What is the relationship between spirituality and health? Can spirituality benefit you emotionally? These are important questions to explore and answer so that you can understand yourself better and benefit from engaging with your spirituality.
Often spirituality and health, or spirituality and mental health, are often seen as two separate things. But they are not. They are intimately connected to each other and help form who you are as a person and your state of being.
Health is not just one thing. It’s every part of your reality as a human being.
In this article you will find out that spirituality and health are actually one and the same. And that health is not just linked to your physical body but your emotional body as well. None of these things are separate within you. You need to engage with all of them for your overall health and wellness.
So read on to learn about the importance of spirituality and health, particularly as it relates to how it can benefit you emotionally. You will learn why you must engage with both in an intentional way to have the best experience life has to offer you.
So What Is Spirituality?
So first let’s discuss what spirituality is. There are no hard and fast rules about what spirituality is but often in explaining what it is you will see common themes.
Spirituality is very personal. It is not based on a religion per se. Spirituality usually has to do with the individual’s connection with their source, higher power or whatever term they would like to use.
There is no dogma in spirituality. There is no rule book. It is not like religion which usually adheres to a specific set of practices, beliefs and religious texts.
Spirituality is usually more broad and fluid. It gives the individual a lot of freedom to grow and explore without feeling confined.
Spirituality helps you to feel that you are connected to something greater than yourself. This helps you to understand your life and give it greater meaning and purpose.
This article by Very Well Mind gives a nice overview of what spirituality is and how it differs from religion.
9 Ways Spirituality Benefits Your Emotional Health
1 – Spirituality Improves Your Emotional Health By Reducing Inner Turmoil & Conflict
How does spirituality improve your emotional health? Spirituality improves your emotional health by causing you to experience less inner conflict. Often the roots of a lot of the emotional and mental stress that you may feel is caused by internal conflict.
This conflict could be around a lot of things but at the root is normally fear. The fear of being alone. The fear of being misunderstood. The fear of what may lay ahead of you in your life. All of these worries and fears lead to a great degree of emotional turmoil and overwhelm.
When you are connected to yourself spiritually this can be greatly reduced because you know that you aren’t alone in the world. You are able to process many of the fears you hold through the lens of your spiritual practices. This allows you to feel less fearful of the world around you and what lies ahead.
Anytime the tension and turmoil inside of you is reduced it is great for your emotional health.
2 – Spirituality Improves Your Health By Decreasing Depression
Depression can be a complex experience for many people. There is no one cause or way that it is experienced. Sometimes it can be related to unprocessed childhood experiences that have not been healed and integrated. Sometimes depression can be rooted in grief and loss. When unexpected things have happened in your life and you struggle to process the impact and meaning. It can look different for everyone.
But one of the common themes for those with depression is that their life doesn’t have meaning. Often those who are depressed feel very lost in their world. Spirituality can make this better because it can often clear some of the mental fog created by the depression allowing some light in.
People who are suffering in this way can find out that there is meaning to their life and experiences. Depending on what path they go down, they may receive valuable meaning and answers to their life experiences that lift some of the depression.
When it comes to the impact that spirituality can have on depression I do not believe in spiritual bypassing. If you don’t know what that term means here is a brief explanation.
Regardless of how you engage with spirituality, the answer is not to skip over the necessary work that you must do to heal and address the roots of your depression. Spirituality is not meant to be escapist. You will receive more benefit from your spirituality when you heal the roots of your depression. Then you will be more able to fully take in what spirituality has to offer you and deal with your day-to-day reality in a more cohesive way.
3 – Spirituality Improves Your Emotional Health By Calming Your Nervous System
One of the great things about many spiritual practices is that they include meditation and breathwork among other things. Meditation and breathwork are wonderful for nervous system regulation.
Often when you are feeling emotionally challenged it is because your nervous system is overstimulated. You do not have the tools to regulate yourself and calm your nervous system. Having a regular spiritual practice can give you these tools and give you the foundation you have always needed to take better care of yourself emotionally.
This can increase your state of being in a way that will enhance your life overall.
4 – Spirituality Improves Your Health By Reducing Conflict With Others
Spirituality can increase your level of compassion for yourself and others. Often you may be in conflict with someone, or many someones, because you want to be “right” or you have a point to prove. You may be stuck in your own viewpoint and not be open to the viewpoint of others.
