For over 20 years I’ve been attending business seminars and writing goals in five categories, including personal, business, financial, family, and spiritual. I’ve never had any trouble writing goals in the first four categories, but I’ve always felt a little lost writing spiritual goals. I was raised in a Christian church and over the course of my lifetime I have enjoyed learning the teachings of many other religions. Not feeling compelled towards any particular organized religion, I have historically made the spiritual category about being a good person. The goals I wrote were generally about volunteering my time or making financial contributions to charity.
However, I am beginning to sense that these goals are more about significance and not about spirituality. Significance is doing good, so we can feel important. There are many positives that have come with the “good deed doing,” as the Wizard of Oz would say. But what I am discovering is that spirituality is more about alignment of mind, body, heart and soul. That alignment brings authenticity and an acceptance of who we are as we are. It seems that it’s possible to be spiritual without religion or to be religious without being spiritual. Of course, one can most certainly be both spiritual and religious at the same time. I’m just not sure these two things are mutually exclusive.
I am also discovering that spirituality is about love, acceptance, peace of mind, wholeness, and oneness. In order to experience this type of spirituality, we must employ acceptance (non-judgment) and gracious amounts of forgiveness. We must be quick to forgive ourselves and other. Otherwise our hearts become hardened which can block the flow of love. Compassion and empathy are natural effects of free-flowing love.
Perhaps spirituality is not just what you believe, but rather how that belief impacts your ability to love. A deeply spiritual person is a deeply loving person. The more we are able to accept ourselves and others for who we are, the more blocks we are able to remove and the more loving we become. To me, this is spirituality.
Photo by Ashley Batz on Unsplash
