Soul inclusion: researching spirituality and adult learning.

Gillian White, Division of Adult and Continuing Education, University of Sheffield, UK.

Paper presented at SCUTREA, 30th Annual Conference, 3-5 July 2000, University of Nottingham

The advent of a new millennium has highlighted the shift of spirituality from the very heart of life to an ambiguous position on life’s margins. Open and inclusive opportunities for adults to learn together about spirituality are rare. My previous SCUTREA papers have outlined the initial stages of this research into spirituality at a centre for people with cancer and their carers. This paper follows from that work but will focus on the experiences of three groups of adults who choose to reflect about spirituality together in the differing contexts of self-exploration, training and religion.

There is increasing public interest in spirituality, particularly in the areas of health, the arts and business. Yet this growing awareness does not appear to be underpinned by any clear understanding about the nature of spirituality. This situation is complicated by the inherent difficulties of speaking about something that is quintessentially individual and intangible. In the three groups this paper considers, spirituality was identified as an essentially human potential, affecting people’s lives in many different ways. The most clearly identified theme in our understanding of spirituality was ‘connection’, with ourselves, with others, with the environment and with transcendent values such as love. When spirituality is understood in this way it becomes an integral part of everyday life. This perspective remains important in many cultures whereas in Western culture spirituality is often ignored or isolated. In this polarised atmosphere the ‘voice’ of spirituality becomes lost or confused so that few people feel comfortable to explore this subject in public. Post modern culture, with its renewed interest in the intangible, challenges this perspective, opening a space to interpret spirituality differently. Interest in holistic approaches provides an opening that could help clarify and broaden traditional understandings of spirituality. The skills of adult education, particularly reflective and experiential methodologies, have much potential to create an environment where spirituality is explored with both discernment and support. As interested individuals reflect together, they venture into ‘the interior castle that few explore’ (St Teresa of Avilla, quoted in Delphone 1994). The remainder of this paper will explore the key lessons that have emerged from groups that have taken this opportunity.

Cooperative Inquiry Group (CI)

A group of seven women health care workers, with varying professional and personal backgrounds, volunteered to form a cooperative inquiry group focussed on spirituality. The aim of the inquiry was ‘for each of us to explore our spirituality with a view to how that will inform our work’. The project was based in a community cancer care centre. The group met fifteen times over the course of a year, with the focus of our discussions gradually shifting from clarifying and developing our understanding of spirituality to considering how spiritual care could be incorporated into the work of the centre. This cooperative inquiry group marked the beginning of my research in this area and has been described more fully in a previous SCUTREA paper (White 1998).

Journey into Faith (JIF)

Another group of seven women, all loosely connected with a local Anglican church, met together for two and half hours each month for a year, starting in November 1997, with a final follow up meeting in June 1999. Meetings were informal, beginning with a shared meal and ending with five minutes of silent reflection. Again this group included individuals of different ages and working experience, despite their common church connection. Participants specifically chose an exploratory experience based approach at an introductory meeting. The aim of the group was mutual support and experience-based discussion in the broad context of the ‘journey of faith’ (Ball 1992)

Manchester Palliative Care Education Forum (MPaCE), Spirituality Module

This professional development course for people involved in palliative care was intended to communicate the findings of the CI group to a wider audience. The module provides an opportunity to explore the nature of spiritual care within the palliative care setting. Opportunities to integrate theory with practice and to reflect on personal experience are integral to the module, which has now been provided for twenty two people, working in hospital and community settings. The development of this module is described in a previous SCUTREA paper (White 1999).

These three groups provide the basis of the following discussion, which draws on both my own research diary and notes from each of the groups. Sharing a common focus, despite different approaches and settings, the experience of all three groups was remarkably congruent. A number of common themes emerged both in our understanding of spirituality and in the nature of the groups.

