Spirituality and spiritual fitness are terms that might lack clear definitions and sound confusing. This lack of clarity can create a barrier, preventing many from engaging with this area of health and source of strength. But cultivating spirituality and spiritual fitness can be a powerful part of your performance and wellness toolkit. It can offer unexpected benefits by helping you draw from your sources of strength and reminding you that life holds more than what’s right in front of you.
What is spirituality?
Spirituality is an intentional way of living in search of what’s meaningful. The journey looks different for each person. For some, spirituality is rooted in religious practice or communion with God or a higher power. For others, it shows up in mindfulness, time in nature, meaningful conversations, or simple daily rituals. It can live in the questions you ask, the values you live by, or the bigger picture through which you view your life. Along the way, spirituality can be felt in moments of awe, gratitude, hope, uncertainty, and mystery of what’s beyond the horizon.
The spiritual journey is often described as a search for what is sacred or holy. Think of spirituality as where and howyou search. For some, sacredness is found in reverence for and devotion to God or a higher power. For others, it’s sought through connection with people and the world around them. Spirituality can also be internal, rooted in discovering who you are, what matters most to you, the values that guide you, your sense of purpose, and how you create meaning in life.
Ultimately, spirituality offers a way to see life through a wider lens of potential and purpose. It helps you make sense of where you’ve been, who you are, and who you’re becoming. It gives context to your experiences and helps weave them into a meaningful life story.
Pillars of spirituality
If the spiritual journey is a search for the sacred, imagine spirituality as an ocean you travel by. Within this ocean there are places where different spiritual channels or streams come together and join the larger body of spirituality. Scholars from many fields have identified several areas of life where spiritual enrichment happens. Spirituality is nourished by living in harmony with yourself, others, nature, and/or something beyond the human experience, such as God. Though different cultures have different ways of conceptualizing these experiences, the following are recognized as universal pillars of spirituality:
- Inner awareness: knowledge of yourself, your virtues, values, strengths, and guiding principles. As this knowledge deepens and evolves, you seek alignment between what you believe and how you live.
- Interconnectedness: awareness that you’re an integral part of a larger whole; your existence is woven into a shared web of life with others and the world around you. You can feel this in the quality and depth of your interpersonal relationships and express it in acts of love, forgiveness, service, moral responsibility, trust, and hope for humanity.
- Transcendence: an experience of awe and wonder for something vast, sacred, or mysterious beyond the human world. For some, these come from experiencing a connection to God or a higher power. These moments often stir a sense of expanded awareness, moving you beyond the confines of your ordinary self, including your body, ego, and everyday concerns.
- Meaning: a way in which you make sense of and assign significance to your life and your experiences.
- Purpose: the clear direction that guides how your values and goals shape your daily choices. Purpose connects living with integrity to a larger, meaningful service that gives your life significance.
What is spiritual fitness?
Spiritual fitness focuses on how religion, spirituality, and/or personal values can strengthen your performance and resilience, especially during times of stress, hardship, or tragedy. Spiritual fitness is part of the Total Force Fitness framework that helps Service Members and their families apply their spirituality to optimize their performance and overall wellness. Strengthening your spiritual fitness can help you improve your relationships, ease stress, and guide decision making. Whether you consider yourself religious, spiritual, unsure, or none of these, you have guiding values. Recognizing those values is a skill, and applying them—especially when life is difficult—requires practice.
A guiding framework: Turning spirituality into spiritual fitness
Developing spiritual fitness is like learning to sail the currents of spirituality with skill and intention. You can do this through self-discovery, spiritual practices, building connection, and embracing transformation. These actions can help you grow the spiritual qualities of inner awareness, interconnectedness, transcendence, meaning, and purpose. Together, developing these components of your spiritual fitness can help you navigate life’s changing winds and unexpected storms with greater resilience.
- Self-discovery: uncovering your values, core beliefs, guiding principles and inner sources of strength. Through self-discovery, you come to recognize what matters most, how you relate to the world, and how to live true to your virtues.
- Spiritual practices: intentional actions you engage in to cultivate a deeper connection with your inner self, the world around you, God, or something sacred that exists beyond it. Examples include meditation, prayer, yoga, fasting, being in nature, and volunteering.
- Connection: a sense of closeness with others, the natural world, God, or a higher power that can be felt emotionally, mentally, or physically.
- Transformation: changes in how you think, feel, and act. Spiritual transformation can come from a sudden awakening or happen gradually, but it typically involves a change to the meaning system on which you base your self-understanding or interpret your life.
