Spiritual Health: Direction, Scale and Acceptance

emotional-health , how igor ticks

I’m not sure spiritual health is real. It might be a fancy label for “stuff that makes you feel less lost,” or it might be the most important thing you’re neglecting. This page is where I muddle through that question. So far, the best test I’ve found: are you sustainably motivated in a way you’d be proud to see in your child? If yes, you’ve probably cracked it — even if you can’t explain how. If no, the word to focus on is motivated, not meaning. You can philosophize about meaning forever and never become more spiritually healthy. That’s the biggest trap. Motivation is the proof that meaning is present. When it’s missing, one of three things is usually gone — a direction, a sense of scale, or acceptance of what you don’t control — and each has practices that refill it.

AI-augmented, roughly 40% AI

I love AI, and I use it on posts like this one partly to get better at using it. The percent is a rough guess: after rounds of prompting, rewriting and editing, it's very hard to say which words came from whom.

Breaking down that test. Two parts:

  1. Sustainably motivated — a bit of a weasel word. How long counts? What if circumstances change? But I think that’s actually OK: while you’re motivated, you’re spiritually healthy. When the motivation dies, that’s when you have a spiritual health problem to solve. It’s like fitness — you’re fit while you’re fit, and when you’re not, you train.

  2. Proud to see in your child — this is subjective, on purpose. Spiritual health isn’t blood pressure; there’s no objective reading. A drug addict is sustainably motivated, but you wouldn’t want that for your kid. The “your child” framing works because you can lie to yourself about your own life, but it’s much harder to lie about what you’d want for your kid.

The test is diagnostic, not prescriptive. For a long time this page stopped there: it could tell me I was stuck, but not what to do on a Tuesday. The rest of the page is my attempt at the “if your motivation is low, do X” playbook.

What I’m not claiming

Nobody has a clean definition here, so I’ll borrow the least-bad one I’ve found, from a 2009 palliative-care consensus (Puchalski et al.): spirituality is “the aspect of humanity that refers to the way individuals seek and express meaning and purpose and the way they experience their connectedness to the moment, to self, to others, to nature, and to the significant or sacred.” Notice what’s not in there: God. I lost my belief a long time ago, and I still think this matters. What religion does for people, and why I miss parts of it, lives in religion and Greek Orthodoxy.

It’s also not emotional health. Emotional health gets you through the sprint: someone cuts you off in traffic, your kid melts down, and you stay regulated. Spiritual health gets you through the marathon: two years into a hard career change, or visiting a parent with dementia week after week, and you keep going because you know why. Strength versus endurance. Or, put another way, emotional health is your athletic ability and spiritual health is the game you’ve decided to play. You need both, independently. The four healths has the tests for each.

Three ways it breaks

When the motivation goes, I find it’s one of three things. Each has a feeling, a tell, and practices that refill it.

Direction: you lack a north star

What it feels like: Things are fine by external measures and you’re going through the motions. The work gets done and feels hollow. You can’t make value-aligned decisions because you’re not sure what the values are.

The tell: The successful person who got everything they wanted and wonders, “what’s the point of all this?”

What refills it: Getting clear on who you want to be — for me that’s my eulogy — and reviewing it often enough that it shows up in the calendar. Loehr and Schwartz, in The Power of Full Engagement, give three ways to strengthen a purpose: move it from negative (not losing) to positive (thriving), from external (money) to internal, and from self to others. Ben Wallace’s The Happiest I’ve Ever Been is a case study of all three: he left a corporate career that looked great on paper and found coaching youth basketball made him happier than professional success ever did.

Scale: you’re the center of the universe

What it feels like: Life is a tedious sitcom and you’re the main character. Every problem looms too large. This is what the literature calls transcendence and what Arthur Brooks calls getting small: anything that shrinks you and makes the universe large.

The tell: The founder who knows exactly what they want and why, and burns out because every setback is a catastrophe.

What refills it: Getting small can go in four directions:

  • Up — the divine, the cosmos, a night sky.
  • Out — community, causes, other people.
  • Through time — ancestors and the people who’ll come after you.
  • In — deep meditation or flow, where the self quiets down.

