Spiritual Intelligence represents our drive for meaning and connection with the infinite. ~Stephen Covey.

    Although spiritual intelligence may not be necessary for short-term success with the usual ego skills in the material world, it becomes very important to achieve long-term success, happiness and peace of mind in a merged material-spiritual world. Both worlds have valuable wisdom for improving the quality of life for us all.

     So, what is this concept of spiritual intelligence? It is our capacity to become more aware in using wisdom, empathy, morality, diverse perspectives, and compassion to find and enjoy welcome the most important things we need—meaning, purpose, wholeness, belonging, love and understanding. It is not something that is learnable, teachable or that you can achieve, but rather just experience. Below are the ten core components of spiritual intelligence and what each entails:

Ten Essential Components of Spiritual Intelligence

1. Awareness

    Spiritual intelligences grows as awareness deepens and so you could say that awareness is the driver of spiritual intelligence. The evolution of deeper awareness helps us to see the interconnectedness of things, understand how apparent opposites just represent wholeness, know our true selves, and live our lives around our compelling convictions and core values. Most importantly, a deeper awareness of reality helps us see past the many compelling illusions in life inhibiting our growth and authentic happiness. Practicing mindfulness is a handy way to increase the essential awareness component of spiritual intelligence. This is where you control mind wandering by focusing on what is happening around you at the moment, rather than remembering past memories that may be irrelevant, or speeding ahead to future worries or expectations that may never happen.

2. Meaning

     There is plenty of research that tells us of the utter importance of having some sort of meaning in this life. Victims of the Holocaust who lacked this needed meaning, had a less favorable survival rate in their horrible experiences in the death camps or even after their releases, than those who searched diligently for meaning. Making some sense out of losses, hardships or anything unwanted always helps reduce the hurt and builds the resilience muscle to confront adversity with a more positive mind. Asking good questions is a good way to get sufficient meaning to understand something well enough to frame a more effective response. In communication, we often don’t say what we mean and that results in miscommunication that just takes more time to straighten out. Meaning and purpose are both part of each other.

3. Purpose

     If we don’t have a specific purpose in mind with anything we are doing, we are likely to get an array of results which are likely much different than what we want or expect. Now why would we want to live our entire lives without any purpose? Finding our purpose in anything can occur by asking the “why” questions and finding suitable answers that help us focus on what we are trying to do. Finding our life purpose can happen by stumbling upon it accidentally, by serendipity, or merely acknowledging some purpose that we unconsciously chose or which life imposed on us is some strange cosmic predestination process. With meaning and purpose, it is difficult to know which comes first in a cause-and-effect relationship.  But at any rate, knowing purpose is becoming very critical in navigating our VUCA world of volatility, uncertainty, constant change and ambiguity.

4. Non-Dualism

     The process of reconciling our world of dualistic Yang and Yin opposites can be a lifelong journey starting with our heads down to our hearts and then onto our souls. Rationally speaking, we can easily understand that many of the apparent opposite things we deal with are really just different sides of the same coin and that both sides are necessary to know and experience the other. There are no rainbows without the sunshine and pouring rain. But at the emotional side of the brain, there is a different story. Here, values and the emotional strength of our religious, spiritual and moral beliefs get in the way. It is more difficult reconciling opposites like good and evil, life and death, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, useful and useless, and so on. Nevertheless, spiritual intelligence lives in a whole, unified, non-dualistic world and getting there requires the understanding that opposite-looking things are not always as they appear.

5. Humility

     When you think about it, our egos only give us short-sighted, short-term wins that are usually not that satisfying, where enough is never quite enough. Managing your ego, especially when it has been highly successful in side-stepping life’s minefields, is probably easier said than done. Sharing vulnerabilities and embracing failures and mistakes can help humility come out of hiding but so can sitting out at a clear night and looking up at the starts in childlike awe. Humility is the antidote to defensiveness, which almost always shuts down communication, and it can be grown in the safer groups we belong to like church, family, work, sports teams or community organizations. Our self-consciousness is the main way we wrongly dismiss the value of the humility that comes with the sense of belonging to something bigger than ourselves.

6. Empathy

    The empathy part of spiritual intelligence has many valuable gains, especially for being successful in interpersonal relationships. Here empathy builds strong soulful connections with other people, widens your personal store of perspectives and beliefs, increases your capacity for unconditional love, and improves your own likeability and lovability. Empathy is crucial in any personal or professional relationship because it is the silent communication that connects people and speaks louder than any amount of words. It demonstrates the useful principle that people don’t care about what you know until they know you care. Again. Empathy is not something you can learn or teach, but rather experience. And the more empathy you experience through reading books, watching good movies or exposing yourself to highly charged emotional situations, the more of it you will have to give others.

7. Equanimity

     The search for peace of mind and having a solid sense of centeredness, purpose and meaning is probably more of a result of increasing spiritual intelligence that something that actually helps evolve it, much like happiness being a result of doing what you do to get that feeling. This equanimity is the calmness in conflict, resilience to adversity and choosing right reactions to situations. Much peace of mind comes with the realization of what you can and cannot control, focusing on the few things you can control, like your reactions to the situations you find yourself in, and letting go of all the rest. This is just one of the many truths that can set you free, and freedom from control is something we all cherish, while we are willing to fight wars against any sort of unwanted control. At the end of the day, having inner peace of mind is more important than being right or even outwardly successful and happy.

8. Integrity

    Integrity has been characterized as the “fuel efficiency of the soul” and as such, it energizes spiritual growth. Our spiritual intelligence is demonstrated by complete and consistent alignment and honesty with our everyday behavior, which needs to be congruent with our convictions, principles, beliefs and core values. This is not the person to become, but to be. The inner cohesion of integrity builds the important qualities of trust and credibility, which are essential in human relationships, not to mention our self-confidence. Our ability to navigate moral complexities with integrity comes from our intuitive conscience, which is probably a better, faster and more reliable decision-maker than the slower rational brain. Practical benefits from integrity include a significant reduction of inner conflict, self-doubts, guilt, confusion and dissonance. Furthermore, integrity provides the foundation for reconciling opposites and protects against false spirituality.

9. Gratitude

     Thankfulness is both a driver and result of spiritual intelligence and subsequently it serves as an appropriate acknowledgement of all these other components of spiritual intelligence. This also magnifies the important point of spiritual intelligence being that things are more interconnected than they may first appear. Practically speaking, the attitude of gratitude is one of the easiest ways to get more of what you want. Of course, the ultimate gratitude is accepting and appreciating mundane imperfections in life and people which hide their beauty and value. The main power of gratitude is that it opens the heart. Other benefits include shifting awareness from our ego to interconnections, quieting the background noise in a situation meant to be thoughtful, increasing emotional resilience, making the ordinary more sacred, and strengthening empathy, generosity, forgiveness and compassion.

10. Wonder

      The wonder that leads to curiosity is a door that is always open to us regardless of how closed our minds may be. Remember how did you answer your child when he or she asked, “Why is the sky blue?” Wonder has a lot of useful benefits in promoting these other components of spiritual intelligence. It can help dissolve our ego’s false certainties which can waste valuable brain space, bring us more into the present moment, expand our perceptions and perspectives, and help us connect to something bigger than ourselves. It is also a good antidote to cynicism. And having an optimistic point of view about life and people has been shown to lead to better relationships, making more money, living longer, being happier and having fewer physical symptoms. That is a big win for anyone wanting one.