Nearly 25 years before doctors began prescribing stress reduction for their patients, one of our century's most trusted theologians, Paul Tillich, defined our time as the Age of Anxiety and predicted our epidemic of anxiety related disorders, both physical and mental. Since then, we have learned how stress leads to unhealthy behaviors like smoking and overeating, and how the body's stress responses can bring on sickness or death.

Tillich's wisdom reached further. Even today, we tend to view anxiety as directly related to particular stresses such as the loss of a job, a lousy boss, a loveless marriage, or family trauma. We don't recognize that the anxiety triggered by such a crisis often comes from a deeper source: an uneasy sense that life lacks meaning and, worse, that we are not connected with anything ultimate. This existential anxiety—to Tillich, a crisis of being—causes people to experience life as a series of chaotic moments that become increasingly difficult to cope with.

Tillich did not suggest that we deal with negative events by interpreting them as God's will. Nor did he suggest that we disempower ourselves by expecting God to solve our problems for us. In The Courage to Be, he urged each of us to develop the courage to live an empowered, authentic, ethical life based on the perception that life, itself, is meaningful. Such courage, he argued, can be found only when we have discovered our relationship with what he preferred to call "The Ground of Being." Saying we believe in God is not enough. We each need to go beyond the cognitive into experiences that connect us directly to our ground of being.

My own research suggests that Tillich's radical prescription is accurate and necessary for healthy individuals and communities. I have also found that the experience of the ultimate is measurable to some degree using my INSPIRIT self test, and that such measurements can provide helpful guideposts for those in search of a closer connection to their spiritual core.

My first professional glimpse of peoples' ability to tap into their ground of being came in the late seventies while leading workshops with the psychologist Carl Rogers. One of the founders of humanistic psychology, Rogers believed that human beings can develop and grow toward their potential much like a seed grows into a tree: We know how to do it, but we need proper nurturing. Beyond the basic needs of food and shelter, individuals must feel accepted, valued, and understood. We must also feel that those around us are trustworthy and consistent in their behaviors, as well as honest in their responses to us. As the staff helped to build these nurturing conditions for the workshop participants, they grew increasingly self-confident and empowered. Then they began to listen to, and trust, the wisdom of their inner selves.

What fascinated me, however, was a dimension that seemed to transcend psychology. I asked one woman to describe what "the inner self" was like. She paused and said, "Well, it's greater than myself." I asked others the same question, and they inevitably replied something like this: "Listening to my inner self is like drawing water from a well that reaches down into an underground sea. It is part of me. Yet it is greater than me."

I could not mistake the spiritual aspect of these descriptions—the degree of inspiration and empowerment produced by this sense of connection to something greater than self. I began to call these moments "experiences of the spiritual core," and to regard them as a discrete stage of self discovery. Provoking religious experiences was categorically not among Rogers' objectives, but it seemed to me that we had come across, almost by accident, a natural human capacity to tap into our spiritual core.

Further study of these experiences made it clear to me that a great deal of our religious perceptions are socially constructed. During intense prayer, when an inner presence is felt, a Methodist will know this to be the presence of "Jesus, the Christ." A Jew will know this to be "Ruach Ha-kodesh, the presence of God." A Muslim will know this presence to be "Allah, the Source of Blessings." Each religious tradition uses very different words to describe this experience. Yet we are all tapping into the same divine essence.

I was hardly the first person to reach this conclusion. William James and Gordon Allport, two giants of American psychology, reached it decades ago. However, the health effects of these experiences had not been examined using the rigorous, quantitative procedures through which scientists test other hypotheses. Only now are serious researchers rushing into this promising field.

My next step was to design a questionnaire to measure experiences of the spiritual core. Working with Drs. Herbert Benson and Richard Friedman at Boston's Deaconess Hospital, I developed and tested the Index of Core Spiritual Experiences (INSPIRIT). Using outpatients in treatment for stress-related disorders, we confirmed several hypotheses.

First, we found that over 25% of the patients had core spiritual experiences before joining the treatment. Second, we found that patients with such prior experience had a measurable and significant health advantage during the ten-week training. They showed the greatest improvement in psychological health (increases in "life purpose and satisfaction") as well as the greatest improvements in physical health (decreases in the frequency of their stress-related medical symptoms).

Recent studies I have conducted support and enlarge these conclusions. Working with Dr. Laurel Burton at Chicago's Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center, I evaluated divinity students at Harvard University, a population of healthy, high-achieving individuals with a serious interest in religious development. Interestingly, not all of these divinity students had already experienced their spiritual core. Those who had, however, showed a higher degree of self-confidence during perceived stress as well as lower levels of hostility, a well-known risk factor for heart disease.

In another study, led by Ms. Marjorie Arias, a Fulbright Scholar working with the US Army in Panama, and Dr. Edward Singleton from the Addiction Research Center at the National Institute of Drug Abuse, we looked at recovering alcoholics. We found high INSPIRIT scores associated with higher levels of happiness, lower levels of hostility, and lessened intent to drink alcohol. In a third study, with colleagues at Lesley College, I found that experiences of the spiritual core help counteract the stress that leads college freshwomen to smoke cigarettes.

These studies do not and cannot prove that God exists. Nonetheless, they do show us that experiences of the spiritual core can begin to repair the crisis of being that Tillich saw at the root of our existential anxiety. That way they help us develop healthier attitudes and behaviors.

As might be expected, these studies also suggest that this spiritual resource should be developed in everyday life, before a crisis. While miraculous moments of religious experience may happen in extreme circumstances, they more typically require a serious commitment to self-exploration. It would be a mockery of this experience to expect a ten-week stress reduction program to produce such results.

It is also important, however, to recognize that there are ways to facilitate such experiences. We tend to doubt our inner resources because we have learned to remain "externally-focused" on the people, situations, and problems that fill our daily lives. But we can learn to listen to our inner voice and connect to the "underground sea." This happens often with my students like Margaret. As we grow increasingly aware of our spiritual core and how to reach it, this relationship can have a profoundly positive effect on our lives.

Finding complete harmony within the stress of life is likely something that only our great religious figures fully achieve. Perhaps this is why such people attract and inspire us so powerfully. Yet too often we compare ourselves to these great figures and assume their achievements require something different from our own abilities. We don't recognize that their achievements grew from deepening their relationship with the Ground of Being. Though we may not all become saints, there is no reason that we cannot each become, to use Margaret's metaphor, "vehicles of God's love."

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