You can’t grab it by effort the way you hit a goal. You set up the conditions (a dawn walk without a phone, a service, a hard problem bigger than you) and let it happen.

Acceptance: you want control, all you have is influence

What it feels like: You’re exhausted from optimizing variables you can’t move. Anxiety lives in the gap between how hard you’re pushing and what’s happening.

The tell: The parent trying to run their adult kid’s choices, or the leader micromanaging a team into chaos while trying to impose order.

What refills it: The oldest answer is the best one:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.

The same idea shows up as Covey’s circle of influence versus circle of concern, the Stoic dichotomy of control, and ACT. Do the work, take the right action, let the outcome go.

I used to call this one “coherence.” That was wrong. In the research on meaning (Martela & Steger), coherence means your life makes sense as a story, which is a different idea from accepting what you can’t control. So: Direction, Scale, Acceptance. The four healths calls the first two Purpose and Perspective, same ideas.

Are these three separate, or one thing seen from different sides? I went back and forth on this for a long time. Where I landed: you can have any one without the others, but Frankl is right that the strongest direction comes through getting small. You find your purpose by pointing it at something bigger than you.

The practices

Here’s what I actually do, or have tried, with an honest read on the evidence. I’m an engineer and I want to know which of these are pulling their weight. “Evidence” is my shorthand for how much I’d bet on it, not a formal grade.

Practice Refills Evidence Where I write about it
Meditation Acceptance, Scale Moderate. Lots of trials. Helps anxiety and depression a little, about as much as exercise, and doesn’t beat exercise, therapy or drugs (Goyal 2014). The trials skew positive (PLOS). Emotional health, SIY
Showing up to a community weekly Scale, plus the tribe Moderate, observational only. Attending services more than once a week tracked with 33% lower mortality in 74,534 nurses, via social support, less smoking, less depression (Li & VanderWeele 2016). Religion, lonely
Awe walks Scale Small experiments, clear mechanism. A minute looking up at tall trees made people more helpful (Piff 2015); 15-minute weekly awe walks raised older adults’ daily positive emotion (Sturm 2020). Elder
Gratitude journal Scale, Acceptance Small but real. Randomized trials hold up (Emmons & McCullough 2003); the meta-analysis effect is small and the authors say it’s no substitute for treatment (Cregg & Cheavens 2021). Grateful, emotional health
Loving-kindness Scale One good trial (Fredrickson 2008). Sublime
Service, bringing joy Direction, Scale Observational; experiments didn’t confirm it (Jenkinson 2013). Joy
Daily review Direction Pilot trials only. The Ignatian examen, a structured daily look-back, raised hope and meaning in a small trial (PMC). My affirmations check is the same move. Affirmations, eulogy
Devotional reading Direction, Scale Untested as I do it. A daily devotional read as written, then translated into secular terms. Walking with God
Memento mori Acceptance Plausible, thin. Reflecting on death raised gratitude in one randomized study (Frias 2011). Stoicism, death, mortality software
Fasting rhythm, sabbath Acceptance Weak. In 1,316 clergy, Sabbath-keeping didn’t predict mental or physical health once other factors were controlled (Springer). Greek Orthodox

The playbook, then. Low on direction: re-read the eulogy and do the daily review. Too big in your own head: an awe walk, meditation, or go serve someone. Fighting what you can’t move: the Serenity Prayer, memento mori, meditation. And for all three, the row I’m worst at: show up somewhere, weekly, with other people.

The Meaning Traps

Most people who struggle with meaning aren’t struggling because they can’t define it. They’re stuck in one of these.

Trap 1: The Philosophy Pit

“What does meaning mean?” You read Frankl, you compare frameworks, you build a beautiful model of spiritual health. And you’re still sitting on the couch. It feels like progress, which is what makes it seductive.

The tell: You can explain what meaning is but can’t point to what gets you out of bed tomorrow.

The escape: Stop asking “what is meaning?” and ask “what would I do if I were motivated?” That question usually has an obvious answer you’re avoiding.

Trap 2: The Motivation Test You Keep Failing

Motivation is the proof that meaning has been found. When meaning is alive, the activation energy for what matters drops and you don’t have to force yourself. When it’s gone, even small things feel impossible.

