The spirit is both a natural and supernatural part of every human being
The only journey is the journey within...
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In the presence of his [her] suffering or that of someone near them, they may find it difficult to maintain what [they] take to be the proper attitude toward God. Faced with great personal suffering or misfortune, they may be tempted to rebel against God, to shake a fist in God’s face, or even to give up belief in God altogether. But this is a problem of a different dimension. Such a problem calls, not for philosophical enlightenment, but for pastoral care. – Alvin Plantinga
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What is Spiritual Care?
Spirituality can be described as that which gives meaning to life. It refers to the universal human need for love, hope, relatedness, value, and dignity. Yet, Spirituality may or may not involve religious beliefs and practices.
Wholeness and relationships
A person’s spirituality is not separate from the body, the mind or material reality, for it is their inner life. It is the practice of loving kindness, empathy and tolerance in daily life. It is a feeling of solidarity with our fellow humans while helping to alleviate their suffering. It brings a sense of peace, harmony and conviviality with all. It is the essence and significance behind all moral values and virtues such as benevolence, compassion, honesty, sympathy, respect, forgiveness, integrity, loving kindness towards strangers, and respect for nature.
Spirituality creates and connects these virtues. This is what lies behind moral intuition. It is about knowing, and experiencing deeper meaning and connection behind apparently random events and processes such as illness, trauma, and chronic pain and an awareness of human vulnerability. However, spiritual care at Greater Works Wellness is not religious care. No, it is part of a holistic approach to your wellness in whatever way spirituality presents itself in your life.
Spiritual care and its relationship to religious care Many have found the following descriptions to be helpful although they do not claim to be a full explanation. Spiritual care is usually given in a one-to-one relationship, is completely person-centered and makes no assumptions about personal conviction or life orientation. Religious care is given in the context of the shared religious beliefs, values, liturgies and lifestyle of a faith community. Spiritual care is not necessarily religious. Religious care at its best, should always be spiritual.
Spirituality can be described as that which gives meaning to life. It refers to the universal human need for love, hope, relatedness, value, and dignity. Yet, Spirituality may or may not involve religious beliefs and practices.
Wholeness and relationships
A person’s spirituality is not separate from the body, the mind or material reality, for it is their inner life. It is the practice of loving kindness, empathy and tolerance in daily life. It is a feeling of solidarity with our fellow humans while helping to alleviate their suffering. It brings a sense of peace, harmony and conviviality with all. It is the essence and significance behind all moral values and virtues such as benevolence, compassion, honesty, sympathy, respect, forgiveness, integrity, loving kindness towards strangers, and respect for nature.
Spirituality creates and connects these virtues. This is what lies behind moral intuition. It is about knowing, and experiencing deeper meaning and connection behind apparently random events and processes such as illness, trauma, and chronic pain and an awareness of human vulnerability. However, spiritual care at Greater Works Wellness is not religious care. No, it is part of a holistic approach to your wellness in whatever way spirituality presents itself in your life.
Spiritual care and its relationship to religious care Many have found the following descriptions to be helpful although they do not claim to be a full explanation. Spiritual care is usually given in a one-to-one relationship, is completely person-centered and makes no assumptions about personal conviction or life orientation. Religious care is given in the context of the shared religious beliefs, values, liturgies and lifestyle of a faith community. Spiritual care is not necessarily religious. Religious care at its best, should always be spiritual.
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Spiritual care provides a way to the following potential health benefits:
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Spiritual ASSESSMENT can reconnect us to the transcendent
Below are categories for your consideration
- Awareness of the Holy
- What if anything, is sacred, revered
- Any experiences of awe or bliss, when, in what situations
- Any sense of mystery, of anything transcendent
- Any sense of creatureliness, humility, awareness of own limitations
- Any idolatry, reverence displaced to improper symbols
- Providence
- What is God’s intention toward me
- What has God promised me
- Belief in cosmic benevolence
- Related to capacity for trust
- Extent of hoping verses wishing
- Faith
- Affirming versus negating stance in life
- Able to commit self, to engage
- Open to world or constricted
- Grace or Gratefulness
- Kindness, generosity, the beauty of giving and receiving
- No felt need for grace or gratefulness
- Forced gratitude under any circumstances
- Desire for vs. resistance to blessing
- Repentance
- The process of change from crookedness to rectitude
- A sense of agency in one’s own problems or one’s response to them vs. being a victim vs. being too sorry for debatable sins
- Feelings of contrition, remorse, regret
- Willingness to do penance
- Communion
- Feelings of kinship with the whole chain of being
- Feeling embedded or estranged, united or separated in the world, in relations with one’s faith group, one’s church
- Sense of vocation or calling in life
- Willingness to be a cheerful participant in creation
- Signs of zest, vigor, liveliness, dedication
- Aligned with the divine benevolence or malevolence
- Humorous and inventive involvement in life versus grim and dogmatic
Grief is a normal response to loss
Grief is the emotional response which we feel when confronted with loss. There are many types of loss, as when we move away from our family home, or when a relationship comes to an end. People can experience grief at the loss of their health, or of their faith, or of their job. However the loss of someone close through death is a particularly painful loss. The attachment we feel to those who are significant to us is a source of stability for us; these people, their presence and their love, are part of what Colin Murray Parkes (2007) calls our “assumptive world” – they are part of how we make sense of life.
