What Is Spirituality?
Everything is Spiritual. Spiritus, filled with breath.
This is my personal reminder.
Spirituality is a personal journey towards connecting first to self, then to others & finally to the world around you. Our mind, body & breath, each of these must be cared for, nurtured, and experienced in its full spectrum of highs and lows. Contrast sharpens desire they say.
Spirituality isn’t about connecting to an anthropomorphized version of God but to an everyday version of your Divine Self. One that is allowed to evolve from moment to moment. Spirituality is not a belief, it’s an approach. Instead of WWJD (What Would Jesus Do), it’s What would I as God do?
How would I connect with my daily tasks, work, meetings, and conversations with my kids, family & friends as this highest version? What would I say if there was no fear, anxiety, or shame attached? No guilt to motivate. No persons to please or persuade. If there was no suffering to uphold. No attachment to cling to. No expectations to carry, how would I show up?
“Say yes to a life that is truly satiating and no to one that fails to curb the pangs of starvation.”
To know truth is to be curious of truth. Spirituality is the search for and discovery of Truth, and ultimately, it’s the process of awakening to Love. For the first time, many of us will taste what true unconditional love is. You can only chase a dangling carrot for so long until you find another way to feed the hunger within. To say yes to a life that is truly satiating and no to one that fails to curb the pangs of starvation. This is our quest, as Divinely Human beings with access to infinite creativity- how & what will we infuse our Spirit into? And better yet, how will this act of accepting our omnipotence evolve humanity?
God comes to us through us as us. But before we can approach the grandiosity of this statement, we have to meet ourselves where we are right now. Listen, take the time to better understand, become familiar with the fear that lurks beneath. Start simply, softly, and slowly. The best thing about spirituality is there is no finish line. It just doesn’t exist. In the beginning that might induce panic because it doesn’t reflect the safety we’ve found through our empty reward system in society, but the shackles that are released knowing that you’re no longer tied to that dangling carrot, that you can actually eat, this is true liberation.
What does being at war with self look like?
What happens when we are divided against ourselves?
What happens when we close the gap and unify the Self?
What does it take to do this?
Introspection, meditation, contemplation, the process of active listening, the metamorphosis of life. Instead of getting entangled in the tension of control or relying on only one way of being, we take the raw, messy, human material and use it to create a conscious life. The Japanese have a technique called Kintsugi where shards of broken pottery are carefully pieced back together using melted precious metals like platinum, silver & gold. Forming a mosaic of new life and reminding us that nothing is ever truly broken nor separated only waiting to be recognized as whole again.
Spirituality isn’t dogma or propaganda, it’s the living philosophy that makes life both expansive and practical. Made not to be confined to theory or idea but infused generously into our everyday lives. It invites us to witness the miraculous in the mundane and gifts us a pathway to become more of ourselves. If there is judgment of self in your spiritual practice, pause. Step away. God does not require self-abandonment to prove its power, although it’s in those moments of forgetfulness we’re most open to it. This is a buoyant practice that is designed to unearth more of who you were created to be and less of who the world told you had to be. Practice doesn’t make perfect in this. Practice only makes embodied. Strong in the knowing that peace exists. Not attained by the endless cycle of doing & fixing but in the remembrance that everything in form is a reflection of you. There is only one.
What is self-love & how do we learn to love ourselves? After years of asking, it finally dawned on me. Self-love is only hard when you’re trying to love a self that isn’t you. When you are devoted to separation, comparison & soul mutilation. When you look out into the world and only see indifference, survival & chaos. I learned that self-love is a result of a harmonious ecosystem. A cultivated & highly curated inner atmosphere. A nourished spirit, still breath, calm mind, well body. Self-love is what allows us to receive one another’s individual expression as a feast instead of a famine. As unity instead of division. And as friends instead of foes.
So, step 1, know thyself. Step 2, see that Self as God. Step 3, live your life as God.
Photos by Jocelyn Morales