Making the Invisible Visible: Tracking Spiritual Growth Through Connectedness
How the Watts Connectedness Scale helped spiritual care provider, Labyrxnth, map the felt sense of spirituality to a new framework of care.
By Frances Cruz (Head of Operations) & Christina Ducruet (Founder & CEO), Labyrxnth
In this guest article, we explore the relationship between spirituality and connectedness and discuss how these dimensions of experience are often overlooked in mental health care. We are excited to share our initial findings from employing the WCS (Watts Connectedness Scale) with participants in Labyrxnth’s 12-week spiritual care program, where the scale helped us to measure subtle but meaningful shifts in participants’ sense of connectedness to themselves, others, and the world.
Mental Health and Spiritual Wellbeing: A False Binary
In an era marked by disconnection, burnout, and fragmentation, it feels urgent to ask not only what makes people ill, but what makes them whole. As psychedelic therapy, alternative modalities, and indigenous wisdom reshape how to approach this crucial question, a paradigmatic shift is beginning to crest in mental health in the western world, revealing a hunger for spirituality and connectedness that can ground us in uncertain times.
One of the most persistent fallacies holding this expansion back is the idea that scientifically-grounded mental health and spirituality stand in opposition—that one must choose a side. But this is a false binary, and in reality science and spirituality are not mutually exclusive; they are complementary ways of understanding human experience. Increasingly, research suggests that a spiritually connected life is not only meaningful but is measurably beneficial to health and wellbeing. This convergence calls for new frameworks of understanding, and new tools for spiritual support.
Spirituality is not easily defined, however. For some, it’s synonymous with religion; for others, spirituality is a personal sense of connection to self, others, nature, or something greater. Without shared language or cultural consensus, this domain of human experience is often overlooked or sidelined, especially in secular contexts where religious affiliation is no longer assumed. For the growing number of individuals outside traditional religious frameworks, there are few spaces to explore, articulate, and nourish this aspect of life on their own terms.
Labyrxnth’s Approach to Spiritual Capacity
At Labyrxnth, we seek to address this through creative self-exploration, multimodal care, and a model that honors the role spiritual development plays in transition, healing, and self-inquiry.
We believe in spirituality as the innate human capacity to experience connection, meaning, and transcendence. It is a vital dimension of wellbeing, not an optional add-on. We understand spiritual capacity not as a fixed trait, but as something that can be cultivated through lived experience. This understanding informs everything we create—from our frameworks to our facilitation.
A Framework for Development: The Four Facets
To support this process, we work with a framework called the Four Facets—interwoven pathways that offer multiple ways into deeper spiritual connection:
Emergence: accessing authenticity and meaning through the unfolding of one’s inner life
Embodiment: rooting awareness in the body to integrate experience and connect with present-moment truth
Essence: attuning to the unchanging self and experiencing connection to spirit, source, or something greater
Expression: becoming a conduit for what wants to move through—creative, relational, or sacred energy expressed as self
These are not linear stages, but multidimensional and converging entry points that allow us to meet people where they are and support the many ways spiritual capacity can come alive—within, between, and beyond the self.
From Insight to Measurement
If these are the core facets of spiritual development, how might we know when that development is taking place?
Traditional tools like the Spiritual Well-Being Scale often conflate spirituality with religious belief, making them ill-suited for secular or diverse populations. We needed something that could reflect what we were witnessing in the lives of participants—people experiencing powerful transformation through inner work, without necessarily aligning with a religion.
The Watts Connectedness Scale and the Awakened Brain
Through the work of Dr. Lisa Miller, we found an answer. In The Awakened Brain, Miller defines spiritual capacity as the innate human ability to connect—with others, with nature, and with a higher power. She emphasizes that this capacity is not exclusive to religious tradition but a natural feature of our neurobiology—what she calls the “awakened brain.”
Her research has shown that activating this awakened brain facilitates connection to a greater reality and acts as a buffer against mental illness, building resilience through deepened relationships, meaning-making, and a sense of sacred interconnectedness.
The Watts Connectedness Scale (WCS), which empirically measures this multidimensional connectedness—defined as felt connection to self, others, and world—offered us a research-backed way to understand spirituality not as dogma, but as embodied interconnection.
Two Complementary Frameworks in Practice
The WCS has played a central role in facilitating our delivery of spiritual care by giving us the ability to empirically measure spirituality vis-a-vis connectedness. In our work at Labyrxnth, this tool became a way to validate that cultivating spiritual capacity is not only possible, but measurable; its benefits are not esoteric, but embodied and relational. Our Four Facets framework guides participants through experiential pathways that modulate connectedness via different ways of knowing, and the WCS offers a psychometric mirror through which these shifts in connectedness to self, others, and world can be measured.
Initial Data and Outcomes
To put this into practice, we used the WCS to measure pre- and post-intervention scores in participants of our 12-week seasonal container, which blends interdisciplinary one-on-one sessions with biweekly small-group integration.
Across nine cohorts averaging six participants each, the WCS was administered during intake and again within a week of program completion. Of 56 participants, 42 completed both the pre- and post-program assessments using a replicated questionnaire with 0–100 scale.
The results surprised us—not because they showed change, but because of how consistent and relational that change proved to be. We saw statistically significant increases across all three WCS domains: connectedness to self, others, and world. These increases were reflected in the total composite score, which showed the strongest shift: statistical significance with a medium effect size. While the dataset is modest, paired-sample t-tests revealed strong within-subject changes (p < 0.01) with no significant differences between cohorts, suggesting a reliable trend.
Participants described an emerging sense of connectedness following the intervention:
“It’s like the rain—something ordinary felt holy, like spirit. I could feel it in a way I hadn’t before.”
"Shared humanity can come from a single moment with a compassionate witness."
These aren’t just technical wins; they reflect meaningful growth in how participants relate to themselves, others, and the world.
Spiritual Capacity as Connectedness
One pattern emerged again and again: when one sub-domain of connectedness shifted, the others often followed. While the WCS separates these constructs for analytic clarity, participant experiences and pre-post scores affirm that these dimensions are deeply interwoven.
Our most significant insight may be this: spiritual capacity is not a static trait, but a relational process—an ongoing integration of intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal connection.
WCS as a Framework for Integration
Even without a control group or long-term follow-up, the WCS has proven invaluable—not only as a tool for evaluation, but as a framework for integration. At the close of each 12-week cycle, participants receive their before-and-after WCS scores as part of a hand-crafted experience debrief (see image).
This data serves as a reflective anchor, helping participants ground the ineffable aspects of their journey—and a compass, guiding future steps. We use it to tailor support based on where connectedness is growing and where it may need more attention.
A Vision for the Future of Mental Health
If connectedness can shift so reliably within a short container, what might be possible over time? Could it lay the foundation for more resilient, relational lives?
As the field of mental health evolves, so too must our tools and our language. Our hope is to show that enhancing connectedness may have a lasting impact on depression, anxiety, and other diseases of despair—just as spirituality has already been shown to do. This would not only expand our toolkit for whole-person wellbeing, but strengthen the case that spirituality and connectedness are inextricably linked.
Spirituality—especially in its relational, non-religious form—is not a fringe concern. By measuring connectedness, we begin to make the invisible visible. We hope this work affirms what many already feel: that healing begins when we stop treating people as problems to be solved, and start meeting them as souls in the process of becoming.