How often do you find moments of deep peace and satisfaction in your day-to-day life? How often does connection with other people, the divine, or nature make you feel more alive? How often are you touched by a sense of awe-inspiring beauty, compassionate love, or pure joy? For many of us, these kinds of experiences tend to be fleeting and all too rare. Fortunately, new research is suggesting that a regular practice of paying attention to experiences like these can help any of us find them more often and cultivate richer, deeper, and more satisfying lives.
In Spiritual Connection in Daily Life, Lynn Underwood introduces her Daily Spiritual Experience Scale (DSES), which is comprised of sixteen simple, multiple-choice questions that invite us to become more attuned to these extraordinary experiences in ordinary life. The DSES is the definitive set of questions for measuring the experience of spiritual connection and has been used in hundreds of studies, translated into over twenty languages, and used around the world by counselors, therapists, nurses, social workers, clergy from multiple faiths, and business leaders.
Spiritual Connection in Daily Life offers a step-by-step guide to using the DSES to improve our abilities to sense the “more than” in the midst of our days. Embraced by people from many different cultures, religious traditions, and professional backgrounds, the DSES doesn’t require any extraordinary experience like hearing divine voices or embarking upon a dramatic religious conversion. Nor does it belabor the exact definition of “spirituality.” Rather, it simply invites us to focus on aspects of our daily lives such as deep peace, sense of inner strength, longing, and compassionate love. The sixteen questions also provide a common, nonpolarizing language for communicating with others about the role of the “more than” in our lives.
Adherents of all faith traditions, as well as people with no religious leanings whatsoever, have experienced profound and lasting benefits from having these experiences, including improved health behaviors, better relationships, decreased stress and burnout, and improvements in daily mood. Now all of us can reap these same long-term benefits with just a little bit of self-reflection and Dr. Underwood’s expert guidance.
Fore more information, please visit http://www.spiritualconnectionindailylife.com/.
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Back to TabsPart One: Why Read This Book?
Introduction and Invitation / 3
Part Two: Exploring Your Experiences
2: Instructions for Answering the Sixteen Questions / 21
3: The Daily Spiritual Experience Questions / 33
Part Three: Why Numbers?
4: Using the Number Scores / 91
5: “Studies Have Shown”: Results from Research Using the DSES / 97
Part Four: Themes
6: The Flow of Love / 115
7: Connection versus Alienation / 129
8: Yes! / 143
9: Translating “God” / 157
Part Five: Springboard for Communication
10: Why and How to Communicate Using Daily Spiritual Experiences / 169
11: Organizational, Professional, and Personal Uses / 181
Part Six: Awake and Alive
12: What Now? What Next? / 199
Acknowledgments / 215
Appendix / 217
Notes / 221
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