5 Benefits of Integrating Spirituality into Counseling

The integration of spirituality into counseling has been on the rise in recent years. Though the reasons for this may vary, one thing is evident: more and more people are turning towards spiritual practices as a way to find peace and hope in this turbulent world and to find meaning in their lives. There are many benefits to incorporating spirituality into practice. Here are five to name a few:

1. Enhanced sense of meaning and purpose

When we allow spirituality to play a role in our counseling, we enable ourselves to connect with a more profound sense of meaning and purpose in life by focusing on something greater than ourselves. This inclusion can be instrumental in the healing process and equally important in seeing the value in our lives and in the lives of those around us. We have experienced firsthand how anxiety, depression, and other daily struggles can be transformed into hope and vitality when spirituality becomes a resource for healing. 

2. Increased empathy and understanding

Another benefit of incorporating spirituality into counseling is increased empathy and understanding towards ourselves and others. Spirituality helps us see differently, helps us see a bigger picture…a more inclusive picture. We learn that it all belongs, the pain and the joy. We learn that we create our own suffering by our thoughts about how we think things should be rather than accepting things as they are. We find there is strength in our times of weakness and that we can use that strength to make changes in ourselves and what we put into the world. When we empathize with, understand, and accept our pain and the pain of others, everything changes. Incorporating spirituality into counseling allows us to recognize what is already true and good inside of us, helps us understand and accept ourselves and others, and can help us open up and trust again. 

3. Better coping skills

We acquire coping skills as we move through life. They are what we use to address life's challenges. We pick up both helpful and not-so-helpful strategies along the way for facing these challenges and are not always aware of the impact these strategies have in overcoming our hardships. When we incorporate spirituality into counseling, we equip ourselves with better tools for facing our challenges. The first is (greater) awareness. When we become (more) aware of how our unhelpful strategies affect us, we can make better, more intentional choices to help us when encountering our challenges. Spirituality can also guide us through these struggles in a healthy, positive way by helping us tap into our inner strength and calmness and by helping us enhance our resilience. Together these tools enable us to reach more desirable outcomes for the challenges we face. 

4. Greater sense of connection

We all have an innate desire to belong, for a sense of connection. We can feel lost and alone when we don't feel that sense of connection. Community is essential for our well-being and our growth. We need others to lean on for support, but we also need to be able to offer support when others are in need. Involving others can help us discern the answers to the important questions in life, help us see the truth and beauty already present within ourselves when we can't see it for ourselves, and can help give us direction when we are unsure which way to go. Many spiritual and religious traditions emphasize the importance of community. Integrating spirituality into counseling allows us to reestablish our community if one's community has been lost or compromised or to build upon our existing community and to find that sense of connection we seek. We become a part of each other's community as counselors and clients. And when we allow ourselves to open even more, we realize how vast our community really is; and that we are never really alone.   

5. Improved overall well-being

Our mind, body, and spirit are all connected. To achieve our best overall health and well-being it is pertinent to include practices from all three (mental, physical, and spiritual) to care for the whole person. The inclusion of spirituality brings practices like prayer, meditation, spiritual/inspirational reading, yoga, and many others to help heal and strengthen our spirit as well as our minds and bodies by providing us all the benefits listed above, an enhanced sense of meaning and purpose, increased empathy and understanding, better coping skills, a greater sense of connection to ourselves, others, and the unknown, as well as hope. All guiding us to our best overall well-being.

When counseling alone doesn’t seem to be enough, integrating spirituality can be immensely valuable. But the same can be said for spirituality. If our spiritual practices don’t seem to be enough, incorporating counseling can be equally valuable. Take whatever is beneficial to you from either or both practices, leave what doesn’t work behind. We can never measure our lives by someone else’s, but we can all work together to help each other find the best versions of ourselves. 

At Transcend Counseling and Wellness Services, we recognize the value of integrating spirituality into our counseling practice. Spirituality can be defined differently for each of us. As an interfaith center, we are open and accepting of all. We honor and respect the similarities and differences each spiritual path provides regarding all that is true, good, and beautiful. Through our many years of counseling, we have seen the impact the inclusion of spirituality has had on helping people transform their lives beyond what they ever imagined. And in the process, we too are transformed, over and over again. 

 

If you are interested in working with one of our providers, please contact us today. Let us journey alongside you on your path towards health and well-being.

Parasympathetic Breathing

 One of the Daily Practices I recommend to almost all of my clients is what I call Parasympathetic Breathing. (For a description of the function of the body’s parasympathetic response, see Balance in the Stress / Recovery System ).

A normal rate of breathing for an adult is about twelve to fourteen breaths per minute. When we get anxious, we do one of two things: We either hold our breath, or we start breathing faster. We might get to twenty breaths per minute or higher in a state of distress.  As we change our breathing, within about thirty seconds, we are going to change our blood oxygen level, which then changes oxygen delivery to the brain, and keep in mind your brain runs on oxygen. Down at the lower end of the range, somewhere between five and seven breaths per minute is what gives us the greatest heart rate variability.  