Finding Our Own Voice

Individuals within all three groups initially expressed their concern that they would not be the right sort of person for this process, fearing they would not fit in or that their ideas were not clear enough. Such concerns express well the sense of exclusion felt by many ‘ordinary ‘ people from the process of spiritual exploration. Much depends on how spirituality is understood, but if it is seen in classic religious terms it can become the domain of an exclusive expert group with their own special language and activities. The majority, lacking theological training or religious interest, lose confidence in their ability to recognise and explore spiritual questions and their unique contribution, which would help root spirituality in a broader experience of life, is lost (Fraser 1980:12-14). Such exclusion, particularly experienced within the context of an emphasis on the material and measurable, widens the chasm between spirituality and experience. Identifying key themes in the nature of spirituality helped all three groups regain the confidence to speak about spirituality, in a sense to rediscover their own voice. As described in a previous paper (White 1999), a safe space was needed in which to explore creatively this uniquely personal and essentially intangible concept. All three groups expressed their concerns about mutual acceptance and respect for each other’s ideas and these, along with listening and confidentiality, became the foundation of mutually agreed ground rules. In such a setting, especially in the groups meeting for a year, individuals were willing to struggle to put the inexpressible into words. Each of the groups described the importance of this sense of exploration, our understanding that there were no right or wrong answers but that each person’s ideas, however tentative, were of value in our learning together. The rational language of concepts and ideas was experienced as an important but incomplete way of responding to this topic. Other ways of exploring spirituality included the use of metaphors, pictures and stories. ‘Telling our story’ was an activity in the JIF group which became unexpectedly important in all three settings (Ball 1992:48-52). Delphone describes how a life journey exercise can be used to help individuals reflect on the totality of their experience, including spirituality (Delphone 1994). Exploring life experiences through the specific lens of spirituality brought a new perspective to this process while also ensuring that our discussions were grounded in reality. To some extent this reflection on life was occurring in personal reflection between meetings but it made a hugely significant contribution to our group discussions, encouraging participants to recognise their own ‘spiritual voice’ and its unique contribution to this debate.

Making Connections

Spirituality as a sense of connection became a theme that was discussed extensively in all three groups. A mystical sense of oneness or connection is sometimes identified with spiritual experiences and meditation. While some group members recognised experiencing this it was a rare event and we also wished to assert a more down to earth understanding of connection akin to the Celtic recognition of the wholeness and value of all life. Connection was an important theme in our understanding of the group process as well as our view of spirituality. Working in a group strengthened our ability to make connections, not only connections with each other that grew stronger as we shared more deeply but also connections for each other as we built an intricate web of understanding about spirituality. As we listened and began to build some common understanding it was sometimes easier for another person to see connections developing between experience and ideas. All three groups recognised the catalytic effect of particular life stages, particularly facing death, because of the setting in which two of these groups occurred. The JIF group recognised the importance of such experiences but suggested that, for individuals with the opportunity and inclination, there was much to learn about spirituality apart from such crises. A theme that we returned to repeatedly was the relationship between religion and spirituality, particularly a frustration that spirituality was so often understood to be the exclusive concern of religion. Participants in all three groups, including the church-based group, talked of their own difficulty with religious structures. In contrast, spirituality was understood to be freer and more fluid yet we grew to recognise that without any structure ideas about spirituality could become inward looking and equally exclusive. While we came to understand that spirituality is potentially part of all life experience, we were conscious of the need to apply discernment in this area. It was tempting to simply place everything we didn’t understand or which gave us a certain warm feeling in a stereotyped box called spirituality. Exploring our ideas with others helped us instead to tease out our underlying assumptions and reflect on how our individual ideas affected other people. Another important theme in our discussions and understanding of spirituality was that of meaning. As trust grew within the groups we were more able to discuss the ways in which we struggled to find meaning in our work and life experience, particularly where it concerned suffering and reconciliation. Talking together revealed starkly that meaning is complex and many layered, often multiple and sometimes contradictory (Usher 1993:172). While journey remained a key metaphor for both spirituality and the progress of groups, we were increasingly concerned to stress the non-linear and exploratory nature of this process.

