Inner Life in a Restless World
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
— Anaïs Nin
A Quiet Shift in Belief
Across cultures, something subtle is unfolding.
People are seeking greater depth and meaning. Not through institutions, but through practice. Not through belief, but through how they attend to inner life and to the world around them.
This is the cultural condition of ‘spiritual yearning’: a movement emerging not from doctrine, but from a growing pull towards inner life that feels true, integrated, and alive.
In recent decades, the number of people identifying as spiritual but not religious (SBNR) has risen dramatically to almost half of the population in the UK, and almost a quarter of the population in the USA.*
These are not fringe statistics.
They mark a shift in the cultural imagination.
This shift signals more than a rejection of religion. It invites a profound rethinking of how we understand inner life, the sacred, reverence, and living with uncertainty.
A Movement Rooted in Longing
The $9 trillion global wellness industry has become a modern sanctuary for many. Practices like meditation, contemplation, visualisation, and journaling speak to a desire for deeper, richer inner life.
In the absence of inherited belief systems, wellness practices offer glimpses of something deeper.
Rituals of attention, intention, and openness.
But what often goes unnamed is the longing beneath these rituals. A yearning not for optimisation, but for orientation. Not just to feel better, but to feel real.
Spiritual yearning is this pull towards the secular sacred. For meaning that holds, for practices that matter, for coherence in a world of fragmentation.