«What Does It Mean to Be Spiritual?” My Brother Asked Across the Dinner Table
Exploring the relationship with my God Within
Me in a last summer-moment on a hilltop close to where I live
Some months ago, my father suddenly turned to me over dinner and offered to sponsor my priest studies. I blinked and looked at him, surprised. Father, I cannot become a priest, I answered him. I'm not a Christian.
What is your religion then? my younger brother wondered. Cause you are religious, no? You do yoga and prayers and stuff.
I don’t really have a religion, I answered him. I'm what we call… spiritual.
What does that really mean?
I love my brother for asking questions like that.
My God Within
The last years, my foundation of both my working and my private life has become deeply spiritual. When I perform, when I write, when I socialize, when I sit drinking tea, I am dancing with my God Within. She is the one who brings meaning and purpose to my life.
But my God Within – as I tried explaining my family - is no Christian God, nor Hindu nor Muslim nor any other religious God. I am no follower of religion. Quite the contrary: I see religion as a spirituality-gone-astray-systems, which in most cases encourages their devotees to DISMISS their god within, and surrender to outer religious authorities instead.
My God exists within, and is available to me all the time I choose to listen! My God Within is my inner voice, my spirit, my nature, she who guides my life and carries my life force energy, she who IS me, and yet is much bigger than me.
My God Within expresses herself through me, yet she exists far beyond the limits of my physical presence.
Befriending my God Within, I have embraced the possibility that there is much more going on to life than what I can see and hear. I think there are good chances I will live again - and I make my choices according to that possibility. Also: I believe in a form of karma; that my actions may have consequences beyond what my conscious mind is able to fathom.
My God Within is teaching me (and it might be one of her toughest and most gracious lessons) to embrace both the light and the dark – and stay present to them both. It's a form of spiritual chemistry, you could say: of attempting to EMBRACE and ACCEPT whatever happens, and open up for there to be potentials in EVERYTHING that comes my way, no matter how it appears initially.
My dance with My God Within has led me to take choices during the last years who otherwise would have been without sense - and she has really taken me on quite a journey.
Spirituality is nothing fancy. It’s just about knowing ME!
I'm still practicing how to explain my spirituality to people casually and precisely – like to my family over the dinner table.
And really, sometimes I find it more precise to not mention anything about my spirituality at all – cause people put me into all kinds of boxes when I do.
It's not MY fault, I want to proclaim, that there are so many absurd ideas circulating about what spirituality is.
On one hand, I observe spiritual people who carry all these fancy near-illusory ideas of what spirituality is: ideas about connecting with our higher selves wrapped in layers and layers of magic, mysteriousness and glitter. It makes me wanna puke, I'm sorry. On the other hand (or maybe it’s just the other side of that same coin), I see deeply spiritual people who have completely bypassed the beauties and opportunities of physical reality, living lives that seem dry and dull, lacking the juice of life force energy. I don’t get that.
To me, spirituality is very simple: it’s my devotion to know, to become and to live as the greatest expression of ME. It has nothing to do with any outer God or any fancy tricks or “amazing” experiences. It has a lot to do with making my life work out for me. But really, the most important thing to say about my spirituality is: My spirituality is my surrender to feeling – the feeling of ME.
And… my spirituality changes everything - because it inspires me to explore life, beyond merely surviving it.
