Last year we released “What Does Spirituality Mean to Us? A Study of Spirituality in the US,” a groundbreaking study designed to help us explore what spirituality means to us and how it influences our civic lives. The study revealed that:
- Spirituality is a complex, diverse, and nuanced phenomenon that people of all spiritual and religious self-identifications experience.
- The more a person identifies as spiritual, the more likely they are to take civic and political action.
Early this year, we shared our free, downloadable “Guide to Exploring Spirituality and Civic Life” including key findings from the study, related activities, questions, actions, and other resources to help you explore your own spirituality and how it relates to your civic life. We invite you to join us in using the following prompt from the guide for this month’s practice.
Our spiritual identities are extremely diverse—we experience and understand spirituality in a myriad of ways. While more than eight out of ten people in the United States consider themselves to be spiritual to some extent, we each practice and experience spirituality differently. How do you visualize or verbalize your spirituality?
Explore: Draw what spirituality looks like to you. If you’re participating in a group and feel comfortable, take a picture of your drawing and share it, along with any description you’d like to provide. (Visit SpiritualityStudy.org to see how study participants illustrated or described what spirituality meant to them.)
Reflect: How does your understanding of spirituality shape how you are present in the world?
Act: Take one simple action this week that is informed by your spiritual beliefs, whatever they may be. For example, if you think spirituality is about love, how can you show someone love? If you think being in nature is spiritual, how can you connect more to nature?