Spirituality and Getting Unstuck

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Join Roy Ellis for our next FamiliesConnect session: Getting Unstuck: How to make Friends with your Grief & Trauma on June 17, 2021 at 6pm EDT (3 pm in BC and 7:30 pm in Newfoundland!) You’ll learn practical steps to help yourself and your loved-ones take small but decisive steps out of stuckness and into a more flexible and responsive life. Registration is open to all Threads of Life family members. 

What is spirituality? For some, the word spirituality represents ideas of religion, belief and the trust in a benevolent universe. They connect the word to the world’s great faith systems which have passed down ancient programs for living with love and fearlessness.

For others, spirituality directs them toward a personal inner meaningfulness and value, a deeply felt sense that at core, human life is valuable and full of an innate goodness that can be spread person to person. These folks emphasize that kindness and compassion are inner muscles that create harmony, clarity and calm when they are flexed often and regularly.

There is another emerging group that understand spirituality as participation in the great ecological web of planetary and cosmic existence. Here, spirituality becomes the very force of life itself, in its endless connectivity and interdependence.

And yet there are still others for whom the word suggests some kind of hippy dream; spirituality is thought of as a fluffy and benign conglomeration of concepts and wishes that have no real basis in reality, and which provide nothing but a positive “boost” to the ailing soul.

However you define spirituality, there can be no denying that humans need to understand the ultimate meanings of things—because the world is full of both good and bad, joy and pain, pleasure and untold suffering. As we struggle—especially to make meaning out of the challenging and painful experiences, the losses, horrors and chance disasters—many find spirituality a helpful path to understanding how to live.

Spirituality doesn’t provide answers, it provides compass points along the journey. It may not tell us where we are going, but it does help us move along the road and remain as present and grounded as we can in the midst of this unsettling experience we call life. Spirituality also invites us deeper into the lived experience of being human and being relational creatures. Whatever spirituality means, ultimately, there is a wealth of inner resources that can be accessed by each of us if we only dare to turn and become quiet for a moment and listen for the beating heart of our essential humanity.

I hope you will join me on a brief exploration of the many ways spirituality can assist us in healing and opening and living a more peaceful life.

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Roy Ellis

Roy Ellis is a therapist, author and speaker in Nova Scotia. Roy brings 35 years of practice working with grief, trauma, sudden loss, He provides frontline support for private, government and community organizations which have experienced an unexpected death, tragedy or workplace disaster. He is a Certified Spiritual Care Practitioner (CSCP) with The Canadian Association for Spiritual Care, and received aMasters of Divinity from Queen’s University and a Masters of Education in Counselling Psychology from Acadia University. Roy has worked extensively with many organizations including Threads of Life, facilitating sessions at family forums, volunteer training, and contributing articles. Learn more at royfellis.com

Latest posts by Roy Ellis (see all)

• Getting Past the “What Ifs” after a Trauma or Death - May 1, 2024
• Spirituality and Getting Unstuck - June 3, 2021
• Men in Grief: Self-Care is for You Too! - July 16, 2020