Week 8 Presentation: Spirituality

Holistic Values of Occupational Therapy

• As OT’s, we help clients experience meaning in their lives through occupational participation

• The meaning in a client’s life

• Understand the interconnectedness of personal values, beliefs, and spirituality as important facets of occupation

• Discuss the multiple ways in which spirituality is experienced through occupation

• Strategies for integrating values, beliefs, and spirituality into OT practice

• As a profession rooted in holistic and humanistic values, OT holds a unique opportunity to help clients restore meaning to their lives

Personal Values, Beliefs, and Spirituality

• In pursuing occupation, humans express the totality of their being, a mind-body-spirit union (Hooper & Wood, 2014, p. 38)

• The transaction of mind, body, and spirit through occupational engagement help answer the question “what do you live for?”

  • Important to address the meaning in a client’s life

AOTA Practice Framework (2014): Values

• Principles, standards, or qualities considered worthwhile by the client who holds them

AOTA Practice Framework (2014): Beliefs

• Cognitive content held as true

AOTA Practice Framework (2014): 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

  • Small part (sacred) could have to do with religion

AOTA Practice Framework Client Factors

Experiencing Spirituality Through Occupation

• Meaning-making

  • The importance of finding occupations that make clients’ faces light up and motivate them to get out of bed in the morning

  • Client finding the meaning

• Context:

  • Nature

  • Physical context (church, homes, etc)

  • Social context – meaning is both personally and socially constructed

  • Co-occupation can increase the likelihood of a spiritual experience

    • Often brings the meaning-making

Reflection, Intention, and Mindfulness

• Focused, inner attentive engagement of the mind that build that spirituality and meaningfulness in things

Reflection

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

Intention

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

Mindfulness

• Flexible state of mind where we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context

Canadian Model of Occupational Performance

• Spirituality is intrapersonal

• Spirituality is interpersonal

• Spirituality is transpersonal

• Debate about the definition of spirituality

• Innate sense of self

Canadian Model of Occupational Performance: Spirituality is Intrapersonal

• “Intra”= within

• The central core of a person

• An innate essence of self

• The quality of being uniquely and truly human

Canadian Model of Occupational Performance: Spirituality is Interpersonal

• “Inter”= between

• Sense of belonging

• Connection to a greater scheme

• Awareness of the impact of one’s action on others

Canadian Model of Occupational Performance: Spirituality is Transpersonal

• A force that animates the body of living things, a quality beyond the individual or groups of people, an energy

• Where different spirituality and religion aspects come into place

Relationship Between Identity and Occupation

• Compelling need to express one’s unique identity in a personally meaningful manner

Identity

• An overarching definition of oneself, which is created, expressed, and changed through relationships with others through one’s actions

Giving Meaning to Occupation

• Through engagement in occupations with inherently meaningful characteristics

  • Meaningful – fill the human drive to make a difference in the world

  • Human essence/that desire to engage with our world around us

• Through relationships experienced by engaging in occupation

• Through transcendence

Addressing Spirituality in OT: Psychospiritual Integration Framework

Psychospiritual Integration Framework

• Helps put together this different aspect when talking about the spiritual component of a person

• Becoming

• Meaning

• Being

• Centerdness

• Connectedness

• Transcendence

Psychospiritual Integration Framework: Becoming

• “Growth of the self through active doing”

• Social skills

• Life skills

• Adaptation to disability

• Facilitate flow

Psychospiritual Integration Framework: Meaning

• “The creation of life themes”

• Exploring meaning of personal illness

• Focus on pursuit of goals

• Occupations that enhance quality of life and well-being

Psychospiritual Integration Framework: Being

• “Who we really are”

• Focus on values, desires, and dreams

• Person-centered practice

Psychospiritual Integration Framework: Centerdness

• “Nucleus of one’s being”

• Mindfulness

• Meditation

• Creativity

• Life balance

Psychospiritual Integration Framework: Connectedness

• “Embedded within an interrelational context”

• Facilitate connections with community

• Promote occupations that demonstrate care for others

Psychospiritual Integration Framework: Transcendence

• “Freedom from all limitation”

• The aspirational outcome of integrating spirituality in practice