Thinking with Your Soul: Spiritual Intelligence and Why It Matters

"Spiritual intelligence is the human capacity to ask ultimate questions about the meaning of life and to experience simultaneously the seamless connection between each of us and the world in which we live."
— Dr. Richard Wolman

The quest for more meaning in everyday life arises in all of us at one time or another. In fact, spirituality can be the touchstone of our lives — a single reliable constant that sustains us through life's most trying moments. Using the current theories of multiple intelligences as his springboard, Dr. Richard Wolman began his research into the nature of spirituality with the belief that each of us has a distinctive "spiritual intelligence." Thinking with Your Soul offers crucial insights into this most important of intelligences and how we can make it work for us.

Dr. Wolman presents the PsychoMatrix Spirituality Inventory (PSI), his groundbreaking system for evaluating the levels and areas of spirituality in people's lives without reference to a specific religious ideology. More than six thousand men and women have taken the PSI. After carefully studying their responses, Wolman identified seven factors that make up human spiritual experience and behavior. They are: Divinity, Mindfulness, Intellectuality, Community, Extrasensory Perception, Childhood Spirituality, and Trauma.

Thinking with Your Soul gives you the chance to take the PSI and examine the resulting profile of your spiritual energy and awareness. For instance, the PSI results may show a strong sense of a higher power but little sense of community. By analyzing the results of our personal PSIs, we can begin to see patterns in our spirituality and to change them if we choose. Understanding our spiritual makeup, strengths, and limitations is crucial to being able to see and improve our personal relationships and our relationship to the world. This insight into our behavior, internal experience, and empathy for the experiences of others gives us a conscious context for our actions and choices.

In addition to catalyzing self-reflection and spiritual awareness, Thinking with Your Soul is a thoughtful inquiry into the spiritual dimension of life, its past treatment by the scientific and psychological communities, and its place in the twenty-first century.

RICHARD N. WOLMAN, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and has been on the faculty at Harvard Medical School for more than twenty-five years. He is the president and research director of PsychoMatrix, an independent educational, research, and testing service dedicated to bringing greater self-understanding to individuals and organizations.