Spiritual Growth

James and the psychology of religious experience

William James delivered The Varieties of Religious Experience as the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, and it was published in 1902 by Longmans, Green. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he examined religious experience through its effects, treating it as useful while holding that usefulness does not establish truth. The entry describes his contrast between healthy-minded religion and the sick soul, and his account of conversion as a way a divided self reaches unity.

Underhill's mystic way

Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism, first published in 1911, is a study of the nature and development of spiritual consciousness within a largely Christian mystical tradition. Its second part, titled The Mystic Way, has chapters on the awakening, purification and illumination of the self, on voices and visions, on recollection, contemplation and ecstasy, on the dark night of the soul, and on the unitive life. The chapter order presents development as a path with named phases, which later writers often summarize as stages.

Maslow, transpersonal psychology and Wilber

A 2015 article in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology describes how Abraham Maslow, in the nineteen months between a near-fatal heart attack and his death on June 8, 1970, revised his earlier thinking on self-actualization and self-transcendence. During that period he described a plateau experience, a steadier state of transcendent awareness that he distinguished from the briefer peak experiences for which he was known. The article credits him with helping to start both humanistic and transpersonal psychology.

The same article reports that Ken Wilber, in a 1998 reader, listed a series of phases through which people adapt to higher levels of spiritual nature: belief, faith, peak experience, plateau experience and permanent adaptation. It describes Wilber as one of the most prolific and controversial contributors to transpersonal thought, and notes criticism of his synthesis, addressed in the Criticism and Limitations section below.

Fowler's stages of faith

A 2022 article in Frontiers in Psychology states that James Fowler's 1981 book Stages of Faith defined faith as the quest for and maintenance of meaning oriented around centers of value, which may or may not be religious. The model has seven stages numbered 0 to 6, with stages 3 to 5 most relevant to adults and stage 6 a rare endpoint. Heinz Streib later reformulated the stages as religious styles, a change the article describes as allowing several styles to be apparent in one person.

Spirituality and religion

Harold Koenig's 2012 review defines religion as organized systems of belief, practice and ritual connected to transcendent ideas within a community, and spirituality as a personal connection to the sacred or transcendent, with considerable overlap between the two. For his review he treated them together because of measurement difficulties. A 2002 paper on the Daily Spiritual Experience Scale notes that health studies vary in what they examine, from church attendance to religious coping to meaning in life, which makes it unclear what is being measured.

A Royal College of Psychiatrists special interest group paper describes spirituality as including a personal sense of ultimate purpose, meaning and values, a sense of the holy or sacred, and a sense of connectedness, not necessarily tied to religious institutions.

Growth, development, awakening and emergence

Different sources use different words for change. Underhill uses awakening for the first phase of the mystic way, not for the whole process. Tedeschi and Calhoun list spiritual development as one domain of posttraumatic growth and describe growth in spiritual and existential matters, including among people who are not religious. The Grofs, as summarized in the Royal College paper, use spiritual emergence for a movement toward a more expanded way of being, and spiritual emergency when that process becomes a crisis. The sources reviewed do not establish these terms as synonyms.

Personal Growth has no separate page on this site. The sources reviewed do not define it, so this page draws no boundary beyond noting that the literature here concerns sacred, transcendent or existential meaning, not self-improvement in general.

Constructs used in measurement

Researchers have given narrower names to parts of spiritual life. Ralph Piedmont proposed spiritual transcendence as a personality construct in 1999, independent of the five-factor model, and by 2017 refined it into the numinous, defined through motivations about whether death is final, whether life has purpose and whether one has personal worth. The Daily Spiritual Experience Scale targets ordinary experiences such as awe, joy that lifts a person out of the mundane, and deep inner peace.

Stage models as maps

Adherents and scholars describe stage models such as Underhill's mystic way, Fowler's stages and Wilber's phases as maps of how spiritual life may change over years. They are descriptive frameworks, not procedures. Fowler's model is studied through the Faith Development Interview, which the 2022 article says takes 12 to 15 hours to administer and score, while short questionnaires have been criticized for a Christian bias and a narrow religious focus.

Practices that people associate with spiritual development, such as meditation and yoga, appear in the research literature mainly as interventions tested in trials or surveyed for adverse events. The sources reviewed do not describe a standard program called spiritual growth, and they give no instructions.

Use in transpersonal and clinical settings

The Royal College paper describes how transpersonal clinicians proposed the idea of spiritual emergency, and says its supporters describe care as supportive, calm and grounding, often by people with a transpersonal understanding. It treats this as an explanatory model with possible clinical utility, not an established diagnosis, and says more research is needed on prevalence, presentation and outcome.

Meaning, connection and wellbeing

The authors of the Daily Spiritual Experience Scale propose pathways by which spiritual experience might influence emotion, cognition, behavior and health, or be treated as an outcome in itself and a component of wellbeing. Koenig's review reports associations between religious and spiritual involvement and measures of meaning and purpose, hope and optimism, discussed under Research and Evidence.

Maslow, as cited in the 2015 article, held that people with access to transcendent states pay more attention to the world and make efforts to improve it. This is his claim and the article presents it as a pragmatic ideal, not a tested finding.

Growth after adversity

Tedeschi and Calhoun describe a richer existential and spiritual life as one way people report positive change after struggling with highly challenging circumstances. Their examples include a deeper faith emerging from earlier doubt and greater engagement with existential questions, which they say can be experienced as growth by people who are not religious or who are atheist.

Normalizing unusual experiences

The Royal College paper suggests that spiritual emergency may be a useful explanatory model because it is normalizing and not stigmatizing for people who frame distressing spiritual experiences this way. The authors state that it remains unclear how large the group of patients is for whom this framing would help.

