In my research, I distinguish seven broad pathways through which spirituality may be encountered, cultivated or interpreted. Six are recurring contexts of human life: religion and ritual; nature and the cosmos; art, beauty and aesthetic experience; eros and intimate love; sport, dance and embodied intensity; and community, care and agape.
The seventh pathway is different. It is not a stable context, but a disruption of ordinary equilibrium: suffering, crisis, illness, grief, childbirth, trauma, depression, psychological turmoil, near-death experience, or altered-state disruption through psychotropic substances, fasting, sleep deprivation, pain, breathwork, sensory deprivation, ecstatic movement or other forms of homeostasis disruption.
These pathways may be entered intentionally or spontaneously. Some people cultivate spiritual experience through prayer, meditation, art, movement, ritual, service, intimacy or contemplative engagement with nature. Others encounter it unexpectedly through beauty, love, crisis, the body, collective experience or rupture. The trigger alone does not make an experience spiritual; it becomes spiritually significant when it is interpreted, cultivated or integrated as pointing beyond the ordinary ego-bound self.
Key idea
Pathways are the domains or disruptions through which spirituality may arise. Modes of entry describe whether the encounter is intentionally cultivated or spontaneously emerges. Interpretation and integration determine whether the experience becomes spiritually meaningful.
Pathways to Spirituality
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Religion and ritual provide inherited languages, symbols, practices and communal forms through which spiritual experience may be cultivated and interpreted.
Cultivated / intentional practices: Prayer; meditation; pilgrimage; chanting; liturgy; retreat; contemplation; devotional practice; fasting; ritual observance; ethical discipline; yoga; sacred reading.
Spontaneous / emergent triggers: A sudden experience during worship, sacred music, collective ritual, religious architecture, funerals, rites of passage, silence, grief, conversion, or an unexpected sense of sacred presence.
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Nature is one of the most common secular contexts for spiritual experience. Landscapes, animals, water, mountains, forests, the sea, weather, stars and cosmic vastness can generate awe, wonder, humility, interconnection and a sense of belonging to something larger than the individual self.
Cultivated / intentional practices: Contemplative walking; wilderness retreat; gardening; sea or mountain contemplation; stargazing; ecological practice; nature writing; environmental care; deliberate attention to water, light, animals, seasons or landscape.
Spontaneous / emergent triggers: Awe before the sea, sky, mountains, forests, storms, animals, light, silence, beauty, vastness, ecological grief, cosmic perspective, or sudden felt interconnection.
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Art can function as a spiritual pathway when aesthetic experience becomes more than pleasure or cultural appreciation. Images, music, performance, film, architecture and literature can alter perception, intensify attention, evoke awe, open symbolic meaning and produce experiences of presence, revelation, connection or transcendence.
Cultivated / intentional practices: Museum-going; contemplative looking; artistic practice; music listening; performance; reading; writing; arts-based research; ritualised attention to image, sound, movement, material or form.
Spontaneous / emergent triggers: Being unexpectedly overwhelmed by music, painting, dance, performance, film, beauty, the sublime, symbolic intensity, atmosphere, memory, grief, or a work of art that reorganises perception or emotion.
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Eros and intimate love can become spiritual when desire, tenderness, vulnerability, sexual union or romantic attachment dissolve ordinary separateness and create a sense of presence, unity, devotion or transformation.
Cultivated / intentional practices: Conscious intimacy; sacred sexuality; tantric traditions; erotic attention; relational vulnerability; deep listening; tenderness; presence; embodied love; contemplative relational practice.
Spontaneous / emergent triggers: Falling in love; sexual intensity; orgasm; physical merging; mutual recognition; profound tenderness; emotional nakedness; or the sense of being dissolved, expanded or transformed through another person.
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The body can become a pathway into spirituality through rhythm, repetition, exertion, skill, flow, exhaustion, music, movement and embodied presence.
Cultivated / intentional practices: Dance; running; swimming; yoga; martial arts; endurance training; breath-led movement; rhythmic repetition; physical discipline; embodied improvisation; ritual movement.
Spontaneous / emergent triggers: Flow states; runner’s high; trance; collective rhythm; exhaustion; music; pain; ecstatic movement; skill absorption; loss of self-consciousness; or the feeling that the body is being moved by something larger than the individual will.
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Spirituality may emerge through connection with others: friendship, family, service, collective belonging, compassion, solidarity, care and agape. Agape is love as care for the other, the stranger, the vulnerable, or the wider human and more-than-human world.
Cultivated / intentional practices: Service; volunteering; caregiving; hospitality; activism; collective ritual; community-building; compassion practices; ecological responsibility; mutual aid; ethical practice.
Spontaneous / emergent triggers: Collective joy; shared grief; witnessing altruism; moments of solidarity; caregiving; forgiveness; reconciliation; sudden compassion; group synchrony; collective song, ritual or mourning.
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This seventh pathway is not a context we usually choose, but a disruption of ordinary equilibrium. Suffering, crisis, illness, grief, childbirth, trauma, depression, psychological turmoil, divorce, bereavement, near-death experience or spiritual emergency may destabilise the ordinary ego-self and open questions of meaning, mortality, identity and transformation.
Cultivated / intentional practices: Psychedelic or psychotropic practice where legal, safe and culturally or clinically supported; fasting; breathwork; vigil; sleep deprivation; sensory deprivation; ecstatic ritual; prolonged silence; ritual ordeal; intense spiritual practice.
Spontaneous / emergent triggers: Grief; illness; childbirth; trauma; depression; despair; loss; psychological breakdown; near-death experience; shock; panic; bereavement; divorce; bodily crisis; pain; exhaustion; sudden collapse of ordinary assumptions.
Further reading
Spirituality Survey
How do people understand and experience spirituality today?
This ongoing exploratory survey looks at contemporary spirituality across five dimensions: identity and affiliation, belief, practice, experience and ethics. It is designed to include people who are religious, spiritual but not religious, secular, atheist, agnostic, uncertain, or who do not use any of these labels.