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SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES IN ÁDVENTURE THERAPY
THE AIM OF OUR STUDY
We aim to examine how hill and cave tours can prompt mystical-spiritual
experiences.
METHODS
We organized adventure tours for students at the Károli Gáspár University of
the Reformed Church, which included hill and cave tours with challenging
climbing and crawling exercises along with relaxation and spiritual singing
and other music therapy exercises. 73 students participated in hill tours,
27 in cave tours (3-4-hour tours).
After the adventure tours, we asked participants to fill out the Spiritual Health
and Life-Orientation Measurement.” After the hill tours, participants were also
asked to draw a free drawing based on their most memorable experience.
Spiritual Health and Life-Orientation Measurement has four scales:
personal, social, environmental, and transcendent domains of spiritual
health. The personal domain refers to meaning, purpose, and values in
life, along with self-awareness. The communal domain includes love,
forgiveness, trust, and hope, and thus it refers to the quality and depth of
interpersonal relationships. The environmental domain refers to the care for
the environment, to a sense of awe and wonder in nature, and to unity with
the environment. The transcendental domain refers to the relationship of the
self with some-thing or some-One beyond the human level. This includes
faith in and adoration and worship of the source of mystery of the universe.
RESULTS
According to paired samples t-tests, both hill and cave tours significantly
prompted positive experiences of personal, communal, environmental, and
transcendent dimensions (see Table 1).
A sense of identity, joy in life, inner peace, love for others, forgiveness
toward others, trust among individuals, respect for others, connection with
nature, awe at a breathtaking view, oneness with nature, harmony with
the environment, a sense of magic in the environment, worship of the Creator,
and prayer and the presence of God were all observed at higher levels during
the tours than on ordinary days.
25 John W. Fisher, Leslie J. Francis and Peter Johnson. Assessing spiritual health via four
domains of spiritual wellbeing: The SH4DI, Pastoral psychology 49 (2) (2000), 133-145.
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