Practising Spirituality

Reflections on meaning-making in personal and professional contexts

Laura Beres

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137556844
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350312869
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

The steady increase in economic, social, environmental and political hardships experienced by many around the globe has led, in recent years, to a corresponding growth in the importance ascribed to finding meaning in life, and to addressing the bigger questions. As deliverers of care and assistance to people across many different faiths and cultures whose lives are impacted directly by these hardships, current and future social workers must learn to apply concepts of spirituality in their own professional practice.

In this unique and inspiring book, a diverse group of authors draws deeply on their own experiences of spirituality in practice, providing a fascinating and often moving exploration of how meaning is derived in a variety of different contexts. Topics discussed include:

- Mindfulness, meditation and the practice of Falun Gong
- The interaction between spirituality, social justice and professional practice
- The role of spirituality in the provision of palliative care
- Indigenous spiritualities, interconnectedness and human-animal bonds
- The role of spirituality in providing hospitality and acceptance in practice.


Enriched by a wealth of case studies and a strong focus on critical reflection throughout, Practising Spirituality is an important and thought-provoking read for students and practitioners across the full range of health and social care disciplines – from social work and counselling to nursing, youth work and beyond.

1 What Is Spirituality and How Does It Relate to Professional Practice?

Laura Béres

Introducing spirituality

For several years I have been incorporating the topic of spirituality in direct practice courses I teach in a university social work programme. I do this despite the fact that when I was a social work student I was only taught how to conduct biopsychosocial assessments rather than biopsychosocial-spiritual assessments. The three-dimensional model continues to be the norm in many programmes that aim to educate practitioners within the helping professions in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States of America and Australia. Yet Cook, Powell and Sims (2009) of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the United Kingdom suggest it is necessary to add the fourth dimension, that of spirituality, to this biopsychosocial model. Cook’s definition of spirituality, which the authors use for their argument, is the following:

Spirituality is a distinctive, potentially creative and universal dimension of human experience arising from both within the inner subjective awareness of individuals and within communities, social groups and traditions. It may be experienced as relationship with that which is intimately ‘inner’, immanent and personal, within the self and others, and/or as relationship with that which is wholly ‘other’, transcendent and beyond the self. It is experienced as being fundamental or ultimate importance and is thus concerned with matters of meaning and purpose in life, truth and values. (Cook, Powell and Sims, 2009, p. 4)

If, in fact, spirituality is related to that which is of ultimate importance to people, providing them with a sense of meaning and purpose in life, then it is necessary for practitioners in health care and social services to develop comfort with, and the skills required for, addressing the area of spirituality in their work with people. Just as the biological/physical, psychological/ emotional and social aspects of people’s lives might be involved in both the problems and potential solutions/resources related to the situation which results in them accessing health or social services, so might the spiritual aspect play either a problematic or supportive role (Canda, 2006; Pargament, 2011). Practitioners should not ignore any of these four areas of a person’s life in the process of assessing, intervening or evaluating outcomes.

Pargament (2011) provides an overview of how the field of psychotherapy in particular has reached its current state of unpreparedness when it comes to dealing with the area of spirituality, yet his remarks are relevant for all the social and health care disciplines. He points out that one of the ‘founding fathers’ of psychology, William James, took quite seriously that ‘psyche (soul) and logy (study of)’ (p. 7) would involve the spiritual and mystical. However, Pargament goes on to highlight the impact of positivism in the early twentieth century and the manner in which ‘psychology moved quickly to ally itself with the natural sciences and thereby distinguish itself from its embarrassingly close disciplinary kin, philosophy and theology. […] religion came to be seen as an impediment to the scientific search for enlightenment’ (p. 8). He argues that models of personality and psychotherapy, and therefore those trained in the resulting approaches, have become quite separate and different from the people they are meant to be serving. In support of this contention, Pargament cites statistics indicating that in the United States about 58 per cent of the population considers religion to be an important aspect of their lives, whereas this is true for only 26 per cent of clinical and counselling psychologists. Similarly, although a belief in God is held by 90 per cent of the population, among clinical and counselling psychologists, the figure is 24 per cent. ‘When it comes to religion, therapists and their clients come from different worlds’ (Pargament, 2011, p. 9). Holloway (2007), in the United Kingdom, in much the same way, says ‘the evidence base is growing for the significance for large numbers of people of a dimension which they term “spiritual”, and a set of issues whose existential source remains untouched by standard psycho-social therapeutic techniques’ (p. 275). She also suggests that the majority of social work practitioners are less religious or spiritual than the general public and those people with whom they will work.

