Touching grass or knowing God: What can psychology tell us about connecting with something greater? – abc.net.au

Leisa Aitken
My earliest experience of the need to connect with something greater was, unexpectedly, at my Year 10 school camp. It was the first time I’d been camping in the Australian bush and there we were, nestled in a valley on a grassy campground. An icy river rushed noisily below and ancient eucalypts towered behind. It was one of the first times I had been out of a city — my family were definitely not campers. Cradled in the vastness, it was my turn to enter into that human experience of sheer wonder and humble participation in nature’s beauty and immensity.
Sadly, one of the consequences of my family not being campers was that the thin sleeping bag we borrowed meant I awoke at midnight shivering. I crawled from my tent to move and warm my limbs. The moon hung full, the stars spilled across the sky, lighting the river and treetops. I expected awe — but instead, I felt alone. A cold, cosmic indifference.
Did any of this — these stars, these trees, anything beyond me — see me? Know me? Earlier, nature had stirred a sense of connection with something greater. Now, I felt adrift. It was the night my own “spiritual” search quietly began.
The word “spiritual” is a difficult one — it is fuzzy. We have been living in a time when meaning has become self-made and it feels disrespectful to question anyone’s definition of spirituality. But this risks making the word so vague as to be almost meaningless, as well as elusive to psychological research.
Some might argue that empirical psychology is simply the wrong framework to answer questions of spirituality. It is true that spiritual experiences may whisper to us in ways that are hard to articulate, so can easily slip through the nets of scientific enquiry. Notwithstanding, I believe that psychology has a place as one lens among many through which to assess the ancient and ongoing human longing to connect with something greater.
In psychology, there are multiple definitions for spirituality, but we have mostly settled on one. Spirituality is “the search for the sacred — elements of life that are seen as manifestations of the divine, transcendent or ultimate, either inside or outside of a specific religious context”. Ken Pargament, a leading voice in the psychological research of spirituality, has a helpful way to think about this. He speaks of a sacred core, “ideas of God, higher powers, divinity, and transcendent reality”, surrounded by a sacred ring of other aspects of life that become sacred through their association with the core. These could be relationships, places or moments that have a resonance with something “beyond”.
This resonance may be hard to name. As philosopher of science Michael Polanyi once said about all human knowledge, “we know more than we can tell”. However, even if description fails, these sacred experiences have tangible ripple effects in our lives. This is where psychology can assess some of their effects. The ubiquitous measurement outcome of “well-being” doesn’t arbitrate whether a spiritual framework is true or not, but in a world of competing spiritualities it does provide one perspective.
In my clinical psychology practice, I am finding an increasing number of people describing themselves as spiritual. A decade ago, many wore their disavowal of the transcendent as a mark of their intellectual sophistication. But something has shifted.
This seems to be confirmed by the rumblings among philosophers that we need a new name for this emerging era. The era of modernity was characterised by an optimistic, shared narrative of human progress. This could not be sustained in the turmoil of the first half of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust and Hiroshima.
From the 1960s, postmodernity saw a deep scepticism towards all large narratives, including (perhaps especially) religion. It eventually was captured in the sentiment “You do you”. But this emotionally reactive cynicism towards all shared meaning was too extensive, and I believe we are now seeing the reverberations in our crises of meaning and mental health struggles.
The pendulum now seems to be swinging back. Some philosophers say we are in the dawn of a new era of metamodernity: an emergent age that is trying to balance, on the one hand, rediscovering the sincerity of modern deep longings for hope, with, on the other hand, the realism of a more nuanced version of postmodern suspicion. Thus a desire for grounded, realistic sacred narratives, for wonder and enchantment, is slowly re-awakening.
I use the word “re-awakening” deliberately. In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor proposed that prior to the Enlightenment there was little division between a sense of self, the rhythms of life and the spiritual connection to something greater. Spirituality was in sacred groves of trees, in holy days and communal religious attendance and prayer. He describes the development of the “buffered self” in modernity — we came to see ourselves as increasingly without a need for connection with the spiritual. “Looking inward” for meaning-making became the air we breathed. However, early signs are that metamodernity and the quest for re-enchanting may constitute a next chapter.
In fact, there is abundant evidence that spiritual health has become a core dimension of contemporary understandings of health. McKinsey Health Institute’s recent global survey of 41,000 people across generational cohorts reported that the vast majority of respondents affirmed that spiritual health was important to them. This was defined as “having meaning and purpose in one’s life and a sense of connection to something larger than oneself”.
