What is Spirituality?
Spirituality is how you understand your place in, and your relationship to the world around you and your own inner world. It can be defined and expressed in a wide range of ways. This can be individual or be a shared experience through a group, an organisation, a religion, practice or a culture.
Spirituality create a sense of wholeness, identity and wellbeing. It’s about how you relate, think and feel about life and its challenges, how you approach life, about your actions and having love for others and yourself.
It is much more than this simple explanation and as it is a personal thing – everyone expresses their spirituality differently.
We are a vast universe of possibilities and when we open to it, allow the unfolding, we are no longer limited to what we have, nor even what we don’t have, what we have become or want to become. We can change!
Choice is a great gift of human consciousness, we can choose to be free from the shackles we put on ourselves.
Freedom
Freedom is like a bird flying in the vastness sky – no limitations, only open space in every direction. So it is with us, we always have choice, choice in every direction, if only peel back the veil, remove the blinkers from our eyes and stop dancing around the outside of the circle, caught on the periphery of our lives.
There comes a time when we dive right into the centre of the circle of ourselves, find our wings and truly fly. We find the being we truly want to be and live the life our heart most desires. Our possibilities become limitless, our ideas possible, our future imaginable, our world universal, because we not only are deeply connected within ourselves, we are deeply connected to the whole.
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.”
– Albert Einstein
The Essential Self
“Above the cloud with its shadow is the star with its light. Above all things reverence thyself”.
– Pythagoras
The self is the most fundamental psychological experience we can have: crystal clear, limpid consciousness.
The self/soul can be defined as the only part of us, which remains forever the same. It is this sameness which once found and fully experienced, acts as an ever-present pivot for the rest of the personality, an inner stronghold to which we can always refer in order to regain a sense of poise and self-consistency. Then we can see that the Self remains the same in ecstasy and despair, in peace and turmoil, in pain and pleasure, in victory and defeat.
The Self is consciousness in its essential state, undiluted, chemically pure
Remember that the Self/Soul is not something we have to struggle for or look for outside ourselves. We are the Self at all times. We just have to remember and become aware.
The Self is reflected in the personal self, which is more accessible to direct experience. There are not really two selves, two independent and separate identities. The Self is one; it manifests in different degrees of awareness. The personal self is a reflection and only appears to be self-existent
When we persistently identify with a part of ourselves:
- A body state tends to become a tension
- A feeling tends to become a hang-up
- A desire tends to become a compulsive craving
- An opinion tends to become a prejudice
- A role tends to become a mask
Conversely, by turning back to the self, we allow our hang-ups to become feelings again, our prejudices to become opinions, and so forth
The Art of Joy
There is a difference between moments of fleeting happiness and joy sounding from a fulfilled heart.
What is it your heart desires to express?
Imagine waking in the morning, carrying through the day and falling asleep at night with a joy filled heart.
This comes only with a deep sense of fulfilment or knowing we are on purpose. It is a quality of our inner self expressing. Joy can only be opened or awakened or likewise closed or limited by ourselves. It is not dependant on circumstances outside of ourselves.
This joy does not stop because we do not achieve our goal, it does not stop because our relationship fails to meet our expectations, it does not stop because we are having a bad hair day. True joyfulness comes from deep within and no event or circumstance can stop the flow of joy within us.
Joy differs from happiness, as happiness can and usually is dependent on some external force; happy with friends, happy with a job, happy doing something… just happy.
In today’s world success is striven for, it is hungered for, we chase it thinking that once we have it, it will bring satisfaction, but generally what it brings is more chasing for more success and more things. For success alone cannot bring fulfilment, however, fulfilment can bring success.
When we are truly on track and our heart is full things flow, life flows. We are somehow in harmony with our life and thus the world around us.
There is a gentle rhythm to it all and somehow our heart sings. This is joy, it is the joy of being.