In order for practitioners to be ethical, competent and culturally sensitive, they need to learn how to integrate spirituality into their professional practice. For the small percentage of professionals who do have their own spiritual and/or religious beliefs and practices, this means ensuring that they do not impose their beliefs on others in any way. For the majority of professionals who identify themselves as not being spiritual or religious it means needing to reflect on what spirituality means for other people and developing ways of working that take into account the spiritual aspect. This is important not only so that an integral part of people’s lives is not ignored in the provision of services, but also to ensure that service providers do not unintentionally silence their clients through their own discomfort with the topic of spirituality or, worse, explicitly patronize or disparage their clients’ beliefs. For example, Canda discovered the following in a small qualitative study he conducted, which involved in-depth interviews with 16 participants:

Five people described sceptical, patronizing, and disparaging attitudes and comments regarding their spirituality from physicians, psychiatrists, or social workers. Four people mentioned tensions arising from differences of spiritual beliefs with significant others including family, coworkers, and friends. One person indicated that the pervasive dichotomy between medicine and spirituality in society generally inhibits patients’ access to holistic, spiritually oriented health care. (Canda, 2006, p. 67)

Holloway and Moss (2010) describe religion, spirituality, meaning and purpose by representing them as concentric circles: the largest circle describes what gives people a sense of meaning and purpose; a smaller circle within that contains spirituality; and the smallest circle in the centre contains religion. Some people are religious, spiritual and engaged with considering what gives them meaning and purpose. Others are not religious but would describe themselves as spiritual and interested in what gives them meaning and purpose. Finally, some would not describe themselves as either spiritual or religious but do search for meaning and purpose in their lives.

Canda’s extensive work in the area of spirituality has been influential in the social work field internationally, and he defines it as ‘the human quest for personal meaning and mutually fulfilling relationships among people, the non human environment, and, for some, God’ (Canda, 1988, p. 243). This provides a broad and general description of spirituality that can be inclusive for the majority of people, whether they believe in God or not and whether they attend organized religious gatherings or not. Most people want fulfilling connections with others and are looking for meaning and purpose in their lives, and professional practitioners can support them in these quests. This will involve engaging with people beyond merely attempting to solve presenting problems but will necessitate a curiosity about what motivates people to carry on towards their preferred ways of being: their hopes, dreams and values.

Introducing myself

Having been born and lived in England until I was 17 years old, I was raised participating in services in the Church of England. My involvement with organized religion remained important to me to varying degrees over the years but diminished in importance during my early adulthood and throughout the majority of my university education in Canada. My first degree was in psychology, and consistent with Pargament’s observations, I was influenced by Freud, on the one hand, who thought religion provides a sense of security which is merely ‘illusory’ (Pargament, 2011, p. 9), and Skinner’s behaviourism, on the other hand, which analysed the manner in which religion controls people’s behaviours (ibid, p. 8). It was only much later that I was introduced properly to the work of Carl Jung, ‘who wrote that, of his patients over 35, “there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious [spiritual] outlook on life”’ (ibid, p. 14), or to Irvin Yalom’s existential psychotherapy. Both Jung and Yalom offer a psychological framework and approach to working which are much more sensitive to the spiritual aspects of people’s lives.

After my second degree, which was a graduate social work degree, I was employed by a Catholic Family Services (CFS) agency. Family service agencies in Canada primarily employ social workers who provide individual, couple, family and group counselling to a range of people with a multitude of presenting problems. Over the 15 years that I was an employee there, I worked with women who had experienced intimate partner violence, child witnesses of intimate partner violence, men who had perpetrated the violence, adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and individuals and couples wanting to improve relationships or their own personal emotional states and functioning in the world. Neither the social workers employed nor the people requesting counselling were required to be Catholic in order to be involved with the agency. During that time, although I had never been educated to deal with spiritual or religious issues, people would sometimes raise topics related to God, the Church or their own personal beliefs. I struggled with how to respond because I wanted to respect others’ beliefs and was unsure of how to engage in helpful conversations about these areas of concern. My clinical supervisor at the time, whose own faith was important to him and who was qualified in both social work and theology, suggested that people’s experiences with their own fathers often shape their images of God as father, and that it was appropriate and helpful to explore this idea with people so that they could see the impact of their childhood and family experiences on their expectations of religion and their image of God. With hindsight I now consider this as having been a pivotal moment in my thinking about spirituality and professional practice. I had previously hindered myself when attempting to respond to religious or spiritual topics in practice; through my wish to be respectful of others’ faith and beliefs about God, I had somehow reified their notions of God: I had not allowed myself to consider the social construction of God. Allowing myself to think about the social construction of God did not mean I was forced to think of God as false and merely a human construct, but rather I was able to imagine that there could be such a vast and immense Divinity that humanity could not understand or describe it fully. Each one of us can only begin to consider the Divine/God from our own personal vantage point that has been shaped by our own experiences and social location. As Sheldrake also points out,

