Episode 194: (Transcript) Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion, Oh My!

Episode Transcript

Many thanks to listener, Mackenzie Boring, for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app, or can be listened to here on Substack.

---

CW: Hello, I'm Cynthia Winward. And I'm Susan Hinckley. And this is At Last She Said it. We are women of faith discussing complicated things and the title of this week's episode is Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion, Oh, My! If you've seen the Wizard of Oz, like most people have, then you know it's our version of “lions, tigers, and bears, oh my!” because I feel like we're hitting all these big topics right off the bat here, right in our title. So, Susan, if we are going to talk about mental health, then we're going to have our favorite therapist on, C.A. Larson, welcome. 

CA: Thank you.

SH: Welcome, C. A. I have been waiting for this conversation this whole season. As soon as we decided we were going to talk about women's spirituality, I knew that I wanted to have a conversation with you. So we've saved the best for getting toward the end of our season and so excited. 

CA: Thank you. I appreciate that. 

CW: Do you want to say anything, C. A.? We probably have most of our listeners, longtime listeners now who know who you are, but feel free to just toss out some info about yourself and then we can jump in. 

CA: Yeah, no, I think probably most people know me and know that I am speaking out of Arizona and I am a therapist here and I work with a lot of LDS population and so that shows up in my conversations with both of you. And I just am always happy to have this opportunity.

CW: Wonderful. Well, how about we jump right in? Let's just go straight to some definitions first, 

C.A. Can you just kind of go through what is religion, spirituality? How are they different? Where do they overlap? Let's just start right there. 

CA: Okay, that sounds good. So this is a little academic, but I think it's helpful.

For thousands of years, humanity has pursued truth with a capital T. The ultimate answers to life and the universe. Humans have been asking the questions of who am I? What is my purpose? Where did I come from and where am I going? What is my value? Religions came into existence to answer these questions.

They unite a group of people under the same values and principles and help to facilitate their collective and individual communication with a higher power and/or philosophy. A form of religion is often an objective experience. There is usually a greater focus on the externals. It's often directed to an external practice, object, or figurehead.

---

---

Religion is structured frequently, a rule-based construct, that to some degree governs the behavior of its members. Moral rules, laws, and doctrines, as well as specific codes and criteria, create the organized structure that contains the religion's specific belief system. It has helped give society a sense of certainty and helped guide and comfort those whose faith was lacking.

Adam Brady described it as religion being about faith. He describes it as believing in something based upon unconditional acceptance of the religion's teachings. Unlike the scientific worldview, religions don't require evidence to validate their claims. Through religion, you are taught to have faith in God or scriptures as being infallible and ultimate truth of reality. Acceptance and surrender to the divine are taught as the path that leads to ultimate salvation. 

Okay, so those are some things about religion. Spirituality, on the other hand, leans more towards self-referral or the internalization of your awareness of your soul. Spirituality is an inward journey that involves a shift in awareness rather than some form of external activity.

Spirituality is more about inner understanding than outer worship. It is focused on your soul, higher self, or the divinity within. Spirituality doesn't diminish faith, however. It often leans more heavily on direct experience of the soul or divinity. Spiritual practices help you to know something because you have tasted the experience yourself and you have allowed it to resonate, as opposed to taking the word of another.

So, there's so many definitions out there of both religion and spirituality. So, I just, I picked some that probably were meaningful to me and hopefully will be to you and the listeners. 

 [00:05:00]

SH: Well, it feels to me like, I mean, to super simplify it, religion is something that seeks to explain God and spirituality is more something that–where we feel connected to God, the inner experience of God. So it's explaining versus experiencing. 

CA: Yes, I like that. And I think over and over again, our talking today will be about that internal versus the external. 

CW: That's what I got in your definition, C.A., is one sounded more external than the other. The other one, obviously, spirituality, sounded much more internal.

SH: Okay. But this is where the rubber hits the road for our listeners because, the whole reason we wanted to have this season talking about women's spirituality is that it seems like a lot of women, and I know that this is not unique to our church, have a really hard time separating–those two things.

CA: Yes. And I hope by the time we finish the conversation today, maybe that will be a little bit easier. That, that definitely is the hope. I–it was interesting. We talked about the overlap a little bit, and I thought that was interesting because this was a little bit helpful to me. And I read something that said, “If you're interested in geometry, you can say that spirituality is a rectangle while religion is a square.” This is because spirituality exists in religion, but religious beliefs may not exist inside the boundaries of spirituality. 

And, I've also seen a diagram of this where it's a circle within a circle. So the outer–the bigger circle being spirituality and the smaller circle being religion. So one, it can be circumscribed in the other. So, religion's meant to enhance spirituality, it doesn't always work that way, but I do believe that is the intent. 

SH: Right. Right, but I think sometimes that circle gets flipped, and people think that spirituality is like a dimension of religion, but religion is meant to be the big circle. 

CA: Yes. 

SH:That gets emphasized.