Spirituality And Spirituality

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Spiritual experience has diverse meaning within different cultures and spiritual traditions. Spirituality may be conceptualized in as many diverse forms as there are people. For example, one individual may experience the sacred looking into the light in a child’s eyes, and another person may understand spirituality as praying during weekly services with religious community. Spirituality was often characterized and defined by its transcendent nature, and it may or may not have been derived from formal religious traditions as suggested by Palnte and Sherman (2001). That is, what were often understood as spiritual were those elements both in and beyond us that gave meaning and vitality of life’s events (Maugans, 1996). As Larson, Swyers, and McCullough (1998) suggested, spirituality is a multidimensional space in which everyone can be located, thus avoiding, as Miller and Thoresen (1999) clarified, taxonomies such as spiritual or not spiritual, and more or less spiritual. Similarly Conn (1987) defined spirituality as self- transcendence that gives integrity and meaning to life by situating the person within the horizon of ultimacy.
Richard and Folkman (1997) summarized two characteristics through which spirituality was understood. First, a person has a deeply felt personal experience of merging with something that, prior to the experience, was considered outside the self, thus experiencing transcendence. Second, the person sensed or felt close to the presence of the higher order, force, or energy larger than him or her, but of which he or she was a part (Richard and Folkman, 1997. P. 529).
By extension, spirituality was the integration of the sacred in daily living, so the process also involved the search for sacred (Pargament, 1...

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... and 400 reviews and revealed positive impacts of religiousness and spirituality on many medical conditions including heart diseases, hypertension, cerebrovascular diseases, immunological dysfunctions, cancer, mortality, pain, disabilities, and health behaviors.
The DSES was used in over 50 studies with various settings including studies of substance abuse, epilepsy, adolescents, inner city elders, caregiver burnout, coping with arthritis pain, end of life care, and a number of web studies on relationship and health (Blumenthal et al., 2007 & Zemore et al., 2004) Besides, links have been demonstrated between scores in DSES and better health outcomes. DSES is also found to be positively associated with psychological variables such as social support, positive affect, and psychological well-being (Underwood & Teresi, 2002., Koening et al., 2004, & Parker et al., 2003).

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