What is spirituality?

Spirituality is each day life. It is kindness. It is acceptance. It is exercise and it is enlightenment, as nicely as the reverse of all these.

Spirituality is a redundant term, since, considerably like enjoy, it has been overused. If we are to use it with any specificity, as I consider we ought to, we need to have to collect together all I have just mentioned, together with the disparate definitions offered by others who are worried with the so-called higher worlds and undertake a property-clearing, so that we know what we are speaking about. If not, let’s think of a new term completely! –simply because the purpose of language is to talk.

These days we have a Tower of Babel situation just look around at the vast array of religious academics, spiritual traditions, new and ancient spiritual philosophies which are sometimes puzzled, vague or obtuse, but often perplexing. If we are to genuinely talk, I don’t believe that spirituality must be any distinct to cooking or medicine or politics. Inside of these spheres of endeavor, if you are as confused as individuals seem to be in the spiritual sphere, we would be speaking nonsense with devastating effects.

So what is the definition we need to use to notify us?

Spirituality is the expression that describes the higher performing of human beings. With out a spiritual dimension, human beings are engaged exclusively with animalistic concerns, like belonging to a group, mating and procreation, acquisition and bodily stability. In the intermediate phases of human growth we are concerned with identity, socialization, compassion for others and person obligation. Non secular philosophies and methodologies are those which envelope all of these and go on to believe a higher aspiration for human fulfillment, an intrinsic require, felt by several, that we are a lot more than we seem to be to be and that the planet of appearances is not all there is.

Like Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?

Of course, like self-actualization and peak activities in Maslow’s product. But also like the insights of the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, the Training course in Miracles, Zen Buddhism, mystical Christianity, Sufism, and on and on by way of transpersonal methods and religious maps too quite a few to point out. But what they have in frequent is human beings striving for the final knowing in the belief that something elusive that is beyond the planet of appearances gives that means and importance to daily life.

Why is spirituality a concern of reasonably couple of individuals?

Spirituality is common. It is everyone’s concern to uncover who they genuinely are, through physical, psychological, psychological, soulful and non secular amounts of the human predicament. We can’t judge how personal folks are engaged with this, but arguably what ever a individual is performing — pondering, working, forming interactions, vacationing — is an endeavor to stability, have interaction with and comprehend self and the planet. It really is a reaction to the silent, tacit issue of existence.

And that query is?

Who am I? No one is totally free of the consequences of this query. The only difference is in how we choose to answer it in self-referral, self-definition or self-transcendence.

What about the etymological origins of the phrase? Spirit means breath, does not it?

Spiritusmeans breath and espiritus signifies the breath of God, which is the phrase from which we derive our phrase inspiration. So spirit is about breath, the divine breath prajna, the interchange with the universe we expertise when we breathe in and breathe out. When I breathe in the universe breathes out or inspires me when I breathe out the universe breathes in or I encourage it. Which is it? From the non secular standpoint there is no distinction, because the universe and I are the same.

Spirituality then is about a romantic relationship in between soul, spirit and entire body?

Spirituality is also associated with questing in the type of a journey. It appears that we have to undertake a religious voyage, a quest, or some type of ordeal in which we are transformed in some way by way of struggling. The ahead shifting narrative of that ordeal, the active research for that enterprise has been essential to notions of spirituality for generations. Depending on in which and when we ended up introduced up it took the sort of the Pilgrim’s Development, the Ramayana, the legend of Siddhartha, Dante’s journey via the underworld, the Native American eyesight quest and so on. What every of these narratives has in typical is the theory concept of striving in direction of a non secular aim by means of effortful persistence, sturdy will and determination.

Curiously really handful of of these religious maps see outside of effort. It is as if we are rewarded only when we push ourselves difficult. Nevertheless spiritual realization alone is epitomized by acceptance, receptivity, gentleness and surrender — all quite delicate attributes. Reading through these accounts you would feel that the only way to heaven is by means of hell.

And just isn’t it?

Heaven and hell are points of see. You enter both 1 in any minute through your predisposition, which hinges on your attachment to the ego, or separation from the rest of existence. As diverse illustrations, both Jacques Lusseyrian during his incarceration in World War II and St John of the Cross in a Toledo jail in the Sixteenth Century seasoned profound non secular and divine epiphanies, in spite of enduring the most horrendous actual physical and mental mistreatment. Another illustration is Laurens van de Post who taught hundreds of POWs in Java to resist bitterness and forgive their captors so that they survived the ordeal psychologically and emotionally intact, through adopting a non secular approach.

Does spirituality entail disidentification from the physique?

Relatively you relate spiritually to your human body, as well as to every little thing else. What this means is that you heart oneself in the essence that is typical to almost everything that arises in consciousness and feeling the resource of all that occurs.

