What Is Interspirituality? Beyond Interfaith to Shared Practice

Interspirituality is a term coined by the Benedictine monk Wayne Teasdale in his 1999 book The Mystic Heart to describe an emerging approach to spiritual life that draws from multiple wisdom traditions simultaneously — not to blend them into a single generic spirituality, but to learn from what each tradition has discovered about the interior life.

The term has been controversial. Critics argue that it promotes spiritual shallowness (a mile wide and an inch deep) or appropriation (extracting practices from their cultural context). Proponents argue that it responds to a genuine feature of our historical moment and recovers something that mystics across traditions have always recognized.

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What Interspirituality Is Not

It is not relativism. Interspirituality does not require the view that all traditions are equally true or that their differences don't matter. The differences between Buddhist anattā (no-self) and Christian theosis (deification of the soul) are real and significant. Interspirituality begins after noting these differences, not by erasing them.

It is not cafeteria religion. The stereotype is someone taking only what's comfortable from each tradition — Buddhist meditation for stress, Christian aesthetics for beauty, Sufi poetry for romance — without any serious commitment or discipline. This is not what serious practitioners mean by interspirituality.

It is not syncretism. Syncretism blends traditions into a single system. Interspirituality is more like comparative literature: you can deeply appreciate both Tolstoy and Mishima without insisting they are saying the same thing.

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What It Is

Teasdale defined interspirituality as "the sharing of ultimate experiences across traditions" — the recognition that mystics and contemplatives across very different religious frameworks are reporting experiences that, while not identical, share enough family resemblance to illuminate each other.

The Quaker Thomas Kelly and the Tibetan Buddhist Milarepa both describe a quality of inner stillness and presence that is remarkably similar despite their entirely different doctrinal frameworks. John of the Cross's dark night of the soul and the Buddhist meditator's "dark night" of the contemplative path are distinct — but comparing them clarifies both.

Interspirituality does not conclude: "therefore they are the same." It observes: "these are different windows onto similar territory. Looking through multiple windows may give a richer sense of the landscape than any single window can."

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The Historical Precedent

This kind of cross-tradition borrowing is not new. Sufism absorbed Neoplatonist philosophy. Christian theology absorbed Aristotle. Buddhism absorbed Confucianism as it moved through China. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides drew on Muslim Aristotelian philosophy. The Indian Reform movements of the 19th century were shaped by Enlightenment and Christian ideas even as they sought to articulate Hindu tradition.

What Teasdale named was a systematic version of something that has happened whenever traditions encounter each other seriously.

The mystics specifically have tended toward more openness. Meister Eckhart's God-beyond-God resonates with Ibn Arabi's wahdat al-wujud. Teresa of Ávila's interior castle maps onto the Sufi stages of the soul. These may not be identical; they are not unrelated.

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The Interspiritual Practice

For individuals, interspirituality as a practice involves:

Rootedness: Teasdale and others who developed the concept consistently emphasized that genuine interspirituality requires being rooted in a primary tradition. You cannot freely draw from other traditions without a home base. Rootlessness produces shallowness.

Study across traditions: Not superficial familiarity but genuine engagement — reading the actual texts, learning the actual practices, encountering the tradition from within before extracting elements from it.

Cross-traditional dialogue: Engaging practitioners of other traditions not to convert them or to compare notes on doctrine but to be genuinely informed by their experience of the interior life.

Humility: The recognition that your own tradition does not have all the answers — that other traditions may have developed capacities and insights that yours has neglected or lost.

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The Critique

The strongest critique: depth requires commitment, and commitment requires choice. The person who practices Christian centering prayer, Buddhist vipassana, and Sufi dhikr may be doing none of them with sufficient regularity or depth to benefit from any.

This is a real risk. The response: interspirituality is not incompatible with primary commitment. You can be a committed Christian who is deeply informed by Buddhist phenomenology, or a committed Buddhist who learns from the Christian mystical tradition — without abandoning your home. In fact, many practitioners find that encounter with another tradition illuminates their own.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, spent the last years of his life in deep dialogue with Buddhist and Hindu traditions — and died in Bangkok, at a conference on Christian-Buddhist dialogue, calling himself more Catholic than ever.

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Daily Lesson and Interspirituality

Daily Lesson is built on an interspiritual premise: that wisdom about how to live — about attention, compassion, honesty, courage, and meaning — can be found across the full breadth of world tradition, and that engaging multiple sources enriches rather than dilutes spiritual life.

The premise is not that all traditions say the same thing. It is that they are all addressing real human experiences — grief, gratitude, anger, love, mortality, the search for meaning — and that no single tradition has a complete map.

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Daily Lesson draws from Torah, Bible, Quran, Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist texts, Stoic philosophy, and more — one reflection each morning. Free at dailylesson.app.