ISSR has received a large grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF 2023-32537) as part of the TWCF initiative on The Science of Religious and Spiritual Exercises (SORSE). Religious and spiritual traditions contain repositories of ancient practical wisdom about how to live well, and they often prescribe practices that help people to foster deeper connections with themselves, with other people, with the world around them, and with the transcendent.

Such practices are often recommended simply because they are proper, rather than because of their effects, but there is increasing evidence that religious and spiritual exercises have considerable well-being benefits. The overall SORSE program has three main objectives:

• Focus on expanding our understanding of the science of religious and spiritual exercises.
• Support interdisciplinary and practice-informed empirical research on the impact of religious and spiritual exercises.
• Encourage science-informed innovation in religious and spiritual exercises to promote human flourishing.

Each project in the SORSE program represents a collaboration between scientists, practitioners and scholars. The ISSR project will be working with two practitioner communities: with Coventry Cathedral (on delivery of some of the spiritual exercises) and with the Guild of Health, led by ISSR Fellow Gillian Straine (on dissemination of the scientific background to the spiritual exercises through an online course). We are convinced that, if scientific research is to be communicated effectively to practitioners, in a way that gets their interest and influences their practice, it needs to be integrated with the theology of spiritual practices and be mediated through science-engaged theology.

Whereas most projects in the SORSE initiative focus on one spiritual exercise, we think different exercises deliver different well-being benefits. Comparing different practices will help us gain a stronger theoretical understanding of how spiritual practices enhance well-being. In our ISSR project, we will examine the benefits of delivery of various kinds of religious and spiritual exercise and how this is achieved.

There are various causal pathways by which spiritual exercises deliver well-being benefits; i.e. different exercises may improve well-being differently. Our project is pathbreaking in investigating this idea. We predict that different exercises will have different short-term effects but may have similar cumulative effects on well-being. We propose a three-fold classification of spiritual exercises, which we will develop and refine. This is reflected in the title of our project: “Repose, Insight, Activity: A Trinity of Spiritual Exercises”.  This classification may not be exhaustive, but we think there are significant differences between these three kinds of spiritual practice.

Some spiritual practices involve physical activity, particularly important in exercises from Eastern religious traditions, such as Yoga, Tai Chi and Qigong. Such practices can become completely absorbing, leading to a withdrawal from conceptual cognition. In some ways they have continuity with the absorption experience that occurred in the trance dancing of early humans. Such movement-based exercise can induce a ‘flow’ state, which lifts people to a different state of consciousness.

Other spiritual practices involve absorption in sensory experience. These may also involve revisiting an earlier stage of cognitive evolution and may have something in common with the fascination with waterfalls observed in some primates. Such practices give rise to feelings of awe, wonder, and self-transcendence. We propose to investigate listening to plainsong chanting, a sensory experience that seems to have a powerful effect on many people but has been surprisingly under-investigated so far.

There are other practices that involve an element of conceptual cognition. The sensory and motor practices described above involve a retreat from conceptual thought, which is probably also true of mindfulness. While it is understandable that many spiritual exercises avoid conceptual cognition, we think there are also potential benefits in a well-judged use of conceptual cognition to bring about a different pattern of meaning-making, which could have enduring benefits. Conceptual activity in such exercises must be carefully calibrated to not overturn the predominance of experiential cognition, a key feature of all effective spiritual exercises. We propose to investigate the effects of an integrative spiritual exercise called “Wonder”, recently developed by our practitioner partners in Coventry Cathedral, which combines sensory and motor elements with reflection and discussion.

Rupert Sheldrake has suggested that these three types of spiritual practice constitute a Trinity, and correspond to Father-Son-Spirit in Christian thought, or to sat-chit-ananda in Hindu thought. As Sheldrake sees it, sitting in a state of bliss, as we think will be induced by plainsong chanting, corresponds to the Father, or to sat. Practices that involve reframing experience and developing understanding, which we think will be developed by our Wonder exercise, correspond to the Son, or to chit. Dynamic spiritual exercises, such as Tai Chi, involve flow, movement and change, and correspond to Spirit, or to ananda.

Building on our recent ISSR research project on Spiritual Intelligence, we will continue to use as our main theoretical framework the cognitive architecture developed by Philip Barnard, Interacting Cognitive Subsystems (ICS), which is built around an important distinction between two different kinds of central human cognition, one experiential (“implicational”), the other conceptual (“propositional”). It identifies how these are linked with other more peripheral and intermediate cognitive subsystems. There is more about ICS on the ISSR website, and also in John Teasdale’s recent book, What Happens in Mindfulness.

Fraser Watts will take the lead in this project, working with Sarah Charles, who worked on a previous project on Religion and the Social Brain, and Marius Dorobantu, who worked on our previous project on Spiritual Intelligence. We look forward to joining with representatives from other SORSE projects at a meeting organised by TWCF, and Fraser would be pleased to hear from other ISSR Fellows who are leading SORSE research projects.

The recently established Centre for Science and Faith in Copenhagen, led by Niels Gregersen (ISSR President) and Per Sangild, will also be collaborating with the project, drawing on their own resources. Later on, we will be hosting a conference in Copenhagen on theories of how spiritual exercises look for benefits. We will provide periodic updates on the project in further blogs and on the ISSR website.