Spirituality Is What?
I recently heard Gregg Braden say something about spirituality that made me think, Wait, what?
He said, “Spirituality is about understanding the relationship we have to ourselves and everything else, even to the past and future.”
That definition sounds considerably different from how spirituality is often defined today. Currently, there seems to be a belief that spirituality is something we seek, something we attain, something we become more accomplished at. There are levels and stages and degrees of enlightenment. People are more evolved or less evolved, more awake or less awake, farther along or not quite there yet. There always seems to be somewhere else to get to.
But Gregg wasn’t talking about getting anywhere. He was talking about relationship.
Relationship with ourselves. Relationship with each other. Relationship with the Earth, with the past and the future.
My curiosity always keeps me searching, especially when something makes me stop and think, Wait, what? I want to know more. I started looking at what the word spirituality actually meant and where it came from.
Spirit comes through the Latin spiritus—breath, breathing, the breath of life—from spirare, to breathe.
Wait a minute. Somewhere I remember that. Somewhere inside me I remember that.
Breath has been connected with life force for thousands of years. Greek and Hebrew both have words that carry the meanings of breath, wind and spirit. Even our everyday words still carry pieces of it. Inspiration. Respiration. Expiration. To breathe in. To breathe out.
Maybe that’s why something in me recognized it.
Breath. Life. Spirit.
Suddenly I had an entirely different question.
What if being spiritual is simply being alive?
Before I can understand my relationship with anyone or anything, I have to be here. I have to exist. I have to take breath.
We participate in experiential relationships constantly. I’m participating in a relationship with another person when we’re sitting across a table talking. I’m participating with an animal when we’re interacting. I’m participating with the Earth, with my body, with food, with whatever is happening around me. Even if I’m sitting completely alone, I’m still participating in relationship—with my body, thoughts, memories, surroundings, sensations, sounds, my own presence.
Apparently Gregg isn’t the only one looking at spirituality this way.
Once I started digging around, I found Dr. Christina Puchalski, a physician and professor of medicine at George Washington University who founded the George Washington Institute for Spirituality & Health. She has spent decades looking at spirituality as part of whole-person health. An international consensus group she helped lead described spirituality as a dynamic and intrinsic aspect of humanity, involving our relationships with ourselves, other people, community, society, nature, and what we consider significant or sacred.
Intrinsic.
Intrinsic doesn’t mean something I have to go find. It means it’s already part of the thing itself.
Taking this a step further, I found a published systematic review in which researchers had already done some of this digging. They searched the scientific literature for articles dealing specifically with definitions of spirituality and ultimately analyzed 166 of them, looking for the ideas that kept appearing across those definitions. Connection and relationship were among the most common.
Gregg sent me toward relationship. Dr. Puchalski’s work led me toward something intrinsic to being human. The research kept leading me back to connection, and the language itself kept leading me back to breath.
That’s where something else started fitting together for me.
When I say relationship, I’m not talking only about relationships between people. I think of people, animals and plants as LivingFields, constantly interfacing and participating with one another, enriching each other through relationship and interacting with the environments we’re moving through.
I’ve been talking about LivingFields and our participation in them for a while now. I’ve been looking at Experience as the point of being here rather than something we’re supposed to get through correctly. I’ve been looking at ourselves as participants in Experience rather than separate observers standing outside of it.
Finding relationship, participation, connection, breath and life within these definitions of spirituality doesn’t prove my philosophy is right. I don’t know that anybody gets to make that declaration.
But every once in a while I come across something that connects to something I’ve already been seeing, and I think, Okay. There’s another piece.
If LivingFields are participating with other LivingFields, then is relationship part of the Experience?
If we’re here to Experience through participation, through relationship with ourselves and everything we encounter, and if spirituality is about understanding those relationships, then are spirituality and Experience interwoven?
If Experience is the point, and relationship is how we participate in Experience, could spirituality simply be our recognition of that relationship?
© Rev. Tina M. Adkins
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