What IS Spirituality, Really?

Spirituality is a topic that can be really difficult to talk about, because everyone has their own definition of what it is.

Which in many ways, is actually a very GOOD thing.

If you don’t want to take the time to read this entire blog series, I will sum it all up here for you - Spirituality is and should be a very personalized, individual experience. It’s not something that anyone should feel like they ‘have’ to participate in, and there should be a freedom of expression within spirituality that makes room for each individual to have their own experience of it. 

So to define spirituality isn’t really what I’m attempting to do here because again, I don’t think there is a ‘wrong’ or a ‘right’ way to have YOUR experience of this difficult to describe phenomenon.

That being said, for the purpose of this article series, I’m wanting to create some space for us to explore together how we can frame the idea of spirituality in a way that makes it a little more practical and down to earth than it may otherwise be for a lot of us, and I want to give us some room to explore what spirituality may NOT actually be - so that we can understand why we may not be feeling nourished and supported by our current spiritual practices.

I mean this in the sense that when we can start to identify where our ‘spirituality’ isn’t actually something that’s serving to improve our lives, expand our view or giving us something of actual value, but is really our cultural values disguised as spirituality - we will start to see where we are being ROBBED of what COULD be a very beautiful experience. So when I say that something ‘isn’t spirituality’ - I don’t mean that in a way to shame anyone who does filter their spirituality in these ways - what I am wanting to point out is that there may be something MORE and something DEEPER that ultimately will feel BETTER for those trapped in these ‘false’ spiritual teachings. I am simply trying to shed some light on the idea that spirituality can and is manipulated to be something that is used as a weapon against us vs. being something that actually enriches us - and I want to shed light on that for anyone who is feeling that they want spirituality in their life, but that the way they are being taught to seek it is making them feel WORSE rather than BETTER.

Why Is Spirituality So Complicated?

This concept of spirituality can get unnecessarily heady and complex for a multitude of reasons. 

We live in what is ultimately a pretty chaotic world where we are all having a unique experience of reality. 

We are constantly bombarded with contradicting ideas about what’s right and wrong, what’s good and bad, what will and won’t get our needs met and this drives us into a state of confusion and searching that can easily lead us to a place of being spiritual seekers who seek and seek and seek but never ‘arrive’ anywhere satisfying. 

We have pain that we can’t always understand, control or prevent, and this leads us to looking for a spiritual answer that will help us deal with what we’re facing in a way that soothes and comforts us.

We have an existential awareness that we can and will suffer, that we can and will die and that everyone we know and love can and will suffer and die - but we don’t have enough awareness that we know WHY all of this happens, how to control it, or what it all MEANS for us.

We have a tendency to project ourselves and our experience out ‘onto the Universe/God’ without realizing that we’re doing it, and this can muddy the waters when it comes to understanding what is a true ‘connection’ experience, a true ‘reality’ experience, and what’s just our wishful thinking/current view of how the world works being made into a Universal truth.

We have a tendency to want to remove ourselves from aspects of self and life that hurt - and we can sometimes use spirituality as our ‘reason’ for why we are dissociating/attempting to escape from what we can’t actually dissociate or escape from. We can use spirituality as the reason we are avoiding life - and this often leads again to deep levels of pain and dissatisfaction that can be interpreted as ‘failing to be spiritual enough’ rather than being seen for what it is - the pain of denying what can’t be denied. 

Our spirituality, like everything else in our world, has also been run through the value systems of our culture - and in this way it’s been cheapened and made into another money making/get rich/get popular scheme - obfuscating any actual benefit of a spiritual practice and boiling it down to how much your spiritual practices can make you fit into the systems of dominance and manufactured discontent we are swimming in.

Along with all of this, we are human beings that - for better or worse - have what appears to be a unique to us trait where we make MEANING out of life and its occurrences.

We don’t just experience what is, we don’t go through the motions of our existence, one thing to the next allowing it to be what it is and then moving on.

Rather we draw connections between this and that event. We come up with all sorts of stories about ‘why’ such and such is or isn’t happening. We invent narratives about what everything means about us as individuals. We recognize patterns and see cause and effect relationships - and this informs how we view what we’ve been through as well as how we expect the future to play out.

We all have a perceptual filter that distorts reality and this perception is built on all sorts of complex factors - our intelligence levels, what we have and haven’t been exposed to/experienced in the past, what others have told us about what things mean, our pain and pleasure levels, what we have been trained to believe ‘reality’ is, our biases, our resistances, our ability or lack of ability to process what’s happening to and around us, how we have learned to cope with life and a multitude of other things.

We all have a desire to feel good, and feeling good is also a complex mechanism. It involves our physical selves - getting our basic needs met and feeling that we have a secure ability to get those base needs met in the future - our mental selves - needing adequate stimulation but not too much, to be growing and learning without feeling out of our depths and to have a sense that our perception of reality are true enough that we can predict our lives to a relatively accurate degree - our emotional selves - which need connection, space, expression, the ability to process and the capacity to embody and work through all that is going to arise in us via our experiences - and our spiritual selves that need to feel a connection to a larger purpose or meaning. With this, all of us have varying levels of what is and isn’t satisfying for us in each of these categories and there’s really no rulebook or one-size-fits-all method of making us feel good at all times.

We are complex beings living in a complex reality within a complex society.

So there is a LOT of reason for finding that our spirituality will also be deeply complex.

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Next week we are going to look at how all of this can drive us into a state of ‘spiritual materialism’ and how this may not serve us the way we think it will.

For now, let’s just hold space for the idea that we are complex beings, having a complex experience and that this is going to mean that our spirituality is also complex!

See you next week for a deep dive into spiritual materialism.

<3