The Oxford Dictionary defines the spirit as the immaterial, intellectual or moral part of man. This definition is taken by the World Health Organization and points out that spirituality leads us to questions about the meaning and purpose of life and is not necessarily limited to any particular type of beliefs or practices. The realm of spirituality links the deeply personal with the universal and is essentially unifying.
Due to its absence of limits, it is difficult to define, but its impact can be measured.
A broad definition of spirituality, which can facilitate the finding of common ground among diverse cultures, includes human needs that are possibly universal: 1. The need to find meaning, purpose and fulfillment in life; 2. The need for hope or the will to live; 3 the need to believe, to have faith in oneself, in others or in God. For practical purposes, since the concept of religion is subjugated to the concept of spirituality, from now on we will refer to this factor as “spirituality/religiosity.”
It seems to be a need to know about this topic
Therefore, it seems to be a need to know about this topic, the benefits that they provide to the individual in order to incorporate it into our mental health practice and, in collaboration with local religious groups, respond to the needs of the community in the spirit of the comprehensive well-being of the individual, particularly their mental health.
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Perhaps you have heard or read about Daniel Goleman who with his book “Emotional Intelligence” had the undoubted merit of disseminating and popularizing what Howard Gardner had begun to outline with his theorization about intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences, referring to the following abilities:
- awareness of self and one’s own emotions and their expression
- self-regulation, impulse control, anxiety, deferral of gratification, regulation of our moods
- motivation and perseverance despite frustrations (optimism)
- empathy (putting yourself in someone else’s shoes) and trust in others
- the social arts
Seen another way, the practical skills that emerge from Emotional Intelligence can be classified into the two areas stated by Gardner:
1) Intrapersonal intelligence (internal, self-knowledge)
a) Self-awareness (ability to know what is happening in our body and what we are feeling)
b) Emotional control (regulate the manifestation of an emotion and/or modify a mood and its externalization).
c) Ability to motivate yourself and others.
2) Interpersonal intelligence (external, relationship)
a) Empathy (understanding what other people are feeling, seeing issues and situations from their perspective, “putting yourself in their shoes”)
b) Social skills (skills that surround popularity, leadership and interpersonal effectiveness, and that can be used to persuade and direct, negotiate and resolve disputes, cooperation and teamwork)
“Spiritual intelligence, won’t it be a lot?”
Now, Dr. Gardner’s scientific concern led him to refer in his theory of multiple intelligences to a type of intelligence that he called: “existential or transcendent intelligence.” According to this researcher, it is “the ability to situate oneself with respect to the cosmos, as well as the ability to situate oneself with respect to the existential features of the human condition such as the meaning of life, the meaning of death and the final destiny of the physical and psychological world in profound experiences such as love for another person or immersion in a work of art.”
In fact, in 1999 he presented two new intelligences: naturalistic and existential, clarifying that a third, spiritual intelligence evidenced by a concern for spiritual or religious issues, is a variety of existential intelligence.
Of course, at this point you may be wondering: “Won’t spiritual intelligence be a lot?”
Already, after the Second World War, in Dr. Victor Frankl, a survivor of the concentration camps, the idea of a spiritual unconscious appears. It is in this unconscious where unconscious morality and belief or religiosity will have a place. So he founded logotherapy – considered a “spiritual psychotherapy” – trying to introduce the practice in spiritual care, as a distinct and independent part of the psychological sphere itself, constituting a necessary complement to traditional psychotherapy.
And Professor Abraham Maslow in his famous Pyramid or Hierarchy of Human Needs, a theory developed in his book A Theory of Human Motivation by , which he later expanded, contributed the term “self-actualization” in The cusp.
Self-realization, for this author, is a spiritual state in which the individual emanates creativity, is happy, tolerant, and has a purpose and a mission to help others reach that state of wisdom and beatitude. It is through its satisfaction that a justification or valid meaning is found in life through the potential development of an activity. He was a precursor of what we now call spiritual intelligence.