Spirituality and wellbeing studies

Koenig's 2012 review identified more than 3,300 quantitative studies of religion and spirituality and health published between 1872 and 2010. Of 326 studies on wellbeing, 256 found only positive associations, and 82 percent of the highest-quality studies reported positive relationships. Most research was cross-sectional, so causation cannot be established. For depression, 6 percent of rigorous studies found greater depression among the more religious, and 11 percent of studies reported greater anxiety.

These findings concern religious and spiritual involvement in general. They are not trials of any program that aims to promote spiritual growth, and they do not show that pursuing spiritual growth leads to wellbeing.

Measures of spiritual experience and transcendence

The 16-item Daily Spiritual Experience Scale reported internal consistency estimates in the .90s across studies, with preliminary evidence that more daily spiritual experience related to lower alcohol intake, better quality of life and better psychosocial status. Piedmont's Spiritual Transcendence Scale, in a 2004 study of 73 outpatient substance-abuse admissions and the 56 who completed treatment, predicted self-rated outcomes beyond personality. A 2026 study of a 22-item numinous inventory replicated its three-factor structure in samples from Poland (328 participants) and Vietnam (307).

These scales capture reported experiences or dispositions, not transformation over time, and the sources reviewed describe no validated instrument for judging that a person has grown spiritually.

Posttraumatic growth

Tedeschi and Calhoun's 2004 target article reports that the 21-item Posttraumatic Growth Inventory has five factors: appreciation of life, relationships with others, personal strength, new possibilities, and spiritual development. The evidence on the link between growth and distress is mixed, with some studies finding lower distress at higher growth levels and others finding no reliable relation. The authors state that growth does not necessarily mean less distress, and that most people reporting growth also acknowledge some distress.

A study of Bosnian war refugees found a somewhat different factor structure, and longitudinal work on the processes involved was still awaited. Some researchers regard self-reported growth as a positive illusion, a view the authors dispute.

Trials of spiritual outcomes

A 2025 meta-analysis of 55 randomized trials with 3,608 adults with cancer found that yoga interventions mildly to moderately improved spiritual wellbeing (Hedges g 0.31, 95 percent confidence interval 0.17 to 0.46) and reduced anxiety and depression, with high heterogeneity for those two outcomes. The authors call for more rigorous trials. Only the abstract was reviewed, and the result applies to yoga in cancer care, not to spiritual growth generally.

PubMed searches for this page, on transformation measures, growth scales, spiritual interventions and posttraumatic growth, found no systematic review testing spiritual growth as a general process against a comparison group.

Critiques of stage models

The 2022 article on faith development identifies several assumptions in Fowler's model as unsupported: linear progression, with some individuals moving toward higher stages over time and others toward lower ones, and the idea that all aspects of faith develop in step. It also notes that the original research focused mainly on monotheistic, religious populations, which limits claims of cultural universality.

The 2015 transpersonal article reports criticism that Wilber's synthesis places large amounts of complex information into universal categories without empirical examination. It also cites Jorge Ferrer's argument that Western transpersonal psychology's emphasis on peak states has often neglected the preparation, maturity and ethical grounding that long-standing traditions usually provide.

Measurement and causal limits

Koenig states that measures of spirituality are often entangled with mental health outcomes, which can make results circular, and that confounding by ethnicity and unrepresentative samples limit interpretation. The numinous inventory authors list reliance on self-report, lack of experimental causal confirmation and the need for longitudinal validation, and the 2004 transcendence study had a small sample from one treatment program.

Spiritual bypassing

A 2026 meta-ethnography credits John Welwood in 1984 with the term spiritual bypassing, defined as using spiritual beliefs or practices to avoid unresolved psychological distress. It included five qualitative or mixed-methods studies with 55 participants, all from the United States. Reported functions included short-term pain relief and containment during acute crisis, while reported harms included loss of self-esteem and spiritual weaponization or misuse of spiritual authority in interpersonal settings.

The authors state that a 13-item bypass scale cannot tell whether reliance on spiritual beliefs is an adaptive early response or an entrenched avoidance pattern, and that retrospective accounts and publication bias limit the findings. The review does not give prevalence figures.

Spiritual crises and distress

The Royal College paper states that the experience labeled spiritual emergency can look identical to other psychotic states, with disorientation, fear, hallucinations and delusions, which makes differential diagnosis difficult. It notes that early use of antipsychotic medication is current best practice for acute psychosis and that delay carries risks, including distress and unwise behavior. It identifies the balance between these risks and spiritual framing as needing urgent attention.

In classification, DSM-IV added a religious or spiritual problem category in 1994, and a 2025 paper reports that DSM-5-TR approved an expanded Z code, Moral, Religious, or Spiritual Problem. A 2023 study of 35 people with such problems and 35 matched participants found raised heart rate and cortisol during religious activities in those with the problems, despite lower reported anxiety.

Adverse effects of contemplative practice

A 2020 systematic review of 83 studies with 6,703 participants found that 55 reported at least one adverse event from meditation. Pooled prevalence was 8.3 percent overall, 3.7 percent in experimental studies and 33.2 percent in observational studies. The most common events were anxiety, depression and cognitive anomalies, and they occurred in some people with no history of mental health problems. Only the abstract was reviewed, and meditation is one of many practices people associate with spiritual development.

Care boundaries

Koenig reports that religion may foster excessive guilt over minor matters and delay mental health care in some people. Anyone with distressing experiences, persistent low mood, thoughts of self-harm or unusual perceptions would be directed by these sources toward qualified health professionals, and spiritual practice would not substitute for necessary care. The sources reviewed describe no professional register, training standard or protected title for spiritual growth work, though the searches for one were not exhaustive.