Thinking with Your Soul: Spiritual Intelligence and Why It Matters

Thinking with Your Soul: Spiritual Intelligence and Why It Matters

"Spiritual intelligence is the human capacity to ask ultimate questions about the meaning of life and to experience simultaneously the seamless connection between each of us and the world in which we live." — Dr. Richard Wolman The quest for more meaning in everyday life arises in all of us at one time or another. In fact, spirituality can be the touchstone of our lives — a single reliable constant that sustains us through life's most trying moments. Using the current theories of multiple intelligences as his springboard, Dr. Richard Wolman began his research into the nature of spirituality with the belief that each of us has a distinctive "spiritual intelligence." Thinking with Your Soul offers crucial insights into this most important of intelligences and how we can make it work for us. Dr. Wolman presents the PsychoMatrix Spirituality Inventory (PSI), his groundbreaking system for evaluating the levels and areas of spirituality in people's lives without reference to a specific religious ideology. More than six thousand men and women have taken the PSI. After carefully studying their responses, Wolman identified seven factors that make up human spiritual experience and behavior. They are: Divinity, Mindfulness, Intellectuality, Community, Extrasensory Perception, Childhood Spirituality, and Trauma. Thinking with Your Soul gives you the chance to take the PSI and examine the resulting profile of your spiritual energy and awareness. For instance, the PSI results may show a strong sense of a higher power but little sense of community. By analyzing the results of our personal PSIs, we can begin to see patterns in our spirituality and to change them if we choose. Understanding our spiritual makeup, strengths, and limitations is crucial to being able to see and improve our personal relationships and our relationship to the world. This insight into our behavior, internal experience, and empathy for the experiences of others gives us a conscious context for our actions and choices. In addition to catalyzing self-reflection and spiritual awareness, Thinking with Your Soul is a thoughtful inquiry into the spiritual dimension of life, its past treatment by the scientific and psychological communities, and its place in the twenty-first century. Though traditional or conventional psychologyDhumanistic or transpersonal psychology exceptedDtends to ignore the spiritual, this aspect of life is significant to most people. Wolman, a psychologist, psychotherapist, and faculty member at Harvard Medical School, bases this book on a firm belief that everyone has spiritual intelligence and that recognizing and working with it is important for a person's total well-being. He has devised and offers here his PsychoMatrix Spirituality Inventory (PSI), which establishes a person's spirituality profile by measuring seven spiritual factors: divinity, mindfulness, intellectuality, community, extrasensory perception, childhood spirituality, and trauma. To take the PSI, one can connect to the web site or use the form in the book (which may cause problems for circulating collections). While research is ongoing, as Wolman indicates, the PSI provides a language for the current, growing dialog about the spiritual. For a related work, see Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall's SQ: Connecting with Our Spiritual Intelligence (LJ 1/00). Highly recommended.DJohn Moryl, Yeshiva Univ. Lib., New York Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. ual intelligence is the human capacity to ask ultimate questions about the meaning of life and to experience simultaneously the seamless connection between each of us and the world in which we live." — Dr. Richard Wolman The quest for more meaning in everyday life arises in all of us at one time or another. In fact, spirituality can be the touchstone of our lives — a single reliable constant that sustains us through life's most trying moments. Using the current theories of multiple intelligences as his springboard, Dr. Richard Wolman began his research into the nature of spirituality with the belief that each of us has a distinctive "spiritual intelligence." Thinking with Your Soul offers crucial insights into this most important of intelligences and how we can make it work for us. Dr. Wolman presents the PsychoMatrix Spirituality Inventory (PSI), his groundbreaking system for evaluating the levels and areas of spirituality in pe "Professor Wolman's research, and his resultant sincere act of sharing through his book, gives concrete testimony to support the notion that a science of spiritualtiy can be a spiritually inspired science. Such a venture helps us discover for ourselves the reality of a truth that not only sustains life but makes it worth living." --Henry Reed, Venture Inward , October 2001   "An effective tool for group study and dialogue as well as for individual self-discovery and exploration. A new enlightening methodology." -- New Age Retailer September 2001   RICHARD N. WOLMAN, P