Repose, Insight, Activity: A Trinity of Spiritual Exercises

Spiritual exercises can deliver wellbeing benefits via various causal pathways. This research project, led by Fraser Watts, and co-directed by John Groger and Marius Dorobantu, will evaluate three different spiritual practices and their associated psychological pathways for impact on wellbeing: 1) plainsong chanting in an Anglican Compline practice, 2) tai chi, and 3) a community-based, arts-related Christian practice. The project is supported through a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation, as part of the Science of Religious and Spiritual Exercises initiative.

The exercises will be studied in situ, nested within the ongoing work of a practitioner community, and compared against controls using a crossover design. Both within-session changes and cumulative changes to wellbeing will be measured.

Interactive Cognitive Subsystems (ICS), a theory which models human cognitive architecture as interacting subsystems (acoustic, visual, body-state, object, speech forms, propositional, implicational, articulatory, and limb), each specialized for dealing with specific information. The project team aims to compare three ways (i.e. sensory, motor, and integrative) that ICS operate in these spiritual practices.

The passive participation (i.e. not singing) in a plainsong-based Compline service will be compared with listening to madrigal music. The plainsong chanting is hypothesized to activate sensory subsystems and the implicational system, leading to feelings of awe, wonder, and self-transcendence.

It is hypothesized that tai chi activates the body-state and limb subsystems, subsequently engaging the implicational subsystem. Karate will be the control condition.

Wonder, Coventry Cathedral’s experimental arts-based service, combines spirituality with various virtues and the arts. A practice of conceptual discussion about art and human experience without the focus on virtues and spirituality will be the control. Singers from Coventry Cathedral are expected to deliver the sensory and integrative practices, and training for the motor conditions by practitioner-collaborators at Oxford Internal Arts.

Results of the research will be shared with practitioner communities in hopes that they will inform subsequent spiritual practices and be disseminated to scholars. A publication of an integrative religious understanding of spiritual exercises that engages with scientific research, and a conference in Copenhagen are planned.