The relationship between spirituality and health has become of more interest to researchers within health science and the clinical setting. Spiritual and religious connections to health are reflected through various routes, such as psychological or psycho-spiritual constructs , these construct effect and influence biological systems and physiological processes.
Psychological constructs that appear to be related to health through their perceived impact on individuals’ lives and include such concepts as a perceived closeness to God, orienting motivational forces, religious support and religious or spiritual struggle.
The view of transpersonal psychology supports these concepts, and goes on to view the human being as being able to express emotion, feeling and self awareness that can convey information about itself, contemplate a larger reality and can experience meaning and purpose. Disease or illness may be understood as a message or a possible task or course of life, in that sometimes disease has to be suffered until learning happens and healing can occur.
There is growing evidence to support the hypothesis that aspects of religiosity and spirituality are linked to physiological processes, including cardiovascular, neuro-endocrine, and immune function. Judeo-Christian religious practices provide reasonable evidence of effects such as lowered blood pressure and less hypertension and improved immune function, and improved lipid profiles. In Zen, yoga, meditation/relaxation practices, there is persuasive evidence for the proposition that meditation/relaxation is associated with better health outcomes in clinical patient populations and evidence that meditation/relaxation is associated with lower blood pressure and lower cholesterol, and lower stress hormone levels. Differential patterns of brain activity suggest that there appears to be some evidence that meditation/relaxation is associated with less oxidative stress, with less blood pressure reactivity under challenge, and with less stress hormone reactivity under challenge. A review of research showed that church service attendance protects against death and that spirituality may protect against cardiovascular disease and that being prayed for improves physical recovery from acute illness.
Spiritual practice or techniques such as Buddhist mediation practice have been shown to ameliorate the effect of stress or stressors in life and work, by inducing counterbalanced positive effects, such as the ability to sustain non-judgemental, moment to moment highly discerned mental awareness.