Spirituality and Wellbeing

This valuable interdisciplinary volume is a significant contribution to the study of religious experience and health, especially given rising interest in both spirituality and well-being and their overlap. The initial broad definition of spirituality is 'that which gives meaning, value and purpose to a person's life', which makes it central to well-being, as a quotation from The Dalai Lama emphasises – where happiness is mutual and based on love and tenderness. The introduction gives a very useful elaboration of the dimensions of spirituality and the various disciplines in which it is reflected, while the first chapter provides further critical analysis. An interesting leitmotif throughout the book is the tension between spirituality and spiritual experience on the one hand, and training in secular biomedical materialism on the other, which tends to pathologise such phenomena and make them difficult to talk about.

The contents are very diverse: Chris Roe writes about clinical parapsychology at the interface between anomalous experiences and psychological well-being. There are chapters on the Christian understanding of the body, spirituality and well-being in China, two chapters on the psychospiritual process involved in AA, another two chapters on cultural differences and similarities between Brazil (where 79% consider themselves religious) and the UK, and a contribution using autoethnography to explore the spirituality of epilepsy. Self-care emerges as an important theme, and is related to self-transcendence, authenticity and social belonging. I particularly enjoyed Becky Seale's chapter on Buddhist practice and the person-centred approach to counselling and psychotherapy, where she links her own spirituality of compassionate presence (Rogers uses the term 'unconditional positive regard') and deep listening to her professional work that itself becomes an aspect of her spiritual practice – including the embrace of suffering and mutual presence in the moment. This volume will be of particular value to psychiatrists and psychotherapists.