What does spirituality do?

Presence is not the same as consciousness. A person can be conscious while distracted, anxious, ruminative or enclosed within habitual self-concern. Presence is a quality of attention and awareness: being more fully available to the body, breath, sensation, image, sound, another person, a landscape, grief, beauty or silence.

Prayer, meditation, contemplative looking, walking in nature, gardening, painting, yoga, ritual, dance, lovemaking and deep listening can all function as practices of presence. Their forms differ, but each can interrupt automaticity and return attention to lived experience.

Many practices associated with spirituality may help regulate affect, attention and the body. Meditation, prayer, breathwork, art-making, ritual, nature exposure, gardening and embodied movement can help some people move away from stress, rumination and sympathetic arousal towards greater grounding, calm and emotional regulation.

These effects should not be universalised: spiritual practices do not automatically reduce stress, and some practices can be activating or destabilising. The more defensible claim is functional. Regulation can create enough psychological and physiological space for a person to think, feel, process experience and relate with greater flexibility.

Spirituality can help people place suffering, mortality, aspiration and everyday life within a larger interpretive frame. Viktor Frankl is central to the idea of meaning as an existential orientation, especially under conditions of suffering. Clifford Geertz likewise shows how religious symbolic systems make the world interpretable by locating events within broader structures of significance.

Emily Esfahani Smith's four pillars of meaning - belonging, purpose, storytelling and transcendence - map particularly well onto this framework. Belonging concerns relation; purpose directs values towards action and service; storytelling allows people to organise identity and experience; transcendence situates the self within something larger than its immediate concerns.

Connection is one of the central functions of spirituality. It describes a movement beyond exclusive self-preoccupation towards greater participation in the world around us. Spirituality may help transcend the ego-bound self not by destroying the self, but by opening it to relation.

Elizabeth Drescher's research on the spiritual lives of the religiously unaffiliated is useful because it shows how spirituality is often lived through ordinary relationships and everyday practices rather than doctrine or dramatic spiritual experience. Her memorable 'Four Fs' - Family, Friends, Fido and Food - point to the significance of care, friendship, animals, shared meals and other ordinary practices of belonging and meaning.

McGilchrist's work is also useful here because of his distinction between modes of attention. A narrow, instrumental mode attends to what can be isolated, controlled or used, while a broader mode is more receptive to context, relationship, embodiment and the living whole. Spiritual practices may encourage this broader form of attention by making us more receptive to what exists beyond our immediate concerns.

Domains of connection

Spiritual connection can be experienced across several overlapping domains: self, body, others, community, nature, cosmos and sacred or ultimate reality. These domains need not be interpreted religiously. A secular person may experience profound connection through the body, relationships, nature, community or the cosmos without giving that experience a supernatural explanation.

Integration is what turns isolated insights, practices and experiences into development. A practice can remain a habit, a belief can remain ideology, and an intense experience can remain a memory. Transformation begins when different parts of a life - attention, emotion, meaning, identity, relationship and conduct - become reorganised into a more coherent way of living.

Transformation can be gradual or precipitated by a powerful experience, but intensity is not its measure. The more useful question is whether the person becomes more integrated, truthful, discerning, relational and capable of acting in accordance with what they have come to understand.

Spirituality does not only regulate, console or connect; it can also generate. Creativity changes not only what a person believes, but what they are able to imagine. It can turn crisis into symbol, grief into image, longing into practice, intuition into form and rupture into story.

This function appears in artistic practice, play, ritual, contemplative imagination and the capacity to envision alternative ways of living. Julia Cameron, Winnicott, Dissanayake and research on art-making all illuminate different aspects of this creative movement. Art is one pathway among several, rather than the organising principle of spirituality as a whole.

A healthy spiritual system should make people more autonomous, not more dependent. Empathy does not require obedience, and discipline does not require surrendering critical thought. A spiritual seeker should remain curious, mentally alert and capable of questioning teachers, institutions, interpretations and their own assumptions.

The relocation of spiritual authority towards lived experience can be emancipatory, but subjective certainty is not infallible. Autonomy therefore has to be joined to discernment: the ability to test claims, tolerate uncertainty, recognise manipulation, preserve boundaries and revise beliefs when evidence or experience requires it. A spiritual guide should become progressively less necessary, not more indispensable.

Taken together, these functions can support a more authentic existence through greater internal alignment. Here authenticity does not mean impulsively following whatever feels true. It means an increasing correspondence between attention, affect, values, identity, judgement and action.

At its best, spirituality does not tell a person who to become. It can help them become more present to their experience, more capable of understanding it, more connected to others, more discerning about what they believe and more able to live according to what they judge to be true and valuable.