In addition, those who felt they had such spiritual meaning and connection were far more likely to have better mental, physical and social health. This coalesces with a large amount of psychological research which finds that generally those for whom spirituality/religion is important have, overall, more well-being in life than those who don’t. It seems that humans do better when we have connection beyond the self.
These are intriguing “headline” results, but I was particularly interested in whether some forms of spiritual connection promote more well-being than others. I soon discovered that engaging with the psychological research in this field is not for the faint-hearted. It is easy to get lost in the enormous, intricately entangled web of articles.
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The research covers many aspects of spirituality: beliefs, personal adherence, community participation, plus different facets of well-being (mental health, physical health, subjective well-being). Yet almost none include the type of direct comparisons that would easily answer my question. The best we have are meta-analyses, which thematically summarise results of multiple studies. While helpful in building a larger sample, they flatten out the peaks and troughs of individual variations and specific contexts. They can be a blunt instrument, but they give us a sense of the broad shape of the landscape.
My insights are also shaped by thirty years of clinical observation, drawn from therapeutic work with individuals from diverse spiritual frameworks and from none. I have always asked people about their spiritual beliefs and the effect they have had on their lives. Based on conversations about spirituality with thousands of patients, I have one main reflection, which meta-analyses largely affirm: There is a difference between connecting with something greater by means of sacred experiences alone, and when those experiences are within a sacred narrative — which is to say, a religion.
There are perhaps three primary and eclectic types of “spiritual but not religious” experiences that flow through the spiritual landscape of the West. They are responses to a beckoning that there is “something more”, and provide opportunities for engagements with “something greater”. These engagements may last for moments, or linger for days.
First, there is the massively growing interest in a variety of New Age spiritual practises: tarot, divination, crystal healing, Wicca and pagan religions, all which have large online communities on platforms like TikTok (WitchTok) and Etsy. Adherents often report a sense of empowerment and community. There is only a smattering of psychological research on these — insufficient to conclude if there are benefits or harms. However, there is abundant research on astrology, which is the most prevalent New Age belief, with two in five Australians being believers.
The largest psychological study on astrological star signs by MIT (a massive 173,000 people) found zero correspondence between star signs and personality traits. Another large study of 30,000 Americans found that happiness levels and divorce rates predicted by astrologers were also unrelated to actual lived experience. Overall, psychological research finds no correlation between belief in astrology and well-being. It may provide a framework of order in a chaotic world, but these results suggest that its capacity to connect to something greater is doubtful.
Second, mindfulness meditation — which can range from secular to Buddhist in its practice — is incredibly popular, with around one in six Australians meditating regularly. This has a vast evidence base for its stress-reducing benefits as well as some evidence that it increases daily spiritual experiences. It is very difficult to differentiate which benefits are from the physiological calm of breath work or the mental peace of cognitive defusion (letting go of unhelpful thoughts) compared to a connection with the transcendent. I encourage my patients to do mindfulness for the calm it creates — and they do sometimes report a sense of “oneness with the universe” while meditating and for a short period afterwards.
Third, connecting with nature also has an established evidence base for its association with well-being. For example, a national Australian study found that those with the highest levels of nature connectedness had greater life satisfaction relative to their health-related quality-of-life. The common exhortation to “touch grass” — to remove oneself from immersion in the online world and get into nature — speaks to a commonsense understanding of its benefits.
Connecting with nature can stir a sense of the sacred in many ways. For some, especially within Christian traditions, nature reveals the beauty and generosity of its Creator, so finds its spiritual home as an important sacred ring but not the core. For others, nature itself is the sacred core to relate to, with the divine immanent within trees, rivers and rocks, as seen in “Green” religions or First Nations spiritual beliefs.
Psychological researchers exploring spiritual connection with nature most often link its benefits to its evocation of awe. Awe is defined as a response to perceived vastness that stretches experience “beyond” one’s current frame of reference. It evokes self-transcendence — the humbling experience of being a small self in relation to the universe. This may help explain its mental health benefits: depression and anxiety often involve a distressing inward spiral of self-focus. Awe is typically an “episodic” connection to something greater: the well-being benefits last from a few hours (as my own adolescent experience attests) to a few days. If significant enough to re-think one’s place on the universe, it can also lead to a deeper search for meaning.
In my clinical experience, this deeper quest for meaning tends to be found in the sacred narratives of religions rather than intermittent spiritual experiences, positive though they may be. As psychologist Dan McAdam has demonstrated, we all live by a story: a consciously or unconsciously adopted narrative that shapes our values, worth, purpose and direction. Religions differ from episodic spiritual experiences in that they situate this personal story within a grander narrative arc — a story that stretches beyond the self, and that speaks to deep existential questions: Why am I here? How do I live? Where will I go after death? They also offer the potential safety of ancient practices to connect with the transcendent by means of time-tested spiritual experiences and a sense of shared ultimate destiny.