Heart Rate variability (HRV) has been linked with many health and mental health benefits, including engaging the calming response. One of my clients, Karyn, was able to reduce her systolic blood pressure twenty points just by using parasympathetic breathing. Increasing HRV over time restores balance to the stress response system.

In my office, we can use sensors to detect a person’s exact ideal rate of breathing, but short of doing that, “six” is in the middle of the five to seven breaths per minute range. And six breaths per minute is easy to remember. Six breaths per minute is one breath every ten seconds.If you were to breathe in for five seconds and breathe out for five seconds, you are breathing at the rate of one breath every  ten seconds, or six breaths per minute. So it’s easy to remember: five seconds in, five Seconds out for five minutes a day. If you like it, you can do it more. You can’t do it too much. 

A warning: Sometimes your breathing mechanics may be irregular.  In this case, you won’t get the most benefit out of parasympathetic breathing, and in some cases, it can actually increase anxiety. 

To determine your mechanics, I’d like you to try an exercise. (Note: If you have respiratory or other medical conditions, please consult your physician before trying this exercise) Put one hand on your belly and one hand on your chest and breathe normally.  After a few breaths, notice which hand moves first. Ideally the hand on your chest is moving very little, if at all, and the hand on your belly moves first and most.  

If you have a hard time moving your breath down into your belly, here is a simple strategy that can help.  Take a book the size of a hardcover dictionary and place it on your belly as you lay flat on your back. As you breathe in you should see the book rise, when you breathe out, the book should fall again. Do your parasympathetic breathing for at least five minutes a day on your back until you can get your breathing into your belly without having to think about the mechanics.

Balance in the Stress / Recovery System

 The body’s nervous system is divided into two parts: the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. The central nervous system is also comprised of two parts: the brain and the spinal cord. The peripheral nervous system includes all of the other nerve cells throughout the body, including those connecting to organs and muscles.

The peripheral nervous system is divided into the somatic and the autonomic systems. The somatic system is the part of the nervous system responsible for the parts of the body that we think of as being under our control, like the arms and legs. The autonomic system controls parts of the body we tend to think of as functioning without conscious thought, such as heart rate and digestion.

The autonomic system is also divided into two parts: the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic system. A rough description of these two systems is that the sympathetic system is that which activates the body to respond to environmental stressors, while the parasympathetic system deactivates the body once the stressor has passed.

The sympathetic system is responsible for the “fight or flight (or freeze) response.” When faced with a danger, such as a car veering into our lane, our heart rate speeds up, respiration increases (or we hold our breath), blood moves away from the extremities to protect the internal organs (causing a decrease in temperature in hands and feet), and muscles become more tense, to name some of the changes in the body. After the danger passes, our body is supposed to calm back down as the parasympathetic response takes over: heart rate decreases, respiration decreases, hand temperature increases (due to the return of normal blood flow), and muscle tension decreases. This is the normal interaction between the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. The problem is our stress / recovery system is not keeping up with the times.

The stress / recovery system has been evident in humans from our earliest days on the planet. The challenge for us living in our modern society is that our stress response has not evolved as our environment has. Our stress system is the same as the one that helped cave people defend themselves against saber tooth tigers. At that time, it was an effective system.

When we faced a tiger, there was typically one of three outcomes: 1) We fight the tiger and win, 2) We run away from the tiger, or 3) we get eaten by the tiger. Notice with each of these outcomes, the encounter would have been over relatively quickly. Because the tiger is more powerful and faster than a human, if the human fights, the fight must end quickly or he is not going to win. If he runs, again, he must get away quickly or he won’t get away. If the tiger wins, this outcome, too, will be fast. So our stress system worked well in these situations: quickly activate the body for fight / flight, maintain activation for a short period of time and then de-escalate the body once the threat has passed.

In our modern society, rarely are the stressors that we experience life threatening and rarely are they short-term. Sitting in traffic, dealing with a difficult boss, butting heads with family members: these are all examples of stressors that are usually not life threatening and not over within a few minutes. The stress response we have, however, remains the same as when we fought tigers: Our stress response system is not keeping up with the times. We get a call from our cranky boss and our heart rate increases, respiration increases, and peripheral skin temperature cools. The negative interaction with the boss could continue throughout the day and our body remains activated. As a result, rather than maintaining a healthy balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic responses, the sympathetic system gets overworked and the parasympathetic system becomes weaker.

The result of this imbalance has been well documented: increased stress leads to physiological problems like heart attacks and ulcers. Increased stress decreases mental clarity. During stress, we make more mistakes and we have difficulty remembering. Increased stress leads to interpersonal problems: the energy we need to be patient with our spouse or children has been exhausted by attempting to manage stress ineffectively and we end up yelling at our family members and kicking the dog. Later we wonder, “Who was that person?”

The parasympathetic response can be trained and can become stronger. As the parasympathetic response becomes as robust as the sympathetic response, we achieve stress / recovery balance. By the way, biofeedback, because of its focus on optimal performance, is an ideal intervention for restoring stress / recovery imbalance.