Introduction: spiritually sensitive helping practices

Kim was attracted to social work as it seemed consistent with her spiritual commitment. Two years into her course, she was sitting in the university café in tears. Spirituality, she said, was given no space in the social work curriculum and, moreover, she believed it was not seen as legitimate in helping practice. She didn’t ‘belong’ anywhere any more, Kim felt—neither at church nor at university. We talked about holistic practice and she challenged me—where was the literature on how helping practice integrated spirituality? Scouting around for such literature, particularly Australian literature, demonstrated a recent growth in academic material on helping professions such as psychology, nursing, social work and medicine including psychiatry (see, for example, Rice 2002; Lindsay 2002; D’Souza 2003; Hassad 2000; Tacey 2005; Rumbold 2003). It is still rare, however, for practitioners to have a presence in this literature although it is they who daily negotiate the complexities of integrating spirituality and helping practice. Moreover, little Australian work in this area addresses cross-disciplinary, multiple and non-Western spiritual traditions, despite the richness of traditions which inform spirituality in Australia and the uniquely Australian cultural contexts of those spiritualities.