What do you think?
Rate this book
Spiritual Connection in Daily Life: Sixteen Little Questions That Can Make a Big Difference
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 tothese 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.
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 tothese 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.
226 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
4 people are currently reading
22 people want to read
About the author
Lynn Underwood
5 books1 followerI have a passion for the arts, and enjoy drawing and painting especially, as well as literature and music. I have published widely in areas such as quality of life, cancer, stress, compassionate love, and the understanding of ordinary experiences in a multicultural context. I originally trained in medicine, hold a PhD in epidemiology, am an elected member of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine, and was awarded a Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress. I have directed foundation programs, been a college professor, and developed projects with the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 19, 2021
3 pages into this book and already calling bullshit. The author has made out that all these medical professionals use this "daily spiritual experience scale" so I tried to do some research on just how much its used by any sort of doctor. Because I've never heard of it and I've spent 27 years around some pretty brilliant doctors. Turns out google can't tell me much either, and I cannot find a single thing to support that 'tens of thousands of professionals' use this. So now I'm completely put off and don't want to waste my time on something written by someone who feels the need to gloat about how smart they are. If you were oh so spiritual I feel like you'd be a little bit modest.
May 30, 2014
Prozac or a Sixteen-Question Rx for Spiritual Health
Consider this fact: 70% of Americans are on at least one prescription drug, and more than half are on at least two prescription medications. Most common: antibiotics, antidepressants and painkillers. The need for medication isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon, but a skeptical look at this dependency – especially for antidepressants -- should be undertaken with regularity. Should some of those patients take greater responsibility for their spiritual health? There’s little opposition to the opinion that physical exercise is essential for human health. But would more exercise alone help the depressed, disillusioned, despair-filled as well as the listless, moody or uninspired?
Most will find Underwood’s Spiritual Connection in Daily Life to be a trusted guide, offering a quiet thought or a gentle hand — acknowledging the many ways this journey can be taken. Instead of the light BizSpeak style of a Steven Covey Seven Habits text or Gary Chapman’s 5 Love Languages, Underwood tackles the double challenge of writing for a general audience while offering as many evidence-based suggestions as the research will allow. Unlike many texts in this genre, Spiritual Connection offers a substantial bibliography that’s fully linked to references in the text. To the extent that these publications aren’t behind paywalls – a lamentable obstacle – readers should accept the author’s invitation to at least read the abstracts.
This book should not be read in a single sitting. To write on this topic, any writer encounters the Too Many Sweets problem. Just as with a diet of only sweet desserts, too much spiritual instruction can saturate the senses -- a small problem easily remedied by a few minutes’ exposure to one of the omnipresent US crime dramas – real life or otherwise.
Return from a journey back to that grim storytelling genre. Read one of the many passages on attention in Spiritual Connection. Do it, for instance, by responding to what Underwood calls the “tradition of apophatic theology that urges that it is in knowing what God is not that we can best come close to God or in union with the divine.” Embrace secular instincts as clues of the transcendent life strewn about in the landscape. Consider them through the lens of sixteen questions.
“Return to the freshness of your experience,” she writes. Discover “generativity” in “the little bursts of brilliance in daily life.” This book holds many such little bursts.
Read my full review at InsideTheOrdinary. Lynn Underwood is my cousin.
Consider this fact: 70% of Americans are on at least one prescription drug, and more than half are on at least two prescription medications. Most common: antibiotics, antidepressants and painkillers. The need for medication isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon, but a skeptical look at this dependency – especially for antidepressants -- should be undertaken with regularity. Should some of those patients take greater responsibility for their spiritual health? There’s little opposition to the opinion that physical exercise is essential for human health. But would more exercise alone help the depressed, disillusioned, despair-filled as well as the listless, moody or uninspired?
Most will find Underwood’s Spiritual Connection in Daily Life to be a trusted guide, offering a quiet thought or a gentle hand — acknowledging the many ways this journey can be taken. Instead of the light BizSpeak style of a Steven Covey Seven Habits text or Gary Chapman’s 5 Love Languages, Underwood tackles the double challenge of writing for a general audience while offering as many evidence-based suggestions as the research will allow. Unlike many texts in this genre, Spiritual Connection offers a substantial bibliography that’s fully linked to references in the text. To the extent that these publications aren’t behind paywalls – a lamentable obstacle – readers should accept the author’s invitation to at least read the abstracts.
This book should not be read in a single sitting. To write on this topic, any writer encounters the Too Many Sweets problem. Just as with a diet of only sweet desserts, too much spiritual instruction can saturate the senses -- a small problem easily remedied by a few minutes’ exposure to one of the omnipresent US crime dramas – real life or otherwise.
Return from a journey back to that grim storytelling genre. Read one of the many passages on attention in Spiritual Connection. Do it, for instance, by responding to what Underwood calls the “tradition of apophatic theology that urges that it is in knowing what God is not that we can best come close to God or in union with the divine.” Embrace secular instincts as clues of the transcendent life strewn about in the landscape. Consider them through the lens of sixteen questions.
“Return to the freshness of your experience,” she writes. Discover “generativity” in “the little bursts of brilliance in daily life.” This book holds many such little bursts.
Read my full review at InsideTheOrdinary. Lynn Underwood is my cousin.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews