This study explored women’s transformative experiences while distance running in nature from the perspectives of embodiment and psychospiritual development. The research method used was intuitive inquiry, a hermeneutical approach in which the researcher begins with her own subjective experience and invites transformation in dialogue with participants. Twenty-three women aged 28–64 described their transformative experiences while distance running in nature using embodied writing (Anderson, 2001), and responded in writing to interview questions that contextualized and gave additional meaning to their transformative experiences. Five final interpretive lenses indicate that (1) during a transformative experience while distance running in nature, women enter into 2 or more states of attunement—intrapersonal, interpersonal, trans-species, or transterra—that open a core spiritual sense of interconnectedness with herself, human others, animals, and the earth; (2) during a transformative experience while distance running in nature women experienced moments of feeling filled with faith, gratitude, grace, or love, which may become sustained transpersonal traits in her life; (3) distance running in nature as a spiritual practice potentiates transformative processes of individuation, self-healing, and “becoming animal” (Abram, 2010) that contribute to women’s deepening embodiment and continuing psychospiritual development; (4) women who engage in distance running in nature as an ongoing spiritual practice often cultivate a recognizable, embodied core spirituality; and (5) women’s transformative experiences while distance running in nature, and participation in this study, generated a shift from an externalized spiritual authority to one that was embodied and participatory with nature as authoritative.
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