When your level of compassion increases your emotional bandwidth expands. This allows you to be able to be with others you may not be in agreement with and not be triggered into a reaction. When you are having a limited or neutral reaction to others, you are not responding in the same way thereby reducing conflict with them.
This will allow you to have a wider perspective and see things from their point of view. Or disagree with someone and choose not to engage with the person further. But you will be doing this not from a place of anger but from a place of peace.
Anytime you can engage with someone you may not agree with or even like from a place of peace and respect, that fundamentally changes the energetic exchange between the two of you and the nature of the experience the two of you have together.
5 – Spirituality Improves Your Emotional State
Being able to breathe, less inner turmoil, decreased depression, a calm nervous system and reduced conflict with others is a game changer for your emotional state.
All of the things mentioned are key to having a balanced emotional state, feeling good in your body and enjoying your experience of life. All of these things contribute to feeling good. And feeling good is a major component of good health and a balanced emotional state.
Connecting with your spirituality, or finding a spiritual path that speaks to you, can improve all of these things in your life and give you a more balanced experience of being.
6 – Spirituality Increases Your Ability To Be Introspective
Components of spirituality such as breathing and meditation can expand your ability to be more introspective and understand what is happening inside of you. Often when you are experiencing some type of turmoil and mental or emotional distress, it is not possible to really understand what is happening inside of you.
This lack of inner awareness often leads to even more inner turmoil and confusion and it becomes a cycle. But when you are able to be introspective, you become more present to your feelings and emotions. You understand yourself better.
You stop beating yourself up and judging yourself so severely. You become compassionate towards yourself. This is something that you and everyone else needs, especially black women.
The ability to be introspective and kinder to yourself can be deeply healing for all aspects of your health.
7 – Spirituality Improves Your Health By Reducing Stress & Inflammation in The Body
The reduction of all of the things named above: inner turmoil, depression, conflict with others decreases your stress response. A decreased stress response decreases inflammation in your body.
Inflammation is the underlying cause of all disease in the body. It is not often spoken about as clearly as it should be but it is. People try to manage inflammation, if they know about it, in many different ways, i.e., dietary changes, not eating meat, etc.
But the true source of all inflammation is your emotional state. Feeling disconnected from others and feeling lost to yourself. Not having the emotional bandwidth or capacity to process your feelings and experiences in a healthy way.
When you are connected to your spirituality you will develop the ability to process your present and past feelings in a more integrated way. This will also decrease your anxiety about the future, another underlying cause of a lot of the stress in your life.
8 – Spirituality Allows You Feel Connected To A Larger Whole
Connecting to your spirituality will allow you to feel connected to a larger whole. As mentioned above a lot of the emotional turmoil you might feel is due to feeling alone and isolated in your experiences.
We are not alone in this world but often due to childhood experiences or even present moment circumstances that may be how you currently experience your reality. When you are diving into your spiritual practices, or on your path, you begin to feel soothed by the knowledge that you are not alone in this world. You are not randomly floating through time.
It all has meaning. It all has purpose. And your soul is experiencing everything you have experienced for a purpose. When you have a shift in perspective that expands your awareness you will see that this is true.
You were never alone. You never have been and you never will be. There is a cadre of spiritual forces unseen around you to support you on your soul’s journey though this dimension.
9 – Spirituality Empowers You In Your Day to Day Life
Being given the meaning and understanding on your path that spirituality can often provide helps you to feel empowered in your day-to-day life. Often the pain you feel is because you feel disempowered. You feel that you have to suffer through what life hands you.
But this is not the case. You have more say and power then you ever realized. You just have to begin letting go of fear by processing and integrating what you are afraid of. Then once you are back in balance in this area, you will see that you have the power of choice to change your entire life.
This will help you to feel more empowered day-to-day. You will begin engaging in your life in a more fulfilling way. This will fundamentally change your day-to-day reality and experience of life.
So I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post on spirituality and health. I hope you can now see the huge impact spirituality can have on you so you experience better emotional and mental health. You deserve to feel better on your journey of life and I hope this article contributes to it in some way. Happy healing!
Related Posts:
{HOW TO BE MENTALLY HEALTHY AND HAPPY | 7 TIPS FOR MENTAL WELLNESS THAT YOU MUST KNOW}
[…] or kind of vague about the whole idea, you can read further about what spirituality is here in a previous article I wrote. In this article, I offer a very simplified explanation that can […]