“A Religious Community That You Used to Have”

Abstract

This study examines the extent to which the experiences of The Jellies, a women’s ocean-swimming community in Australia, demonstrate the attributes of feminist ecospirituality. Drawing on ecofeminist theory, feminist spirituality, and qualitative data from surveys, group communications, and media, the research explores how spirituality is enacted beyond institutional religion. The findings show that participants exercised spiritual agency by identifying, naming, and interpreting meaning through embodied, relational, and ecological experiences rather than patriarchal religious institutions. Swimming together fostered trust, belonging, and shared vulnerability, constituting a communal spiritual practice grounded in connection with Water, community, and the more-than-human world. Sensory immersion positioned the body as an ecological site of knowing and transformation, while attentiveness to marine life cultivated an ethic of care and reciprocity. Interpreted through ecofeminist theory and Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’, the findings illustrate an integral ecology lived through everyday practice, challenging dualisms of body and spirit, human and nature, belief and practice.