The research indicates that, overall, religious belief correlates positively with well-being, and data is easily found that this holds for Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Such generalisations must be made with care — after all, religions can certainly cause harm, especially for those in a minority religion or who have suffered religious trauma from abusive or controlling religious groups. Still, most meta-analyses affirm a distinctive power in religious narratives: their capacity to provide meaning and a sense of coherence, especially in times of suffering.
In both large-scale psychological research and my own observations of my patients, this is most evident when life fractures and assumptions are shattered. Sometimes, participating in a benevolent sacred story can become the place where meaning and hope are pieced back together. One meta-analysis of the psychological research on religion and well-being concluded:
The findings of the studies in this research might be understood to be gesturing towards the conclusion that the more that someone believes in and inhabits an overarching narrative of love and generosity, which they believe is ontological (i.e. written into the very fabric of the universe) rather than contingent (i.e. simply an admirable but essentially arbitrary personal choice with no resonance beyond the individual), the more likely they are to enjoy better well-being.
Many religious narratives include a personal God and the research reflects that one’s perception of God determines if this belief is beneficial or not. When people feel a “secure attachment” to God — a close personal relationship with God whom they feel is listening, guiding and protecting — they have higher life satisfaction, more sense of purpose and even less loneliness. Such a feeling can have specific outworkings: for example, those who believe in a benevolent God are themselves more benevolent compared with those who believe in an authoritarian God.
However, mere belief in God does not necessarily bring a sense of well-being. Insecure attachment, and a perception of God as punitive, authoritarian, distant or angry, is associated with poorer psychological outcomes.
What do we mean by “God”? Psychology can inform us of the effect of our human response to God, but it is not the appropriate discipline to provide us with a definition of the divine. For that we need the language of theology. As theologian David Bentley Hart writes in his book The Experience of God:
God … is not something posed over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. … Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian scriptures) all things live and move and have their being. In one sense he is “beyond being” … In another sense he is “being itself,” in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity and simplicity that underlies and sustains the diversity of finite and composite things … All the great theistic traditions agree that God, understood in this proper sense, is essentially beyond finite comprehension … All agree as well, however, that he can genuinely be known: that is, reasoned toward, intimately encountered, directly experienced with a fullness surpassing mere conceptual comprehension.
To sum up: in the search for connection with something greater that characterises metamodernity, sacred experiences such as mindfulness meditation or nature immersion often do bring well-being. However, it is the enduring architecture of sacred narratives that best anchor meaning, especially when life is difficult. If belief in a personal God is involved, well-being is shaped not just by faith, but by the felt quality of the relationship.
The psychological research on well-being and spiritual connection coincides with my own story. A few months after my Year 10 campground experience my father died, prompting a more urgent and serious spiritual search. After all, I too would one day die. I needed a framework that didn’t just give me an experience, but an answer for the purpose of my very existence. I decided to explore all the major religions — Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism, and the Hari Krishna commune that existed (quite literally) next door to my house in Sydney suburbia.
Only after two years of intense exploration did I give Christianity its turn. I hadn’t wanted to simply “inherit” the default religion of my culture. However, as I started reading the Bible, I became convinced that, out of all the religions, the story of Jesus was the most coherent and compelling response to the human dilemma of death. At its core was an extraordinary event that parted the veil between the material and the spiritual — a resurrection from the dead.
Eventually, one evening I decided to pray to see if Jesus would answer. I was, ironically, camping again, in my own warm and well-worn sleeping bag now. This time, with friends from university. I awoke the next morning and turned to look at the glass-blue lake and grassy hills beyond. Every colour was saturated and intense. The whole world was lit from within by a welcoming light. It was as if a filter that had long dimmed my vision was removed. More than awe at nature. More than assuming a benevolent rather than indifferent universe. It was a spiritual experience, a sudden, expansive knowing of being loved by the one who made this world. I began to talk with Jesus and walk with him, inhabiting an ancient sacred narrative that convinces me that death is not the end. It’s still the path I tread.
It is impossible to say whether I would have greater or lesser “well-being” had I followed some other path — such are the limits of psychology. And psychological research is not the place to search out the truth or otherwise of my sacred experiences or narrative. Yet I take quiet comfort in the evidence from my discipline that those who find a connection to something — or someone — greater, often navigate the hills and valleys of life with a deeper sense of peace and a surer purpose to carry them.
Leisa Aitken is a clinical psychologist who works on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. She is a Fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity. An earlier version of this article appeared at CASE.
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