RAISE The Standard, November 2022, v.9 n.2

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Spiritual Health, Wellness and Growth

In this issue of RAISE The Standard, we explore the intersection of disability and spiritual wellness.

Spirituality and spiritual wellness are often overlooked in transition planning for youth with disabilities, but in many ways they are the foundation. Before we dive in, it is important to know that spiritual health is not same as religion. (Of course, they can be—and often are—related.) This means that a student can be religious and not be spiritually healthy, and vice versa.

Spiritual life has three core components:

•   Purpose and meaning

•   Defined values, morals, and ethics

•   Living according to values, moral, and ethics

Click here to learn more about how spiritual life and religion are not the same thing.

Just how does spirituality fit into overall wellness?

Click here for a 3-minute video from College and Career Ready Labs for a quick overview of the eight dimensions of wellness, including spiritual growth.

What can Strong Spiritual Health Do?

Strong spiritual health can guide and influence decisions a student makes around work, life, money, and relationships.

"We live in a world where dreams take a back seat to job security and passion comes second to production."

-  Lawrence Lewars

Check out this short TEDX talk (with more than 1.2M views!) by teen Lawrence Lewars. He invites us to ask questions, explore what matters, and change our mindset. 

Mission Possible

Did you know that a person can have a “mission statement”? That’s right.

We turned to Project School Wellness for tips on how to encourage youth to consider their personal values, passion, purpose, and goals. It can be helpful to consider these questions:

• What makes me happy?
• What activities make me lose track of time?
• What makes me feel great about myself?
• Who inspires me the most? Why?
• What are my natural abilities and skills?
• What are some goals I have in life?
• If I could teach something, what would it be?
• What do I value most in life?
• When was there a time in my life when I felt on top of the world?
• What are my hobbies?
• What would I do if I knew I could not fail?

Here is a lesson plan to get youth engaged in considering who they are and who they want to be: https://www.projectschoolwellness.com/mission-statements-made-easy-a-middle-school-writing-activity/

Staying Connected to Your Spiritual Home

We turned to Disability Voices United for advice on how to remain connected to your spiritual home during the pandemic.

"In times of crisis, we receive so much information on how to keep our bodies physically safe or how to prepare our homes. Our souls’ and hearts’ needs are often overlooked during stressful times. But religion and ritual have always been part of humanity’s toolbox for handling crisis."

-  Rabbi Jackie Redner, Vista del Mar Children and Family Services

Here are some things to try:

1. Attend virtually. Technology helps us stay connected with each other even when we’re not in the same room. Consider getting in touch with your spiritual community through email, podcasts, WhatsApp, FaceTime, Zoom, or YouTube Livestream.
2. Create rituals for home. Many people find it calming to perform familiar rituals such as praying or chanting, singing, lighting candles, reading passages from important books, saying blessings over food, or reciting prayers/giving thanks before bed. All of these rituals remind the stressed-out body and mind that peace and joy are not only possible, but that they are essential to our overall sense of wellness and well-being.

If you are missing other parts of a traditional worship service, you can adapt.

• Try singing religious music on the phone in a group call with family or friends.
• Build a home altar with meaningful objects, flowers, or photos.

Read the full article here: https://disabilityvoicesunited.org/cv/spiritual-needs-of-people-with-developmental-disabilities/

Science and Spirituality

There are evidence-based steps and activities that have been shown to help people live a happier, more spiritual life. Recent research has shown that mindfulness meditation can lead to changes in the brain, including increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection.

So how can we ramp up our connection to our spiritual side? We turn to Action for Happiness.org for action steps:

1. Get outside every day and enjoy the natural world.
2. Take care of the world around you, whether that is your own room, your classroom, your school community, or your town.
3. Bring mindfulness into your day.
4. Disconnect from screens.
5. Journal.
6. Consider and express your gratitude.
7. Spend time with people who uphold similar values and beliefs, making it easier to make positive choices.

Self Compassion

No one is perfect. But so often we compare our insides to other people’s outsides. Dwelling on our flaws—what we’re not rather than what we've got—makes it much harder to be happy. Learning to accept ourselves, warts and all, and being kinder to ourselves when things go wrong increases our enjoyment of life, our resilience, and our well-being. It also helps us accept others as they are.

Click here to view this simple self-compassion video from The School of Happiness.

There are eight (8) Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA) Parent Centers throughout the US that provide training and programming to youth/young adults with disabilities and their families, professionals, and other PTIs and CPRCs on the issues surrounding youth transition.

RSA Parent Centers are funded by the Rehabilitation Service Administration (RSA) under the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), which is part of the US Department of Education.

In this issue, meet REAL Transition Partners, a collaboration between all 26 Region A parent centers will provide innovative services that involve diverse youth/young adults with disabilities and their families, highlight the region’s strengths and collaborative spirit, and through a regional Community of Practice, enhance participating parent center capacity around transition and adult service systems. FCSN is the lead partner in Region A-1 for parent centers in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Learn more here about REAL Transition Partners (Federation).

The University of Northern Iowa offers its students guidance on wellness, including this info graphic with 25 Tips for Wellness for College Students addressing sleep, stress, anxiety and depression, and more.

https://wellbeing.uni.edu/sites/default/files/inline-uploads/top_25_wellness_tips_infographic.pdf

"It sounds like a simple concept: accepting who I was rather than pining for who I thought I should have been or wanted to be… I’d fought as hard as possible to “not have MS” and that denial had really started to negatively impact my mental health and my view of myself. With that realization —and a developing acceptance of my physical limitations—I began to feel free to actually, well, be disabled."

– Alicia Grishman

This month, on our theme of spiritual wellness and self-compassion, we bring you a throwback to 2019, when blogger Alisa Grishman wrote "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Disability."

RAISE The Standard enewsletter identifies and shares resources that the Rehabilitation Services Administration Parent Training and Information Centers (RSA-PTI) can use and share with families.

The RAISE Technical Assistance Center is working to advance the accessibility of its digital resources, including its websites, enewsletters and various digital documents.

* For more on SPAN Parent Advocacy Network and all of the complementary programs supported, visit spanadvocacy.org.