Spiritual traditions do not exist on some ideal plane above and beyond history. The origins and development of spiritual traditions reflect the circumstances of time and place as well as the psychological state of the people involved. They consequently embody values that are socially conditioned. […] This does not imply that spiritual traditions and texts have no value beyond their original contexts. However, it does mean that to appreciate their riches we must take context seriously. (Sheldrake, 2013, p. 12)

While employed by CFS and during the time that I was working primarily with women who had experienced assault and abuse, one of the women I was counselling told me she liked to read romance novels so she could try to learn how to behave like the heroines in those novels in order for her husband not to beat her. This comment significantly influenced my ongoing career as I soon afterwards began studies towards a PhD in critical pedagogy and cultural studies. Although I had been taught in my social work degree to consider the biopsychosocial aspects of a person’s situation, the social part had lacked any acknowledgement of the power of popular culture in people’s lives. Popular culture is another form of education that many of us are engaged with and negotiating all the time (Béres, 1999, 2001, 2002). While I was attempting to understand the impact of popular culture in the lives of my clients/service users I was becoming more familiar with social constructionism and post-modernism.

As I continued to work at CFS while completing my PhD, I also attended a workshop facilitated by Michael White about narrative therapy/practice for the first time (White, 1995). Narrative practices provided me with a method of working with people which involved assisting people in uncovering the influence of culture on the development of some of their meaningmaking behaviours. Having taken up a full-time academic position after completing my PhD (at a Catholic university in Canada), I continued to pursue further education in narrative therapy at the Dulwich Centre in Australia. I found that although I had originally struggled with how to hold onto, and respect, others’ belief systems when using a social constructionist lens, I began to appreciate the manner in which narrative practices provided a method of doing so. For example, White’s (2007) description of the use of conversational maps provides an approach which focuses not only on the social construction of attitudes and behaviours but also on peoples’ hopes, dreams, values and what gives them a sense of meaning and purpose (see particularly chapter 7 in Béres, 2014).

Although I had never heard White talk explicitly about spirituality, when I asked him about this area, he directed me to a short interview about the ‘little sacraments of daily living’ in a collection of his essays and interviews (White, 2000). In that interview he quotes Malouf, an Australian author, as saying: ‘the little sacraments of daily existence, movements of the heart and invitations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things [… are] the major part of what happens every day in the life of the planet, and [have] been from the very beginning’ (Malouf in White, 2000, p. 145). I particularly like the way in which White emphasizes the ‘little sacraments of daily existence’ and stresses the need to be open to, and curious about, those otherwise mundane moments and experiences in people’s lives which can evoke a sense of significance and meaning, or of the sacred.

At about the same time as I was becoming more interested in narrative practices I was also becoming curious about Celtic spirituality. I have written extensively about Celtic spirituality in other places (Béres, 2012, 2013, upcoming), so will only say here that Celtic spirituality suggests there is only a thin line between the physical and the spiritual and that there is also a spark of the Divine in all of Creation. This shares something in common with Indigenous and First Nations spiritualities, and also resonates with this idea of the ‘little sacraments of daily living’. One image that was given to me was of someone sweeping the hearth or putting on the kettle and all the while engaged in worship of the Divine through these activities; religion, spirituality, even prayer, do not need to be separate and removed from the everyday activities of life.

I audited a module about Celtic Spirituality which was part of the MA in Christian Spirituality offered at Sarum College in the United Kingdom, due to my desire to understand Celtic spirituality academically as well as through the myriad of popular books available on the subject. Having done so, I realized how much more there was for me to learn more generally about spirituality, and so I am now also pursuing formal studies towards an MA in Christian Spirituality at Sarum College.

When I look back in order to explain the influences on the development of my curiosity in spirituality for both personal and professional practice, I find it fascinating to see through the reflecting process how the variety of seemingly different interests has woven together seamlessly over time. However, this is only one of many paths towards an interest in spirituality, and as I began to consider writing a book about the importance of spirituality in professional practice, I realized that such a book would be far more engaging and useful if it brought together a collection of reflections from other professionals and academics as well. This would offer a greater range of insights from different professions and from different spiritual perspectives.

Reflecting upon meaning-making practices in both personal and professional lives, and highlighting the integration and congruence between those two areas of practice, is a method that is particularly suited to Jan Fook’s Practice Theory in Context series. Jan had previously asked me to contribute to her series, explaining that her aim for the series was that people should write about their experiences of actually putting theory into practice rather than write in such a way that would create another standard textbook. The initial request resulted in me writing The Narrative Practitioner (Béres, 2014). In thinking about this particular edited book about spirituality, and talking with Jan about it, we realized that it could make another contribution to her series. We hoped that authors would not only present theoretical descriptions of spirituality but would also consider the implications of how they make meaning in their personal spiritual practices and how they negotiate these personal values and beliefs as they take up the concept of spirituality in professi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. What Is Spirituality and How Does It Relate to Professional Practice?
• Section I:
• Section II:
• Section III:
• Section IV:
• Section V:
• Index