Home : Spirit Guided Health

Spirit Guided Health

The Heart of Health and Healing

While Evidence-Based Medicine helps us apply scientific answers to address our health concerns and knowing how to navigate the healthcare system empowers us with support, these alone may not be enough to facilitate our experience of optimal health and healing. Indeed, the reliance on databases, electronic health records and other forms of technology has the potential to sterilize the physician-patient interaction.

Unlike the first two resource centers that focus on external guidance and support, this resource center focuses on inner guidance. Here we remember and connect with our spirit, and explore the way spirituality relates to an experience health and well-being – a sense of essential wholeness. This includes a willingness to be inspired, to open our hearts and feel compassion, to experience love, hope, forgiveness, inner peace, stillness and comfort, healing us from within. It’s the spirit of what provides our lives with meaning, motivation, purpose, and direction, which compels us to self-less service and is the source of our wisest actions.

(Even the father of evidence-based medicine, Archie Cochrane, recognized that science is not enough. Read what he has to share about the importance of the spirit of compassion in medicine.)

At SuperSmartHealth we recognize that spirituality is a highly personal experience, including all or some of the following, and infinitely more not mentioned here. We may experience spirituality intuitively by finding peace and enjoyment, or appreciating beauty. We may find it expressing and receiving love and remembering those we love, connecting with others. Some experience it communing with nature, or through music, art, learning and exploring, or living by a set of values and principles. Others find it through exercise, such as jogging, yoga, walking on the beach, or through sport or sex. For many, spirituality involves a connection with a power greater than oneself, experienced both inside and outside of organized religion, and cultivated and expressed through prayer, meditation, reflection or service to others.

Spirituality is also something that the healthcare system is increasingly paying attention to. In fact, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), the organization that sets standards for healthcare institutions, requires organizations to include a spiritual assessment as part of the overall assessment of patients(1), an acknowledgement that both science and spirit provide important contributions to optimal health.

Science and spirituality are not mutually exclusive. For some the pursuit of truth through science is a spiritual endeavor. There is also a large body of science that point to benefits of spirituality and religion on health. Associations have been found with reductions in mortality, hypertension, HIV progression, cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease, substance abuse, gambling, depression and anxiety, and more(2).

Fragmentation of Wholeness

For many, spirituality lies at the heart of our sense of essential wholeness. And often this sense of wholeness is fragmented by stress, uncertainty and self-doubt, issues often inadequately addressed, or even exacerbated by the healthcare system. These issues have a major impact on our health.

It has been estimated that between 75% and 90% of visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related conditions(3). Stress affects multiple organ systems and has been related to heart disease, hypertension, headache, dizziness, peptic ulcer disease, irritable bowel syndrome, muscular tension, fibromyalgia, a variety of skin conditions, the common cold, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, depression and anxiety, amongst many other conditions(4).

With intense pressures on healthcare providers to see greater numbers of patients and reimbursements falling, healthcare providers may be even more stressed than the patients they see. With little time to address patients’ underlying stress driving their symptoms and poor health habits that help them cope, symptoms tend to be medicated, rather than fully explored.

Much of the stress we experience is driven by underlying fear, uncertainty and self-doubt. When we feel threatened, whether physically or psychologically, we instinctively protect ourselves. We fight and take flight. When it comes to the stress of self-doubt – frequently triggered by judgment or criticism, feelings of rejection or that we are unable to live up to our own and others expectations and standards – we may reflexively fight to prove self-worth or take flight from things that trigger self-doubt, often without even realizing how or why we are doing so. While intended to protect ourselves, our defenses can do more harm than good.

Fighting to prove self-worth can drive an exhausting need to get ahead, maintain appearances, be “right” in relationships, or seek the validation of or to control others. Taking flight can lead to withdrawal from others, substance abuse and the avoidance of any challenge that might confirm unworthiness. In addition to releasing adrenalin, cortisol and other substances, too much of which can harm our bodies, our fight and flight responses can cloud our spirit, reinforce the notion that we are somehow not enough, and lead to feelings of resentment, loneliness, or emptiness, all of which can fragment a sense of essential wholeness.

Remembering Your Essential Wholeness

The essence of Spirit Guided Health lies in the acknowledgment that no matter what challenges we have faced or currently experience, we are each essentially whole. As such Spirit Guided Health is not about overcoming self-doubt and uncertainty to become whole but remembering the wholeness we already are. In remembering we reconnect with others and with something larger than ourselves to participate fully in the vitality of life, gain access to inner wisdom that motivates and guides us to take better care of ourselves and others, and experience optimal health and healing.

In remembering essential wholeness one shifts from a state of fear and reactivity to one of inspiration and creativity. We can find greater fulfillment in learning and exploration, connecting at a heartfelt level, having fun, fully expressing ourselves and contributing to others. It’s an experience of being at home within ourselves, or coming home when we get lost.

There are countless paths home. Each of us has a unique way of accessing inner wisdom and guidance. At SuperSmartHealth we offer a framework and resources to support Spirit Guided Health, not to change anyone’s spiritual beliefs or practice, or substitute for helpful external guidance provided by healthcare providers, counselors or spiritual teachers, but simply as scaffolding to support the way each of us may draw on inner wisdom to navigate stress and personal uncertainty and experience essential wholeness. With everything being connected as part of a whole, the framework we offer in Spirit Guided Health to navigate personal uncertainty is the same as is used in Evidence-Based Medicine to navigate scientific uncertainty:

Frame

Super Smart Health

Empowering Health and Wellbeing

Spirit Guided Health

The Heart of Health and Healing

Fragmentation of Wholeness

Remembering Your Essential Wholeness