beliefs and ceremonies
beliefs and ceremonies Spiritual traditions help people make sense of life-altering events . Moreover spirituality often helps people make sense of life issues and complements social work’s holistic biopsychosocial model of practice. In clinical practice social workers might request detailed information about religious and/or spiritual beliefs and practices during the assessment phase, or incorporate spiritual and religious interventions based on a client’s spiritual background. beliefs and ceremonies.
A comprehensive biopsychosocial assessment can explore the nature and depth of spiritual and religious beliefs and practices, as well as potential support systems for clients. A thorough assessment will therefore allow the practitioner to treat the service recipient according to his or her needs.
A routine assessment of all incoming clients’ religious or spiritual backgrounds will potentially help stimulate this discussion, which may offer useful information, clinically relevant strengths or struggles, and potential areas to tailor interventions that are often not explored.
A majority of social workers considered various spiritually related helping interventions to be appropriate helping interventions, but few have personally used the intervention with clients. This may stem from a lack of educational preparedness to deal with these issues in practice .
In the absence of formal religious texts, African spirituality has been passed down through the oral repository of African stories and songs from which people have distilled their spirituality and their healing methodologies for well being . African spirituality is thus predicated on the “bases of cyclical existence, not contained in a written text, but rather the African spiritual worldview honours the centrality of spirituality within all of life . There are two aspects of the created universe: the physical and the spiritual.
The spiritual realm reflects various “spaces or abodes; those of departed ancestors, spirits (deities) and that of the penultimate source of Creation of all things.” both realms are in reciprocal contact with each other and hence what occurs within one realm impacts on and influences the other. Moreover, within the African worldview “humanity is in a relationship with environment, culture and tradition, African spirituality reflects the totality of life,
it is non-dualistic and does not set up a dichotomy between the secular and the sacred, which grounds the need to include spirituality within the development of a therapeutic plan. beliefs and ceremonies.