An Integral Approach to Spiritual Wellness in School Counseling Settings

Spirituality is a dimension of humanness and spiritual wellness is a construct that reflects spiritual health. This article describes how Wilber's (1995) Integral Model can be used to integrate spiritual wellness into school counseling settings. This includes behavioral, psychological, cultural, and social dimensions across lines and levels of development. ********** The issue of spirituality in education has received increased attention in the past decade particularly as spirituality has become recognized as a construct distinct from religiosity. Working openly with spirituality in education has been written about generally (Best, 1996; Cummins, 2002; Dennis & Dennis. 2002: Levine, 2002; McMurtry, 1998; Suhor, 1999) as well as in specific educational specializations like gifted education (Chauvin, 2000; Lovecky, 1998; Morelock, 1995; Piechowski, 2000), library-media science (Barron, 2002), vocational education (Lakes, 2000), and educational administration (Bhindi & Duignan, 1997; Hoyle, 2002; Sokolow, 2002; Wheatley, 2002). While some works devoted to spirituality could be integrated into school counseling work with students (Benson, 1997; Dowd, 1997; Koepfer, 2000; Love, 2001), it is time to specifically address spirituality in school counseling. Although integrating religion and public schools is fraught with political problems (Mawdsley, 1998a, 1998b, 2001), spirituality in public schools is less controversial when spirituality is understood as a developmental line innate to human beings. There is ample support for understanding spirituality as a normal human line of development like cognition, emotion, or sexual identity (Ingersoll, 1994; Sisk, 2002; Vaughan, 1995, 2002; Wilber, Engler, & Brown, 1986; Wilber, 2003). While there has been some resistance to this idea (Blake, 1996), spirituality conceptualized as a universal human construct is important to education and school counseling (Halford, 1999). In this article we discuss integrating spirituality into school counseling using the spiritual wellness construct and the integral model developed by philosopher Ken Wilber (1995). We begin by operationalizing spiritual wellness and summarizing the integral model. Next we discuss the importance of understanding spirituality as both a line and level of development as well as the role of non-ordinary states of consciousness in spiritual wellness and development. Finally we illustrate integrating various dimensions of spiritual wellness into school counseling using the four perspectives from the integral model (behavioral, intrapsychic, cultural, and social). SPIRITUAL WELLNESS In summarizing the literature on spirituality or spiritual development, the biggest problem is how to operationalize these words (Wiggins-Frame, 2003). Since spirituality is a broad concept that ultimately transcends concepts in general, there are two traps commonly encountered in operationalizing it. The first trap is when groups with vested interests lobby for one particular definition to be used exclusively. The second trap is to make the construct so broad that it is meaningless. To preclude these traps we must rely on research-based constructs that point toward spiritual health while admitting we do not know the full extent of what spirituality is. Spiritual wellness and spiritual well-being are examples of such constructs that have been pioneered by researchers in sociology and psychology over the past 30 years (e. g., Ellison, 1983; Ingersoll, 1998; Moberg & Brusek, 1978). These constructs provide a vocabulary to work with spiritual issues in secular settings like public schools. Man), such constructs have been proposed and supported with research that we draw on in this article. We use the general construct "spiritual wellness" in this article since it is the one most commonly used to describe spiritual health. According to Westgate (1996), spiritual wellness has its origins in the medical wellness movement where wellness is seen as the optimum integration of various dimensions of human functioning including spirituality (Bensley, 1991). …