Our Search for Spirituality
I always had a hard time finding God in a building, be it a magnificent church, a synagogue, a mosque or a tiny chapel. Raised in the Catholic faith, I knew I should go to church to pray and ask the priest to intercede on my behalf for the forgiveness of my sins. But even though I attended a Catholic grade school I never felt connected to God on a personal level until I went camping for a week on an island in northern Minnesota, surrounded by nature, animals and the stars you don’t get to see in the city. That was my first conscious taste of my connection to all living things, in other words, my connection to my own spirituality.
I say it was my first conscious connection, because I was a farm girl from southern Minnesota where we were immersed in the growth of crops and critters. At the first opportunity I left that small town for college in the big city. During my four years at a Catholic college I stopped going to church completely. Many people find spirituality in religion but twenty-two years of religious education did not do it for me.
Apparently, I am not alone. According to a 2002 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, the U.S. was the only developed nation in the survey where a majority of citizens reported that religion plays a “very important” role in their lives[1], yet a 2006 online Harris Poll of 2,010 U.S. adults found that only 26% of those surveyed attended religious services “every week or more often”.[2] The same Harris Poll found that only 58% of those surveyed were “absolutely certain” that God exists[3], a marked change from a 1998 Harris Poll of 1,011 U.S. adults where 94% of those surveyed believed in God.[4] Another key finding of the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey indicates that the proportion of the adult population who do not subscribe to any religious identification has increased from 8% in 1990 to over 14% in 2001.[5]
This trend reflects a recent movement towards the concept of spirituality, a sense of connection to something “greater” than oneself, which may emphasize the finding of one’s own path to whatever-god-there-is, rather than following a scripted doctrine. Spirituality, according to most adherents, also forms an essential part of an individual’s holistic health and well-being, a departure from the common Western medical definition of good health.
Shamanism addresses the spiritual aspect of healing, a concept that is often not even on the radar screen in our Western culture. Each of us has four aspects to our being: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. If any one of these is out of balance it affects the other three, manifesting in ways that may take us by surprise and be chronically difficult to heal. Spiritual imbalance may be the result of soul loss through a traumatic experience and may be expressed as chronic depression, addiction, chronic pain or emotional shutdown.
Trauma is relative to an individual situation and we each have our limit where an experience can be overwhelmingly painful and life-changing. It may be the loss of a loved one, a near death experience, major surgery or physical, emotional or sexual abuse.
Whatever the cause, the experience may result in physical, emotional, mental and spiritual damage that must be corrected for the person to become whole and healthy again.
Our Western medicine recognizes and treats physical disease or illness as if it is isolated from the influences of emotion, thought and spirituality. Unfortunately, physical illness is often treated by addressing the symptoms of the disease, usually through the use of pharmaceuticals or surgery, when the situation has reached crisis mode. While some attention is now being given to underlying causes and the factors of stress, emotional distress, and mental strain or exhaustion, the spiritual aspect is rarely considered. Individuals who seek shamanic healing are often addressing conditions that have already been treated medically, therapeutically or pharmaceutically with varying degrees of relief. Often further progress is reported when the spiritual aspect of the condition is addressed as well.
So many of us seek our own form of spirituality for different reasons. It may be that we are looking for optimum health for our entire being, or a solution to a chronic condition that defies conventional treatment. It may be that we desire a closeness to God and a ‘connection to all’ that we do not find in an organized religion. Or, we may be searching for our ‘path’, our ‘work’, and our purpose for being here on the planet Earth at this particular time. Whatever the reason, we are NOT alone.
[1] U.S. Stands Alone in its Embrace of Religion. Pew Global Attitudes Project. Retrieved on January 1, 2007.
[2] The Harris Poll® #80, October 31, 2006. Harris Interactive. Retrieved on January 1, 2007.
[3] IBID.
[4] Religion in the United States. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved April 25, 2007.
[5] ARIS Key Findings at http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/aris/key_findings.htm
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