An honest exploration of wholeness would be incomplete without giving some thought to the role of spirituality and its potential for supporting human life. As an experience, it’s a quality that’s had deep influence on our understanding of being human. However, it’s also a word and subject that carries a lot of baggage at the moment! Even though it’s a topic I care about a lot and has been a central part of my work so far, I feel the need to be careful in my approach.
On the one hand, we have a problem with meaning: twenty people see the word “spiritual” and have twenty separate definitions. I’m also aware that we live in a time in which spirituality can be seen in a particular light in our modern culture: be it indifference, suspicion, or avoidance altogether.
There are good reasons for these attitudes: human history is full of people using spiritual values and ideas to harm or manipulate others, which naturally wears on our interest and motivation in exploring the subject. We have examples of people who use spirituality solely for themselves, as a way of gaining attention or popularity rather than for a larger purpose. It’s also become something to brand, market, and sell: promises of enlightenment and guarantees of permanent happiness set behind paywalls. At least right now, spirituality is a word that can spark any number of misgivings.
Nevertheless, I’d like to make the case that it’s something that’s worth a genuine rediscovery in our current era: but only if it represents and supports something meaningful in our lives. It’s impossible to have a sense of how something works if you don’t have an understanding that you can relate to. In my own work, I’ve met dozens of people who identified themselves as “spiritual but not religious”: people who all had a keen desire for some kind of deeper relationship to life, but didn’t know how to articulate or follow their instincts. The urge was there, but the support didn’t seem to be available or responsive to the interest.
I think this is in part why a significant number of people today resonate with these between-spaces like spiritual but not religious: their instincts aren’t being met with fresh language and definitions that actually speak to what they’re looking for in life. As long as spirituality feels like this strange, vaguely threatening or awkward dimension, there’s really no reason to think about what it can do for us.
I should be clear that I’m not talking about formal religion here, but it’s worth pointing out that the decision to label oneself as “spiritual but not religious” makes a clear distinction. Exploring that distinction is beyond the scope of what I’m hoping to speak to, but it’s important to acknowledge that it’s there.** What I think it’s communicating is that (and this is still true for me) many of us are in a state of questioning: trying to ask good questions about our place in the universe and what that means for us.
Despite the lack of clarity and misuse around some of our current understandings of spirituality, I believe there’s an authentic need for an existence that has this kind of orientation. Each of us desires, love, connection, and encouragement in life. Whatever our life is; we want to be in relationship to it, fully. Being a passive consumer of our experience simply doesn’t work for us, and I think it’s easy to see that living in that way is incomplete. We may be able to satisfy our material needs and entertain ourselves to no end, but is that enough? Is that what love and connection look like? Do these things allow us to grow, to discover, to meet the challenges of life?
Spirituality is simply a framework for living our lives fully, pursuing those instincts that we have for depth and transforming them into quality connections with the full context of life as we experience it. It involves honesty towards ourselves, integrity towards others, and it’s creative in nature. Perhaps this can be our working definition for the time being; because at its essence, that’s really all we’re talking about. Keeping it simple is important as a starting point, because I think our definitions of spirituality can be too big and vague at times to experience something tangible, something we can actually connect with. With that in mind, let’s take a step back and use this definition as a template moving forward. I’m not at all attached to this and you’re welcome to replace these words with ones that resonate with you:
Our Working Definition of Spirituality:
A life of honesty towards oneself, integrity toward others, and creative in nature.
OR (to state the same thing in a different way),
A life that’s self-aware, understanding**, and curious.
What you’ll notice almost immediately is that this could look like anything. Anything! It does not require a three month meditation retreat, or a degree, or booking a flight to India. We have a mind and a heart, and so any of us can learn to be self-aware, understanding, and curious exactly as we are with whatever it is that we do in life.
The other thing worth noting is that this definition points to awareness, or paying attention. For me personally, that’s how I would describe 95% of what I consider to be my spiritual practice. Simply paying attention to my life, being aware of what’s going on. All the ordinary things, the exciting things, the thoughts, emotions, people, changes, frustrations. As I notice things, I become more interested, and my connections to life grow as a result. All that other stuff, in my case the Buddhist studies and going on meditation retreats and so forth: that’s the other 5%. It’s an important part of my life, but not more important than washing my dishes, having a conversation at dinner with friends, shopping at the grocery store.
Often, we look at the 5% and think that’s what spirituality is. We think it’s all about looking a certain way, acting a certain way, being a certain way. That “way” compels us because it seems cool, attractive, mysterious, whatever. We focus on that, and treat the 95%, the entire rest of our life, as if that’s what’s getting in the way of us meeting the spiritual. We’ve missed the forest for the trees, so to speak. It’s not about the bells and whistles, or having a lightning-bolt encounter with God, it’s about discovering what matters to us, and using that as our compass through life.
One of my professors put it this way: “I know some excellent meditators who are real jerks. They’re great at meditating, but as soon as they get off the cushion, they go right back to being jerks to people around them!”. If we think it’s all about mastering meditation, getting certified in yoga, or finding a teacher at the top of a mountain, we’re missing something valuable (and we might end up becoming jerks in the process).
So if we’re just starting out (and this perspective is useful no matter where you’re at), a more simplified and realistic approach towards spirituality can be quite helpful. The quote at the top of the page comes from my heart teacher**, the Venerable Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. He summarizes this approach much better than I can. We can see that for him, spirituality is very simple and not anything removed from what we already experience. “Mindfulness” means paying attention, to what we’re doing while it’s happening. As we practice this, even the smallest things become doorways to connection and meaning. “Holy” is another way of saying we respect what our life is like in that moment, and “sacred” just means it matters a lot to us.
We can’t discover what truly matters to us if we’re not paying attention. At a basic level, I think we can feel how hard it is to live with divided attention, to be constantly unaware yet compelled by our thoughts, feelings, and deeper emotions. When we’re not present to what we do and who we are, life can pass us by. We lose the ability to tune into what our life is saying to us, and how we’re responding to it. We don’t recognize how we build our habits, or why we react in the ways that we do, or what we are looking for as we make our choices. In that confusion, we just hope the next “thing” (the next episode, the next scroll on our app of choice, the next vacation, etc.) will sort things out for us. The open question is whether that works for us, or if there’s an opportunity to experience something different.
On the larger scale, I feel that many of our current crises: endless war, environmental catastrophe, you name it; continue to exist because we’re not encouraged to discover meaning and value within life itself. In our current situation, life is not sacred; life is something to consume, not enough from the very beginning, and therefore a struggle to get as much as you can. With these collective values, spirituality is naturally rejected because there really isn’t a place for it: why care when it’s more convenient, more comfortable, more profitable not to care?