There’s no set order for building spiritual fitness. You can begin wherever it feels right and take small, meaningful steps.
Spiritual fitness in action
Consider the end of a military career as an example. This milestone can mark a personal and spiritual crossroads. The values, structure, and community of military life don’t always have clear equivalents in civilian life. When such a defining role ends, it can be difficult to find new anchors for your values and purpose, often prompting questions like, “Who am I now?” and “What’s next?” In these moments, spiritual fitness can help transitioning Service Members rediscover meaning, purpose, and possibility in the path ahead.
Spiritual practices can offer a space for stillness and reflection in the midst of change. Practices such as rituals, prayer, journaling, meditation, practicing gratitude, and nature bathing don’t need to be daily. Even brief, regular moments each week can help you feel more connected to yourself, to others, and/or to something beyond.
These practices can open the way to self-discovery, building connections, and cultivating transcendent experiences. Over time, these practices can broaden your perspective. These experiences can also be transformative, and being open to that transformation may help you find meaning in new areas of life beyond the uniform, such as being present with your family, serving your community, or simply showing up with integrity in daily life. What once felt like the mundane can become spiritual touchpoints that guide who you’re becoming.
Channeling spirituality into spiritual fitness—through self-discovery, building connection, expanding awareness, and embracing transformation—can help someone like a transitioning Service Member maintain a clear sense of identity. This foundation can make it easier to navigate life changes that might otherwise lead to a loss of direction or sense of self.
Things to keep in mind about the spiritual journey and spiritual fitness
- The spiritual journey ebbs and flows. Your spiritual journey won’t necessarily be linear or consistent, and that’s okay. Some seasons involve intentional searching or questioning, while at other times, unexpected spiritual encounters can fill you with awe or suddenly change your perspective when you least expect it.
- The spiritual journey is unique to each person. There’s no “right” way to be spiritual. What supports one person may not work for another.
- It’s never too late to build your spiritual fitness. You can start right where you are. First, take stock of your current spiritual health, then look for ways to weave practices into your routine that help you feel connected and aligned with your values. Savor meaningful moments, leverage your signature strengths to cultivate joy in your life and serve others, and invest time caring for what is most sacred to you. Finally, be open to letting the beauty around you move you beyond yourself.
- Spiritual fitness can be strengthened. Like physical fitness, spiritual fitness can weaken when it’s neglected and grow stronger with consistent practice. It can also become strained, especially during times of hardship that challenge your spirit. Challenges to your spirit can feel heavy and make it harder to move forward with a sense of clarity or direction. Yet spiritual fitness is something you can intentionally exercise and strengthen over time with spiritual readiness practices.
- Spiritual fitness can improve personal and interpersonal well-being. Strong spiritual fitness not only supports your personal growth and well-being, but it can also help you show up for others with more empathy, humility, and care. You can also cultivate collective spiritual fitness with your family, friends, teams, and spiritual communities that help you clarify your shared values, strengthen your bonds, cope with adversity together, and uplift each other in ways that meet your spiritual needs.
- Spiritual fitness won’t take away adversity, but it can help you move through (not around) it. Spiritual fitness won’t make you immune to life’s difficulties, but it can help you reframe them and face them with hope, strength, and resilience. It may be tempting to lean on spirituality to bypass difficult emotions or circumstances instead of confronting them. When that happens, remember that avoidance can limit growth and healing and even cause harm. It’s important to draw on spirituality to move you through, not around, life’s challenges. Your spirituality can connect you to the sources of strength that help you refocus on what matters most, reclaim meaning, affirm your identity and purpose, and find a way forward after hurt or hardship.
- Spiritual fitness does not replace other forms of support. Spirituality can help carry you through life’s hardest chapters, but there may be times when you need additional support from others or trained professionals. Chaplains are a free resource available to Service Members and their families and can guide you to the right resources for whatever you’re going through.
Bottom line
Spirituality is an ever-evolving process by which you live in truth with who you are, connect with the world around you and/or higher powers beyond you, transcend the limits of your ego and personal concerns, and find meaning and purpose. The spiritual journey looks different for everyone, but the benefits of building spiritual fitness are available to all. Throughout life, you can always turn to your spiritual anchors to steady your path and move forward with a clear understanding of who you are, what you're capable of, the greater whole you're part of, and where you can find hope and grow even through life’s toughest trials.
Additional resources
CHAMP SOCOM Spiritual Fitness Scale (SSFS)
