Cultivating Spirituality: Why It Matters & How to Do It

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Mind Over Medicine" by Lissa Rankin. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Do you consider yourself a spiritual person? How does practicing spirituality improve one’s health and well-being?

People who practice some form of spirituality are happier, healthier, and more resilient. That said, you don’t have to be religious to be spiritual. According to Lissa Rankin, the author of Mind Over Medicine, spirituality is simply finding and honoring what’s sacred for you.

Here are some tips for cultivating spirituality.

Develop Your Spirituality

Cultivating spirituality will help you feel more grateful, find meaning in hardship, and live a peaceful life. All of these things help you relax and heal. People who consider themselves spiritual are happier, have better mental health, abuse fewer substances, and live longer. Rankin views spirituality as a perspective that finds sacred value in the things of life.

Here are a few of Rankin’s tips for embracing spirituality:

Acknowledge what is sacred in your life. By assigning extraordinary qualities to everyday things, Rankin says you expand your awareness and transcend superficial aspects of reality, which makes you more open, grateful, and forgiving. This can help you overcome temporary troubles or grudges that cause negative emotions.
Trust a higher power to guide you on your healing journey. Rankin defines a higher power as any loving force that has your best interest in mind. This could be a religious deity or your own body’s natural healing force. Belief in a higher power can help us find meaning in loss and suffering, mitigating the stress of grief and sorrow. Trusting that a loving force is guiding your healing can also relieve the stress that results from our efforts to control every step of the healing process.
Follow a spiritual path that is true to you and helps you relax. Rankin explains that your spirituality can stress you out if it doesn’t align with your values and truth. For instance, a religious group you belong to might make you feel guilty or shameful of your lifestyle, which has been shown to cause you stress and potentially lead to illness. On the other hand, belonging to a spiritual group that makes you feel welcome, loved, and supported may help you relax and heal. Spiritual communities that gather based on shared beliefs have been shown to induce positive health effects such as better mental health, lower rates of cancer, and greater longevity.

What Element of Spirituality Most Contributes to Healing?

The most comprehensive study on spirituality and health concluded that the most influential aspect of spirituality on positive health outcomes is engagement with a spiritual community.

Does your community have to be spiritual in order to benefit your health? Another meta-analysis concluded that the social support gleaned from attending religious services appears to be more advantageous for health than any other type of social support, including marriage, number of close friends, and hours spent in social groups. Although these other forms of support are associated with health, the analysis concluded that religious service has the strongest effects on health over the widest variety of outcomes.

Although the benefits of regularly attending a religious service are strong, spirituality doesn’t have to be religious and it doesn’t need to involve a community. To expand on Rankin’s suggestion that nature can be a source for spirituality, science writer Chet Raymo, in his book When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy, describes his religious naturalist approach to the world. He claims that when you abandon a supernatural explanation for the natural world, it becomes even more awe-inspiring. If you don’t have a spiritual belief system or practice, try connecting with nature and contemplating the interconnectedness of it, to feel yourself as part of a larger whole.

Cultivating Spirituality: Why It Matters & How to Do It