When such a person is taken away by death, divorce, or illness and we face the reality that they are not coming back, then our world is shattered. We may wonder how we will ever cope without them and that feeling of loneliness is not just physical, but emotional – we feel empty inside.
Feelings of despair and of suicidal ideation are not uncommon. As a bereaved person, the one thing we want more than anything else is to have the dead or estranged person back again and our innate instinct is to cry, because childhood experience has taught us that is the way to get what we want. The pain of grief is intense, physical as well as emotional – we ache for the person who has died or left. Grief is a journey to a new normality It is important to note that this is a journey through grief.
Eighty to ninety percent of people in grief just like you and I will experience an intense, but transient, emotional pain which, for a while, may affect our ability to function normally and may affect our ability to concentrate; eating and sleeping patterns can change and sometimes irrational or compulsive behavior can be manifested. You are not going crazy but you most likely would benefit from spiritual care as part of connective resilience coaching (CRC).
Grief is the emotional response which we feel when confronted with loss. There are many types of loss, as when we move away from our family home, or when a relationship comes to an end. People can experience grief at the loss of their health, or of their faith, or of their job. However the loss of someone close through death is a particularly painful loss. The attachment we feel to those who are significant to us is a source of stability for us; these people, their presence and their love, are part of what Colin Murray Parkes (2007) calls our “assumptive world” – they are part of how we make sense of life.
When such a person is taken away by death, divorce, or illness and we face the reality that they are not coming back, then our world is shattered. We may wonder how we will ever cope without them and that feeling of loneliness is not just physical, but emotional – we feel empty inside.
Feelings of despair and of suicidal ideation are not uncommon. As a bereaved person, the one thing we want more than anything else is to have the dead or estranged person back again and our innate instinct is to cry, because childhood experience has taught us that is the way to get what we want. The pain of grief is intense, physical as well as emotional – we ache for the person who has died or left. Grief is a journey to a new normality It is important to note that this is a journey through grief.
Eighty to ninety percent of people in grief just like you and I will experience an intense, but transient, emotional pain which, for a while, may affect our ability to function normally and may affect our ability to concentrate; eating and sleeping patterns can change and sometimes irrational or compulsive behavior can be manifested. You are not going crazy but you most likely would benefit from spiritual care as part of connective resilience coaching (CRC).
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-My Faith Tradition is Christian and so my longest outlook on this life peers into the life eternal and that is where I find my hope, peace, and existence. But our health is important and worth treating in the here and now. It's a matter of our focus and a matter of what we are living for. -- Dr. Richard Helein
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Pastoral Counseling
A major principle that informs my work in spiritual care is that it is “existential.” As a pastoral counselor, I draw from both postmodern clinical practices and sacred spiritual formation in order to heal by all means possible. I describe what I do as postmodern pastoral conversation because it is eclectic and because it draws heavily from the postmodern therapy approaches which emphasize somatic therapies, the construction of meaning, unconditional positive regard for you the client, and the equality of the therapist/patient relationship.
My goal is not to impose a solution on you, but rather it is to listen to your need and together with you to find a constructive resolution of the issue. I do not seek to effect change so much as to provide the context within which change can occur. Good therapy and or coaching reveals healing love and in this it is curative. Pastoral conversation then is what might be termed therapeutic conversation. Therapeutic conversation is of a different order than the therapeutic strategies of medicine.
It is about engaging you in the process of “thinking spiritually and even theologically.” It is about inviting you to construct a new way of ordering your world that is grounded in the gracious action of God. Healing then comes about not so much because I am able to make your suffering go away, so much as because I am able to engage you in a new way of making sense of it. Infusing hope is a foundation of connective resilience coaching (CRC). Hope is the only cure for despair and discouragement. The medical model relies solely on finite hope in material science, whereas, CRC - while using evidence based models of therapy for the here and now, includes the formation or restoration of a transfinite or transcendent hope. In other words, an ultimate hope.
A major principle that informs my work in spiritual care is that it is “existential.” As a pastoral counselor, I draw from both postmodern clinical practices and sacred spiritual formation in order to heal by all means possible. I describe what I do as postmodern pastoral conversation because it is eclectic and because it draws heavily from the postmodern therapy approaches which emphasize somatic therapies, the construction of meaning, unconditional positive regard for you the client, and the equality of the therapist/patient relationship.
My goal is not to impose a solution on you, but rather it is to listen to your need and together with you to find a constructive resolution of the issue. I do not seek to effect change so much as to provide the context within which change can occur. Good therapy and or coaching reveals healing love and in this it is curative. Pastoral conversation then is what might be termed therapeutic conversation. Therapeutic conversation is of a different order than the therapeutic strategies of medicine.
It is about engaging you in the process of “thinking spiritually and even theologically.” It is about inviting you to construct a new way of ordering your world that is grounded in the gracious action of God. Healing then comes about not so much because I am able to make your suffering go away, so much as because I am able to engage you in a new way of making sense of it. Infusing hope is a foundation of connective resilience coaching (CRC). Hope is the only cure for despair and discouragement. The medical model relies solely on finite hope in material science, whereas, CRC - while using evidence based models of therapy for the here and now, includes the formation or restoration of a transfinite or transcendent hope. In other words, an ultimate hope.