Holistic Spirituality

Holistic spirituality is an umbrella term encompassing a broad range of beliefs and practices that have grown in popularity in Western European countries and the United States since the counterculture movements of the 1960s. These beliefs are primarily orientated toward the attainment of wholeness, health, and the well-being of “body, mind, and spirit.” Holistic spiritualities place an emphasis on self-realization, connectivity, and personal experiences of God, the supernatural, or the sacred. They explicitly reject the Neoplatonic/Cartesian mind-body dualism identifiable within some strands of Christian and Western philosophical traditions. For these reasons, the relationship of holistic spirituality to organized religion, and particularly to wider trends in Christian spirituality since the 19th century, remains an area of considerable debate. This has led some commentators to distinguish holistic spirituality as an “unchurched spirituality” or “lived religion,” while others treat it as coterminous with New Age, Eastern esoteric, and “subjective-life” spiritualities.

Embodiment is a primary preoccupation within a holistic spirituality, and the body is privileged as a site for access to the inner life of emotions, selfvalidation, and spiritual experiences. Holistic spiritualities have become pervasive within a variety of settings, including the New Age, neo-Paganism, and complementary and alternative health care practices. A common strand across these eclectic movements is a stress on the notion of “wellbeing,” which is realized by the attainment of harmony with one's “authentic” or inner self through attention to feelings, intuitions, and bodily sensations or ailments. Self-expression and gradual self-realization are deemed overarching priorities. In some settings, an awareness of the unity between the body and spirit might also find extension in a relational connectedness between the individual and others, including nature and the cosmos. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the markedly gendered popularity of holistic spiritualities in a post-Christian setting and has argued that women embrace these forms of an embodied, expressive spirituality as a mechanism for negotiating the “dilemmas of selfhood” and the conflicting demands of contemporary femininity.

In view of the diffusion of religious traditions, ideas, and practices grouped under this term, there is a tendency in some of the sociological literature to dismiss holistic spirituality as unduly fragmented, inherently consumerist, and incapable of transmission. Such studies characterize it as a “pick-and-mix,” syncretic movement with low salience and little to distinguish it from the individualistic, consumerist practices promoted by global capitalism. While there certainly is a propensity for a holistic, well-being culture to be annexed by consumerist narratives, recent studies have also identified a deeper strand within this spirituality and a common, core emphasis on immanentism and the “sacralization of the self.” There has been a marked growth in this form of spirituality in most Western European countries from the 1980s, as well as the emergence in North American “churched Christianity” of a form of spirituality that is questing, questioning, and attracted to embodied and expressive belief. As such, this is a transnational movement with implications for the [Page 532]study of mainstream religious affiliation as well as spiritual searching and meaning making outside institutional and traditional settings.