By Sara Somasca | BASE YOGA
When we support a person, we meet more than their symptoms, difficulties, or immediate goals. We also meet their hopes, their understanding of life, and the beliefs that help them continue when the way forward is unclear.
For health professionals, making room for this dimension can be part of seeing the whole person. In coaching and wellbeing work, it can also offer a meaningful conversation when the client wishes to explore it.
Spirituality has many expressions
For some people, spirituality means faith in God and belonging to a religious tradition. For others, it lives in nature, a philosophy of life, the universe, or a sense of connection with something greater than the individual self. It may be a relationship with the sacred, or a quiet recognition that our lives belong to a wider world.
The language differs. What matters in a helping relationship is understanding what that connection means to the person in front of us. Some people do not identify as spiritual at all. Their sources of meaning, belonging, and hope deserve the same attention and respect.
Hope beyond what we can currently imagine
There are moments when the possibilities we can see feel painfully limited. We look at our circumstances through what we know, what we have experienced, and what we fear. From that position, it can be difficult to imagine that anything different might become possible.
A spiritual perspective may leave room for what we cannot yet see. A person might feel supported by God, find reassurance in the rhythms of nature, or draw strength from a belief that life holds possibilities beyond their present understanding. Within that experience, hope can be nurtured.
This hope does not have to promise a particular outcome. It may simply allow someone to say:
“I do not know how this will unfold, but I do not have to assume that what I see today is all there can be.”
That openness can make room for another conversation, an unexpected source of support, or a next step that previously felt impossible.
Letting go of total control
Many of us carry the expectation that if we work hard enough, plan carefully enough, and make the right decisions, we should be able to keep life under control. When something painful happens despite our efforts, that expectation can become another burden.
Spirituality can offer some people a way to acknowledge the limits of their control while remaining engaged in their lives. We can make choices, seek help, and take responsibility for our actions. We cannot determine every outcome, prevent every loss, or decide how other people will respond.
Letting go can mean loosening the demand for certainty. For a person of faith, that might take the form of prayer or entrusting an uncertainty to God. For someone else, it might emerge through time in nature, reflection, or accepting that life continues to unfold beyond their plans.
Sometimes a situation feels more manageable when we stop requiring ourselves to control every part of it.
That does not mean that suffering is deserved, that every difficulty is a test, or that good things are guaranteed if we surrender. A person can have deep faith and still experience pain, doubt, and disappointment. There must be room for those experiences too.
What a brain imaging study suggests
Researchers have begun to investigate what happens in the brain during spiritual experiences. In a study of 27 young adults, Lisa Miller and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging while participants listened to personalized accounts of spiritual, stressful, and neutral relaxing experiences. The paper was published online in 2018 and appeared in Cerebral Cortex in 2019.
Compared with neutral relaxing experiences, spiritual experiences were associated with reduced activity in the left inferior parietal lobule, a region involved in aspects of perception and representing the self in relation to others. The researchers interpreted this as potentially relevant to the experience of connection beyond the individual self.
This was a small study of brain activity during recalled experiences. It did not establish lasting brain changes, prove a healing effect, or demonstrate that a higher power intervenes in our lives. It does suggest that personally meaningful spiritual experiences have measurable neural correlates. The connection to hope and letting go explored here is a reflection, rather than a finding tested by that study.
Making room in the helping relationship
We can begin with an invitation:
“What gives you hope when life feels uncertain?”
Or:
“Are there beliefs, practices, or connections that help you feel supported?”
The person can decide whether spirituality belongs in that conversation and what words feel right for them.
Listening also means recognizing when beliefs bring conflict, guilt, or a feeling of abandonment. Our role is to understand the person’s experience without imposing our own explanation.
When further support is needed, an appropriately qualified spiritual care professional or someone from the person’s chosen community may be helpful. Spiritual exploration should complement appropriate healthcare and remain within each practitioner’s role.
For me, seeing the whole person means leaving space for what gives their life meaning, including what they experience as greater than themselves.
Sometimes hope begins with the possibility that we do not need to hold every answer or carry every uncertainty alone.
Sara Somasca | BASE YOGA
Body-Mind Coach & Somatic Practitioner
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Reference: Miller, L., Balodis, I. M., McClintock, C. H., et al. (2019). Neural Correlates of Personalized Spiritual Experiences. Cerebral Cortex, 29(6), 2331–2338. Published online May 29, 2018. Read the study.