A spiritual journey of an Indonesian woman: The evidence through literature from a psychospiritual perspective

Abstract

AbstractRecently, the study of women has been widely discussed worldwide in various perspectives. One of them is the study of women through a literary perspective. In this regard, this article aims to explore women who seek identity through a psychospiritual perspective using the medium of literature. This study combines psychology and the spiritual dimension as a transpersonal approach. Specifically, this article explores the spiritual journey of an Indonesian woman through fiction, which is depicted in a novel entitled Partikel by Dewi Lestari. This study applied a qualitative method to present the result in a descriptive-interpretative way. A documentative technique was used as an instrument to collect data. Meanwhile, the data analysis technique was conducted through data identification, classification, reduction, and explanation stages. The results of the study revealed the following findings. First, the character Zarah was not brave enough to choose her spiritual path in her childhood stage. Second, in her adolescence stage, Zarah started openly exposing her spiritual path by worshipping mushrooms. Third, Zarah experimented on her spiritual journey by eating the sacred mushroom to carry out a holy pilgrimage in her adulthood stage. This study has implications for psychospiritual studies in the context of women’s literature and for the development of future literary studies.

Keywords

• spiritual journey
• transpersonal
• psychospiritual
• Indonesian woman
• literature