One of the main foundational points of body theology is that we are whole and complete as we are and that our bodies are divine. It’s a way of thinking about the body and of the self that is rooted in radical acceptance and liberation theories. The medical field calls it person-centered care, though they are looking at it not through a spiritual lens, but rather a physical/pathological one.
Person-centered care is exactly what it sounds like. It’s care that is responsive to the individual and their goals, values, and preferences. It’s designed to allow patients to make informed decisions about their health care, so that they know what they’re dealing with both in terms of pathology but also potential treatments. (1 – Centers for Medicare & Medicaid). An article from the National Institute of Health states it even more clearly, and perhaps for our purposes, more directly: Person-centered care means treating patients as individuals and as equal partners in the business of healing; it is personalized, coordinated and enabling. (2)
I notice one glaring omission from these definitions and that is that if we are treating individuals as equal partners in the business of healing then we should believe their lived experience. We should treat them as experts in their own body in terms of how they experience the world and how it feels to them. To do any less is to deny that they have agency and a direct knowledge of their own lived experience, and that is most definitely not person-centered.
Spiritual care is fundamentally person-centered. If religion, as one college professor told me, is about humans making meaning out of chaos, then spiritual care is helping an individual create meaning in their own life, through their own chaos, however that may look like. I know we don’t like to think of our lives as chaos, but let’s be honest, when it comes to our ability to earn a living, the systems around us, or even some aspects of our daily existence, how much do we really control? I know we like to think that we control everything. Manifest destiny and individuality are the ways in which capitalism tries to tell us that we are in charge of where we’re going, so if we don’t get there, then that is our fault, not the system’s. The truth is much more complicated.
To me the concept of person-centered care, of spiritual care, means that the individual’s lived experience is to be honored, to be believed, and should be the framework through which I work to help them. The person is centered, not me, not the tools I use, not the process–the person.
If this sounds like how you’d like to work, I encourage you to book a free call. Let’s chat, and see what spiritual care can do for you.
(1) https://www.cms.gov/priorities/innovation/key-concepts/person-centered-care
(2) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6465833/
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