Learning Together

While spirituality was understood to be very personal and individual, all three groups valued highly the collective nature of these learning experiences. Time and energy spent articulating our ideas about spirituality in a group challenged us all, both individually and corporately. The group provided a wider range of ideas and experiences, forcing us to see things through other people’s eyes and thereby challenging our own opinions. While all group members valued the exploratory nature of our approach, some particularly struggled with the sense that there may not be answers to our questions. Indeed most of us struggled with this at some point, desiring the comfort and security of certainty, though we recognised that we were unlikely to be able to hold such certainties with integrity. In the area of spiritual care particularly we expressed our longing for a formula that would make this easier to provide rather than have to struggle alongside clients in need. The tension between the desire to find answers and to keep exploring intensified in the longer running groups, sometimes leading to painful confrontations. Meeting regularly over a prolonged period helped our ideas grow and develop, creating an environment where we could begin to face these differences and the challenges they brought. Aware of the tendency to separate spirituality from everyday life, groups consciously emphasised the integration of spirituality into our life and work. This is unusual in church-based groups, where work is often ignored, and in work-based groups where spirituality is often ignored. Heron suggests that validity in human research comes from the quality of being well founded, emphasising particularly the foundation on experience (Heron 1988:40). Only the CI group was a specific research setting but all three groups shared this emphasis on experience. Reflecting on experience can be painful and is undoubtedly demanding, while a group dimension brings further challenges. Sometimes it was more comfortable to theorise than confront our experiences but the groups both challenged and supported those who chose to do so. Each group grew to recognise the benefit of grounding our discussions in the totality of life experiences, from the everyday to the profound. Hence in the MPaCE group, a participant would raise their concerns about a particular client, moving seamlessly from the difficulties with medication to their own struggle to cope with this person’s pain. Similarly in the JIF group, a participant could talk about their family, moving from the challenges of parenting to what they had learnt about God through these experiences. Perhaps this is part of the unique contribution of ordinary people, rather than so called experts, which thereby creates a more complete picture. The very experience of talking about spirituality in this way challenges the assumption that spirituality is essentially exclusive. At best exploring spirituality together challenged us to see beyond superficial labels, listening to ourselves and each other at a deep level. Such listening was never easy. Where similar ideas were expressed in very different ways we had to reach beyond the words to find the underlying meaning in what people were saying. Where very different and strongly held ideas were expressed, in whatever way, we had to grapple with the reality of our ground rules, continuing to respect each other despite these differences. Exploring this very personal issue, particularly in a public way, was risky, perhaps even more than we had realised at the start. Participants were free to choose how much of themselves to reveal but such risk taking was more apparent in the long running groups, particularly the CI group where there was the widest range of opinions.

The Holistic Approach

Reason suggests that the purpose of all human inquiry is to heal (or make whole) the fragmentation and division that so characterises modern life. He links ‘wholeness’ with ‘holiness’ suggesting that a greater awareness of the world as sacred is an essential part of the participatory approach (Reason 1994:10). The understanding of spirituality reached in all three groups was very much concerned with health and well being, for our clients but also ourselves. Benson identifies spirituality as an essential part of self-care, helping people cope with the stress of modern living in a way that is health promoting (Benson 1996:22-23). Simply attending to our own individual spirituality was recognised as an important and unusual element of the groups. Only the JIF group included any corporate spiritual observance but participants in the other groups described how they had become more aware of ways in which spirituality could be nurtured in their own lives, such as meditation, creative activities and prayer. In a sense our very integrated approach militates against specific, separate spiritual activities yet without specific opportunities to recognise and nurture spirituality it can easily be neglected. Relationships, connections with others, were seen as important in our thinking about spirituality. The groups, by the very nature and depth of their discussions, created strong bonds between participants. This was true of all the groups, although again it was more marked in the CI and JIF groups where time allowed the development of greater trust and mutual support. Yet the nature of all three groups was specifically to learn together; participants had contracted to learn together about spirituality, albeit in a personal and experiential way. Mutual support was an important element in this process but this was essentially to underpin our learning ,never the primary purpose of the group. Self-exploration and group learning became intertwined and at times the boundaries between personal development and adult learning seemed to blur. Individuals within each of the groups undoubtedly had the skills to provide mutual counselling yet we chose to retain and clarify our emphasis on learning together. Cooperative inquiry recognises clearly that deep feelings raised during the course of an inquiry cannot be ignored and indeed have a profound effect on the life of the group. Specific ways of responding to such tensions can be built into the methodology and it helped the CI group that this was recognised from the beginning (Heron 1996:69-72). However in the more informal JIF group the process was less clear cut; deep feelings were undoubtedly raised but only sometimes expressed or responded to in group meetings; a deep sense of mutual support developed yet participants rarely saw each other between meetings. It would not be possible for me or anyone else to know all the ways in which these groups affected individuals’ lives. Although we discussed what we had learnt in each group, I sense that the full effect will only be recognised as our learning becomes even more fully integrated into our life and work.