Two Forces

TWO FORCES:

SEEKING AND RESISTANCE

How important is spirituality to you?

For some individuals, spirituality is the key to their health and healing, whereas for others it matters little, if at all. How can you determine how important it is to you?

Map of the Spirit calls your degree of interest in spirituality your degree of Seeking —the forward-tending force in your spiritual development. Seeking reflects your desire to devote attention and resources to exploring your spirituality. Seeking can be inherent, present from birth, and/or acquired, in response to illness, deaths of loved ones, or other life stresses. You can assess your degree of Seeking by answering Question #1 on the Questionnaire:

How important to you (or to your health) are matters concerning spirituality, or whatever does or doesn’t exist that is greater than or beyond human experience?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

V. Low Low Moderate High V. High

How important is spirituality to your health?

To determine how important spirituality is to your health, first determine your current degree of Spiritual Satisfaction by answering Question #2 on the Questionnaire:

2. How satisfied are you with the extent to which you have been able to explore or pay attention to matters concerning spirituality, to date?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

V. Low Low Moderate High V. High

Your degree of Spiritual Satisfaction reflects your balance between Seeking, the forward-tending force in your spiritual development, and Resistance, the force that blocks or holds back Seeking. When your Seeking relatively exceeds your Resistance (Patient A - below), you are more likely to progress with your spiritual development and have higher Spiritual Satisfaction . On the other hand, when your Resistance is relatively greater than your Seeking (Patient B - below), your spiritual development will tend to be blocked or stuck and your Spiritual Satisfaction will tend to be low.

Balance Between Seeking and Resistance

Thus, even individuals with very great Seeking can be held back spiritually as long as their Resistance is relatively greater than their Seeking. On the other hand, individuals with low Seeking might still progress with their spiritual development if their Resistance is relatively less than their Seeking.

The lower your Spiritual Satisfaction, the more important it is to identify and then address your sources of Resistance—either those that come from outside you (External Resistance) or within yourself (Internal Resistance). Potential sources of External Resistance include, family, relatives, friends, acquaintances, work/school, the cultural milieu, and time and financial constraints. Sources of Internal Resistance include psychological condition(s) in which you tend to resist change, such as simple neuroses and affective disorders, all the way to personality disorders and psychoses. List your sources of Resistance in Question #3 of the Questionnaire:

3. What blocks or holds you back from exploring or paying attention to matters concerning spirituality or whatever does or doesn't exist that is greater than or beyond human experience?

Both Seeking and Spiritual Satisfaction influence your health. In general, the greater your Seeking and the lower your Spiritual Satisfaction the greater the (negative) impact of spirituality on your health. Map of the Spirit introduces the concept of Spiritual Stress to describe this influence of Seeking and Spiritual Satisfaction on your health.

Spiritual Stress = Seeking - Spiritual Satisfaction

Put simply, any time your Spiritual Satisfaction is less than your Seeking, some degree of Spiritual Stress exists. Calculate your degree of Spiritual Stress in Question #4 of the Questionnaire:

4. Calculate your degree of Spiritual Stress by taking your degree of Seeking (from Question #1) and subtracting from it your degree of Spiritual Satisfaction (from Question #2).

                    < 0        1           2           3           4           5           6          > 7

                   None         Low               Moderate               High             Very high

Spiritual Stress Rating

Spiritual Stress mediates the connection between spirituality and disease. Recent medical data have demonstrated that Stress has a tremendous impact on many diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, cancer, auto-immune diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, aging, and many emotional/affective disorders. Spiritual Stress combines with your physical and mental/emotional stress levels to produce your overall level of Stress (see below), which in turn influences your health and risk of disease.

Spiritual Stress

So now we've answered our first two questions. Seeking explains, "How important spirituality is to you." And, the balance between your Seeking and Resistance, as expressed by your Spiritual Satisfaction and Spiritual Stress, explains, "How important spirituality is to your health."

The next two sections—the Three Types of Spiritual Experiences and Four Stages of Spiritual Development—answer our one remaining question, "Where are you, spiritually?"