The tell: You have a beautiful eulogy document but haven’t changed any behavior in months.

The escape: Treat low motivation as a diagnosis, not a character flaw. Ask which of the three is missing, then do the thing — badly, briefly. Motivation often follows action.

Trap 3: Meaning Without Motion

You found meaning once — the kids were small, the job mattered, the cause lit you up. Then circumstances changed and the source dried up. The retiree who was their job title. The parent whose kids left home.

The tell: You talk about meaning in the past tense. “I used to feel so purposeful when…”

The escape: Meaning isn’t found once and banked. It gets renewed by picking up new responsibilities as life changes.

Trap 4: Borrowed Meaning

Your parents’ expectations, your company’s mission statement, a self-help book’s prescription. It looked like meaning from the outside and never generated motivation, because it was never yours.

The tell: Your purpose sounds great and doesn’t survive a hard Tuesday morning.

The escape: Trust the behavior over the narrative. Your real meaning shows up in your calendar and where your energy goes when nobody’s watching.

Trap 5: Spiritual Bypassing

Using the practices to skip the emotional work. The psychologist John Welwood named this in the 1980s: meditating past grief, “accepting” a resentment you never looked at, getting small so you don’t have to feel anything.

The tell: You’re serene about everything, and the people close to you would say otherwise.

The escape: This is why I keep emotional health and spiritual health separate. The marathon doesn’t excuse you from the sprint.

The part I can’t cobble alone

The research had one finding I didn’t want. In the big studies the benefit rides on the community and the regular practice, not the belief. People who attend weekly live longer (Li & VanderWeele), and religious-service attendance tracks with flourishing even in the most secular countries (Global Flourishing Study). And in one large English survey of 7,403 people, those who called themselves spiritual but not religious did worse than people who were neither — more anxiety, more drug use (King 2013).

That’s a direct hit on my plan, which was roughly: keep what religion does, drop the God part, cobble the ten pieces together myself. The practices I can cobble. The weekly room full of flawed people I can’t. When I was working through the devotional on fellowship, I wrote, “I don’t have a tribe I regularly engage with for this kind of wisdom exchange. And that’s probably costing me” (Walking with God). That’s the most important sentence I’ve written on this topic. The open question is where the secular version of the weekly gathering is, and whether there is one. More in religion and lonely.

Where the frameworks came from

I spent a lot of words on this page summarizing other people’s books. Here’s the short version, with links to where the full treatment lives:

  • Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: meaning comes from self-transcendence, down three paths — creating a work, loving someone, and the attitude you take toward suffering you can’t avoid.
  • Arthur Brooks: faith as one of four pillars, “get small,” and in From Strength to Strength, the Hindu stages of life and the move from striving to wisdom. My notes are in Elder and Build the Life You Want; the Arthur Brooks field map has the books with sourced quotes, including the second curve. Brooks also says faith tends to rise with age. Pew’s data says most of that gap is generational (Pew), so I read it as: some people find this switches on in midlife, and if it does, walk toward it.
  • Loehr & Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement: spiritual energy as connection to values beyond self-interest, kept alive by rituals.
  • Martela & Steger: meaning is coherence, purpose and significance. Brooks’s The Meaning of Your Life builds on the same three. My “acceptance” is a different thing from their coherence.

What’s the meaning of life?

Here’s where I love Viktor Frankl’s insight the most: you’re asking the wrong question.

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.

Life is asking you: what’s the point of your life? And you answer not with words, but with what you decide are your responsibilities. When life hands you a kid needing guidance, a problem needing solving, work needing doing, it’s asking “what are you going to do about this?” Your meaning is in how you respond.

That’s why Frankl’s three paths are all outward: creating work, loving someone, choosing your attitude toward suffering. Each one is taking responsibility for something beyond just existing.

My eulogy is my answer to life’s question: being a great father, being present, bringing joy, helping others grow. Not abstract philosophy — commitments to show up in specific ways. The meaning gets stronger when those responsibilities reach past me, to my kids’ growth, my partner’s wellbeing, my team’s success. That’s where direction and getting small merge.

Stop asking life what it means. Start answering life’s question about what you mean to do with it.

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