Every little thing that occurs at some point also ends?

But that which has no ending is the essence of spirituality. The religious quest is to uncover and become one particular with the source of consciousness, the root of consideration. Spirituality lies amongst what we contact the mystical and transcendence it is not an end in by itself, our intention need to not be simply to apply spirituality, but to penetrate further to in which it leads. So, our understanding of mysticism, or the self-directed mystical path (as distinctive from a spiritual route), qualified prospects us on a religious journey to self-transcendence and the conference with the Divine.

For some this is God, for other folks Buddha Mother nature, infinity, the Absolute or Brahman. But all of these phrases are mental constructs they are basically ideas. There is only 1 proper response to a conference with the Divine — awe-motivated, mystical, respiration silence, because in that fantastic calm one lastly encounters one’s correct self, which is past ideas of mind, interpretation and description.

Spirituality leads to a assembly with the Divine?

Or a meeting with your self it’s the very same point. To know yourself, to uncover out who you actually are you must employ religious strategies, continue being constant to a spiritual practice, but then you have to shed that follow, leave it totally to get there in the location it has been using you. This is one of the difficulties in the Contemporary Period, as nicely as in historical moments. Men and women are loath to ruin they’d relatively develop up. Right now we contact it materialism. Chögyam Trungpaeven coined the term ‘spiritual materialism’ to describe how religious practitioners grow to be hooked up to their accomplishments and their follow.

Spirituality is worried mainly with internal elements of the human becoming. It is real that a religious getting exhibits certain characteristics, like enjoy, gentleness, compassion and forgiveness. But none of these are worth anything at all until they are authentic, really seasoned from the coronary heart center of the person exhibiting them. To engage with the coronary heart middle a single of the insights we need to experience is that we do not absence… something! Nothing at all in any respect is wanting in the human encounter when it is felt, witnessed, touched and skilled totally. When this insight has been understood entirely, a single has this encounter of internal emptiness it is profoundly receptive and resonating and it permits you to relate authentically with the rest of the world. It is the condition of becoming-ness within you, with no exercise, restlessness of any sort, without disturbance — internal or outer — it is sound, unwavering you would not even call it religious, it would be a lot more actual really to contact it one’s all-natural condition.

Is this ‘natural state’ offered to all?

Of course of program. But you have to want it, and you have to want it terribly. Also you need to possess an interior integrity, a deep honesty about it and you must take no substitutes! Simply because the non secular route is beset with this sort of interruptions, issues, seductions and pretenses, urgings of the ego to permit it all go and settle for some quasi-non secular condition that would be exalted from the point of view of the amateur, the person who aspires to the spiritual benefits of the path.

What can you do in this quasi-religious state?

Set up as a spiritual teacher! Engage in excellent, tell individuals what to do, entice other folks to act as followers or disciples, compose a book about your ‘spiritual’ ordeals, your enlightenment, whilst all the time you are simply preening your ego. It is hardly uncommon in this dark time the period of time the Hindus predicted we would be in now — the kali yuga.

But the curiosity in spirituality, meditation and yoga is absolutely growing?

Effectively, desire isn’t really necessarily sufficient. The spiritual globe is entire of dilettantes and satisfaction-seekers and self-aggrandizement. This is not to detract from the sincere practitioners, the utilized kinds, but even there you see you can occur throughout an moi lure, because some people’s ego is held alive by enticements like ‘I will in no way succeed’, ‘I’m not great enough’ — it is basically the antithesis of ‘Look how fantastic I am’, ‘I have succeeded since I am better than the rest’. Spiritually there is no difference in between these two details of look at they both provide the preening of the moi point out.

So what ought to we do? I am commencing to see what you indicate about the religious route currently being beset by seductions.

Never be seduced, implement yourself diligently, do not cease till you get to the end of your religious journey, pick a teaching and a trainer that makes feeling and don’t consider anything on encounter value, fairly question everything and don’t feel for a moment that you can do it on your very own.

Everyone demands a expert?

Everybody wants assistance from an individual who capabilities as a teacher in their lifestyle and on their spiritual route, to preside over their non secular endeavor and correct and motivate and question and cajole and give a model of an authentic human currently being in the planet. This is how we maintain religion, know that it is possible to do well and cultivate the motivation and braveness to carry on.

Richard Harvey, Psychotherapist, Author and Religious Trainer, makes the connection between counseling and psychotherapy and religious growth. He speaks specifically to people who are looking for more than they have discovered in remedy. And gives smudge spray to individuals searching for to undertake the inner journey – advice free of dogma and grounded in what numerous of us encounter as the “messiness” of our personalities.