Drawing of heart with quote about the heart representing pure love
Topic:

Last year, we released “What Does Spirituality Mean to Us? A Study of Spirituality in the US,” a groundbreaking study designed to help us explore what spirituality means to us and how it influences our civic lives. The study revealed that:

  • Spirituality is a complex, diverse, and nuanced phenomenon that people of all spiritual and religious self-identifications experience.
  • The more a person identifies as spiritual, the more likely they are to take civic and political action.

Early this year, we shared our free, downloadable “Guide to Exploring Spirituality and Civic Life,” including key findings from the study, related activities, questions, actions, and other resources to help you explore your own spirituality and how it relates to your civic life. We invite you to join us in using the following prompt from the guide for this month’s practice.

Our spiritual identities are extremely diverse—we experience and understand spirituality in a myriad of ways. While more than eight out of ten people in the United States consider themselves to be spiritual to some extent, we each practice and experience spirituality differently. How do you visualize or verbalize your spirituality?

1) Explore

Sketch a picture of what is sacred to you. It can be anything from an activity to a scene of people that you commune with. You have the freedom to be creative and expressive here.

If you’re participating in a group and feel comfortable, take a picture of your drawing and share it, along with any description you’d like to provide. (Visit SpiritualityStudy.org to see how study participants illustrated or described what spirituality meant to them.)

2) Reflect

The way you envision what is sacred inevitably leads you to make life choices that bring you closer to that reality in your own life. It drives you toward productive change and adjusts how you present yourself in front of others.

How does your understanding of spirituality shape how you are present in the world?

3) Act

Take one simple action this week that is informed by your spiritual beliefs, whatever they may be. For example, if you think it is sacred to love, then how can you show someone love this week? If you think being in nature is what ties you to the sacred, then how can you connect more to nature?

Take this step and listen closely to your heart, mind, and body.

4) Grow

After that, recall your experience in visualizing your connection to what is sacred. Use this experience to inform you the next time your go through this practice. And each time you do, look for a new way to express the visualization of your spirituality.

It’s all part of the process of endearing your heart toward what is sacred to you in this life.