Spirituality: The Key to Your Health and Well-Being
While modern medicine has proved to be effective in curing severe diseases, it has failed to enhance the emotional health and well-being of people.
The World Health Organisation portrays health as a state of complete mental, physical, and social well-being. This indicates that we should go beyond biomedical science to attain social and emotional well-being including the spiritual aspects.
For this reason, more and more people are turning to spirituality for finding an answer to all their physical and mental problems.
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What is Spirituality?
Spirituality refers to a sense of connection with something bigger than life which can bring positive emotions such as contentment, peace, gratitude, awe, and acceptance and involves a search for the true meaning of life.
People find spirituality through different media for which they resort to techniques like meditation, silence, prayer, yoga, or any other collective or individual practice, mostly under the guidance of a master.
The ultimate goal is to achieve a heightened sense of physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
The Key to Your Health and Well-Being
How Is Spirituality Related to Religion?
While spirituality may include elements of religion, it is basically a broader concept. Spirituality and religion are not the same though both have the same objective of connecting to the divine power.
Since spirituality Is an abstract concept different religions were developed to establish a connecting link with divine power.
Different religions prescribe a specific code of conduct, rituals, and practices that helps in developing a sense of oneness and the realization of a higher sense of well-being.
Whereas, religion addresses the following issues –
- What are the rites, rituals, and practices that a man should follow?
- The difference between right and wrong.
- Which is true and which is false?
Spirituality helps us in finding answers to the following questions:
- How to live?
- How to feel connected?
- Where to find inner peace?
Through spirituality and religion, the belief, comfort, ethics, and reflection that develops in a person is the way he/she thinks, feels, and behaves.
Relationship Between Spirituality and Health
While there is no proof to establish the relationship between health and spirituality, it is believed that the mind, body, and spirit are inter-connected. An imbalance in any one of these elements may affect the others.
Positive belief, strength, and peace gained through meditation and prayer can contribute towards overall well-being. It can promote healing and will make you feel better through improving your spiritual health while you are down with some illness.
Recent studies on human health reveal that engaging in any act of spirituality can help in treating and preventing mental and physical illness.
Religious beliefs supply people with the necessary social support and inner strength required to cope with illness and attain overall well-being.
When medical care turns out to be ineffective, affordable and futile, then spiritual care can prove to be a totally feasible and logical solution.
The Key To Your Health and Well-Being
Why Should You Go for Spirituality?
In the past decade, more and more people are prey to mental stress and lifestyle diseases because of their stressful and hectic life. The contribution of western medicine is just limited to providing treatment or prevention.
Patients suffering from chronic illness such as the final stage of cancer or any other life-taking disease should engage in spiritual care activities to alleviate their pain and suffering. It helps in preparing them for a peaceful afterlife.
While modern medical treatment has developed new modalities of investigation procedures and treatment methods, the high-end technologies like artificial ventilation and imaging are often beyond the financial capability of the middle class and lower-middle-class people.
In such situations, spiritual care turns out to be the only affordable and available option.
The Path to Your Improved Health
If you want to enhance your spiritual health you may need to follow a specific path. But in doing so remember that the path chosen for different people will be different as what may be effective for others may not work for you.
- Make a note of the things in your life that provides you a sense of inner peace, strength, love, comfort, and connection.
- Fix a specific time every day to perform the things that will help you to grow spiritually. This may include meditating, praying, reading, singing, or something as simple as taking a walk in the park.
- If you are being treated by a doctor for some illness, share your spiritual beliefs with the healthcare expert. Take note of whether your spiritual belief is preventing you from following the recommendations of your physician.
A Final Word of Advice
As you proceed further exploring spirituality and its connection with overall health and well-being, you will find that many practices that recommend for cultivating spirituality have similarities with those that are recommended for enhancing emotional well-being. Try to strike a balance between the two.
