Week 8 W&S Chapter 24: Personal Values, Beliefs, and Spirituality

Values

• Can be understood as principles, standards, or qualities considered worthwhile by the client who holds them

Beliefs

• Closely relates to values

• Cognitive content held as true

Spirituality

• 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

• A deep experience of meaning brought about by engaging in occupations that involve the enacting of personal values and beliefs, reflection, and intention within a supportive contextual environment

• Is often experienced through engagement in everyday activities

• Thrives on actual experiences of occupations that provide the opportunity to bring one’s values and beliefs to life

Religion

• A set of shared beliefs and attendant practices used to relate to the sacred

• Permeates many people’s daily experiences of spirituality through participation in rituals and occupations such as prayer, meditation, reading theological books, and attending religious services

• Not only does this provide followers with practices directly relating to theological beliefs, but these beliefs often ascribe spiritual meaning to daily occupations such as food preparation, work, and intimacy

Spiritual Health

• Connotes being able to experience meaning, fulfillment, and connection with self, others, and a higher power or larger reality

Occupational Alienation

• An an inability to create meaning and express one’s spirit through occupation

• Experiencing this demonstrates a lack of spiritual health or well-being for a person

Advocates of Moral Treatment Valued Ideals Such as

• Holism

• Humanism

• A recognition that engagement of the mind, body, and spirit through occupation promoted health and brought meaning to life

How Peloquin Refers to Occupation

• An act of making that represents an extension and animation of the human spirit

  • To see such radical making in the acts that we commonly name doing purposeful activities, performing life roles and tasks, adapting to the environment, adjusting to disability, and achieving skills or mastery, is to discern the spiritual depth of occupation

Linking Occupation and Spirituality Together: Making

• Implies a fluid and active approach to the phenomenon

• A person expresses tangibly the intangible yet vital realities of life

Physical World

• Can serve to potentially facilitate or block spiritual experiences

• Some experience spirituality through occupations in nature such as hiking in the mountains, fly fishing in a stream, or walking along the beach

• Built spaces such as churches, houses, and other structures serve to refine and make more vivid human feeling, perception, and comprehension of reality

• Out of experiencing those spaces and the objects within them, a person draws a sense of place that is “an organized world of meaning

Social World

• Can significantly influence spiritual experience because meaning is both personally and socially constructed

• Engaging in occupations with others, or co-occupation can potentiate the likelihood of a spiritual experience

• As a growing public health concern, loneliness and lack of social connection can increase mortality and a range of disease morbidities and points to the necessity for helping people find ways to connect with others

• Beyond religious occupations, communal occupations such as attending sporting events, concerts, or political protests as well as family celebrations such as weddings or graduations can be rich environments for spiritual experience, the enacting of personal values and beliefs, and the fundamental human need for connection

Spiritual Experience

• A deep experience of meaning and connection

• Personal reflection, intention, and mindfulness enhance this

Reflection

• Refers to the exploration of one’s inner world and necessarily involves recognition of feelings, emotions, and motivations to act

• Becomes a tool of interpretation that can lead to a setting apart of spiritual experiences as different from everyday life, something special or transcendent

Intention

• Involves a value, belief, or ideology to guide one’s occupational engagement, thereby changing the meaning of the experience

Mindfulness

• Has emerged in recent years as supportive to well-being and health and as a way to mitigate the stress of everyday life and counter mindless and distracted modes of living

• Can be understood as a flexible state of mind where we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context

• Can be both a cognitive trait and a meditative practice

Cameron’s View of the Intertwining of Spirituality and Creativity

• Is an experience—to my eye, a spiritual experience

• It does not matter which way you think of it: creativity leading to spirituality or spirituality leading to creativity

• In fact, I do not make a distinction between the two

Occupational Participation and Spirituality

• Not all occupations are experienced as spiritual, but all occupations hold the potential to be spiritual

• Although people often name occupations stemming from religious traditions as spiritual, the lived experience might feel rote or disconnected to self and might not necessarily be spiritual for the person at that point in time

Rituals

• Symbolic actions with spiritual, cultural, or social meaning

Bell: Recognizing the Importance of Ritual-Like Performances

• They communicate on multiple sensory levels, usually involving highly visual imagery, dramatic sounds, and sometimes even tactile, olfactory, and gustatory stimulation

Issues Integrating a Client’s Personal Beliefs, Values, and Spirituality into OT Practice

• Due to a breadth of definitions, large diversity of practitioners’ understanding of the notions, and need for more extensive or further education

Two Strategies Recognized by Egan and Swedersky Used by OTs who Successfully Integrated Spirituality into Practice

• Addressing clients’ religious concerns

  • Can include talking about the accessibility of the clients’ place of worship, practicing transfers to the type of seating in the religious setting which might also involve kneeling down on a bench or the floor

• Assisting clients in dealing with suffering

  • Ex: In the Buddhist tradition, pain and suffering are viewed as tools for spiritual insight or enlightenment

Integrating Spirituality into Practice Necessarily Involves a Reflective Process of the OT Practitioner

• Practitioners must consider their own understanding of spirituality and how their spirituality plays out in their occupations and experiences

• This self-reflective process may lead to the recognition of personal biases, values, or beliefs that could interfere with the crucially needed openness to clients’ diverse beliefs and experiences

• Self-reflection also aids in the ethically important need for therapeutic

  interventions to be consistent with the client’s spiritual life, not the therapist’s

Spirituality: Canadian Occupational Performance Measure (COPM)

• Allow for a client-centered and occupation-based approach that can address spiritual needs through actively integrating the client into the phases of evaluation and intervention

• Conducting an occupational profile gathers relevant information about important and meaningful occupations and builds a client-centered foundation for intervention

OT-QUEST

• An OT spiritual assessment with a combination of Likert scale and open-ended questions

Occupational Therapy Spiritual Narrative Assessment (OTSNA)

• Consists of guiding qualitative narrative interview questions designed to better understand a client’s lived experiences of spirituality to help enable integration of holistic spiritual care in OT

• The tool’s design strives to facilitate a meaningful conversation between OT practitioner and client about areas of deep meaning relating to occupational participation and is meant to be flexible according to client needs

• The five core categories of personal values and beliefs, coping, community, connection, and referral all have a primary question with other optional exploratory questions

Areas Included on an Occupational Therapy Spiritual Assessment

• Personal values and beliefs

• Coping

• Community

• Connection

• Referral