Spirituality involves developing intrapersonal and interpersonal sensitivity
At the beginning of this century, it is good to know that there are several authors who study this type of intelligence. Among them is psychologist Frances Vaughan, president of Transpersonal Psychology and the Association for a Humanistic Psychology.
For her, spiritual intelligence is related to emotional intelligence because spirituality involves developing intrapersonal and interpersonal sensitivity. “Paying attention to and cultivating subjective thoughts and feelings is part of increasing awareness of the inner spiritual life.” She also explains that we use our spiritual intelligence when we explore the meaning of questions like “Who am I?”, “Why am I here?” or “What really matters?”
The Drs. Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall link the concept of “spirituality” with that of “intelligence”. One of the ways in which they define Spiritual Intelligence is as that “…intelligence with which we face and solve problems of meanings and values, the intelligence with which we can put our actions and our lives in a broader, richer and more meaningful context.” , the intelligence with which we can determine that one course of action or a life path is more valuable than another. Spiritual Intelligence is the necessary basis for the effective functioning of both the IQ and the Emotional Intelligence. It is our primordial intelligence.”
It would also be the ability to give an answer to the question: “Who am I?”, to find a deep meaning in life and remain aligned with transcendental principles.
The human being is a symbolic subject, a creature of meaning. Therefore, it is part of the human condition to ask questions like: “What are we doing here?” “What are we for?” “what can we expect?”; which does not mean that we have an answer for all of it or that there is only one.
It would be the ability to give an answer to the question: “Who am I?”, to find a deep meaning in life.
As we see in these definitions, spiritual intelligence is what allows us to understand the world, others and ourselves from a deeper and more meaningful perspective; It helps us transcend suffering. For this reason, many authors consider it the highest type of intelligence of all.
But let’s see what it is about, in more detail, with an example:
Vicente Del Bosque, the coach who made Spain world champion in soccer, had just been elected the best coach in the world and in the Spanish newspaper “El País”, they asked him what worried him in life.
He said: “Try to make my children nice. I’m not saying excellent students, successful professionals, no. I say: let it be said that they are good people, respectful, supportive. That is my main concern. I have no other”.
One of Del Bosque’s three children, Alvaro, suffers from Down syndrome and they also asked him about him. “At first you don’t expect it. So after his birth we asked ourselves three questions.
The first was: ‘Why us?’
You do that very quickly and you quickly answer it with the following question: And why isn’t it up to us, since we have the means and can help you be happy? And the third?: Now we often ask ourselves, what would happen to us without him?
“We don’t understand life without Alvarete.”
In the response of the Spanish team coach we find, at least, the following characteristics:
- He is what psychologists call “field independent,” that is, in giving such a wonderfully unusual response, he has a facility for going against convention.
- He has the quality of being inspired by visions and values, when answering what worried him in life. Curiously, he does not expect his children to develop great intellectual and emotional intelligence, but spiritual intelligence.
- Demonstrate moral principles and a loving attitude towards your children.
In this regard, Marc Hauser, psychobiologist at Harvard University and author of the book “Moral minds: The unconscious voice of right and wrong”, explains that “emotions such as revenge, compassion or love are behaviors that have helped human beings. to survive in community for many thousands of years. Even morality is a biologically inherited tool to consolidate a society.”
- Before the birth of Álvaro, he shows the ability to be flexible (actively and spontaneously adaptable) and to possess a high level of self-awareness and the ability to face and use suffering, to confront and transcend pain.
- The tendency to see relationships between things, that is, to be “holistic.”
- Living this event in a spiritual way has led to great inner wisdom.
- To distance oneself from reality, but also from one’s emotions and, therefore, also have more capacity for self-control over them.
- Going from asking “why” to “why”, evidencing a need to give meaning to what happens, experiencing its existence as problematic and evidencing the need to think about what to do. If you look closely, the response he gives to the meaning of his life with respect to Álvaro is specified in the verb “give” and in testifying to others that, with his being and doing, his life makes sense precisely in the things he does. in and for your child. In short, Del Bosque presents a remarkable ability to construct meaning.
As we can see, it is not little.
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