Spiritual Health: A Quiet Intelligence Within?
Spiritual health is a dimension of human health that is often overlooked and can be challenging to define. In today’s popular culture, it’s often framed as a set of practices to optimize one’s life, or as a mental and emotional health tool with spiritual side effects.
But what if it’s something altogether different, something that doesn’t need to be demonstrated, practiced, or performed?
On my website, everydayspiritual.com, we clarify what spiritual health is not.
It’s not therapy.
It’s not self-help.
It’s not a belief system.
So what is it, then?
This is where things start to get tricky—when we try to name or define spiritual health (or God, for that matter). Still, let’s take a stab.
Two weeks ago, I accidentally scraped my elbow. The top layer of skin was rubbed off, and there was some bleeding. I didn’t even notice it until my wife pointed it out a few hours later. The skin around it had turned reddish-yellow and was sensitive to the touch. She helped me clean the wound, apply antiseptic, and cover it with a bandage.
Over the next several days, I watched as the raw skin formed a scab. The surrounding redness faded. Within a week, the scab fell off. The new skin looked almost untouched, like nothing had happened.
I marveled at how my body restored itself, seemingly on its own, without any conscious effort from me.
What allowed this to happen?
We might be tempted to name it. Maybe call it a self-organizing directive. Or an intelligence in the body. But if we say intelligence, what do we mean?
Science can describe the mechanisms of healing that took place at my elbow, cellular response, chemical signaling, inflammation, immune activity, tissue regeneration. It can explain what happens, but not fully why it happens. It doesn’t account for why this self-organizing directive exists in the first place.
Where does the body’s capacity to heal come from? And why should it know what to do?
Science is an extraordinary tool for measuring, observing, and modeling phenomena. But it’s not built to assign meaning. It’s not designed to ask the deeper question of being.
What if this same intelligence that healed my elbow is silently waiting to be in relationship with you?
Not as a belief system.
Not as a therapy model.
Not as a self-help, create-the-best-version-of-yourself plan.
But as a quiet collaboration.
You can speak to it.
You can listen.
And when you do, something shifts.
Spiritual health is not a thing with qualities we can name or characteristics we can identify it with. No.
Maybe the most important thing is simply to pause and listen.
Not for answers, but for presence.
Not to fix something, but to remember you’re already in relationship with what heals.