Spiritual healing techniques and spiritually based health care systems are among the most ancient healing practices. Spirit is the liveliness, richness, and beauty of one’s life. Spirituality is the drive to become everything one can be, and it is bound to intuition, creativity, and motivation.

It is the dimension that involves relationships with oneself, with others, and with a higher power. It involves finding significant meaning in the entirety of life, including illness and death.

The materialism of North American culture of the 1980s has given way to a period of reflectiveness. People are searching for a “wholeness” in their lives and a way to allow their innermost selves to grow and expand. Spiritual healing practices guide people to places within themselves they did not know existed, through techniques as ancient as prayer, contemplation, meditation, drumming, storytelling, and mythology. In consciously awakening the energies of the spirit, people are able to move toward healing places and sacred moments in their lives.

During periods of stress, illness, or crisis, people search for meaning and purpose in their pain and suffering. They ask questions like “Why am I sick?” or “Why did this bad thing happen to me?” This spiritual quest for meaning can lead to insight and healing or to fear and isolation. In the words of Buddhist philosopher Ken Wilber, A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life, is, at the same time, beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities.

For suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality, and forces us to become alive in a special sense—to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves and our world in ways we have heretofore avoided. It has been said, and truly I think, that suffering is the first grace. Spirituality is not religion. Spirituality, however, is the search for wholeness and purpose that underlies the world’s religions. Remove the dogma, the politics, and the cultural influence from any of the world’sreligions, and you find the same questions, the same seeking, and the same answers. The concept of spirituality does not undermine any religion but rather enhances all religions by illuminating their commonalities and the commonality among all people. It makes us far more similar to each other than it makes us different.

Many traditions also speak of spiritual guides. Some of us think of them as guardian angels, others as Beings of Light who guide people through near-death experiences.

Although no Western scientific evidence supports the existence of angels, one can find phenomenological evidence. Many first-person accounts of near-death occurrences involve angels and similar experiences from people of different ages, from diverse cultures, with different personal and religious beliefs.