This week @eco-alex, the driver of the amazing @ecotrain came up with this brilliant question and I am excited to share my viewpoint on it.
For a very long time, I confused spirituality with religion and thought that to be spiritual enough one only had to be religious and since I have been told Islam is the best religion in the world, I also believed that one ought to be a Muslim only to be spiritual. . I was surprised to see people living a nomadic life and some even not having any religious faiths call themselves spiritual. This puzzled me a lot but I didn’t care much about finding out the truth because I believed my belief was right and there was no way it could be wrong.
Never in my life did I imagine and think that one day my beliefs would change. No I am not denouncing my faith or something, but yeah now I do believe that spirituality doesn't have anything to do with religion or with just being a Muslim. I am still amazed at how my thinking changed but it has and this change has made me a lot more accepting and open towards many other idea, concepts and beliefs. This mainly happened because of a writing gig. I was asked to write a book on unlocking your spiritual side and during the research process, I was exposed to a lot of information that was honestly an eye opener for me. The more I researched on the topic, the more my views on spirituality changed and the more surprised I got.
I then understood and made peace with the fact that spirituality has nothing to do with being religious. Yes, for some people, religion is a way to unlock their spirituality and strengthen it but spirituality isn’t limited to just being religious.
What Does it Mean to be Spiritual?
Spirituality for me and from all that I have gathered and learned to date is about being at peace with how you are and being fully connected to yourself. Spirituality is when you understand who you are and accept your individuality which I think is something many of us lack. We are mostly complaining about something we aren't happy with in ourselves and in our lives so yeah to nurture spirituality one has to put in some effort. And mostly we aren’t happy and peaceful with who we are because we lack a sense of direction in life. Having a sense of direction in life and knowing your purpose is another important element of spirituality which I believe mostly comes from understanding your place in this world and being in harmony with everything in this world.
When you feel in unison with everything around you and with everything that happens to you, be it good or bad, you are likely to feel at peace. And when you are at peace with yourself, you can better explore your purpose in life and understand it. In the 29 years of my life in this world, I have just directly known and met 2 people whom I find to be extremely spiritual. I don’t know whether or not they did call themselves spiritual because both of them have passed away, but according to what I know about spirituality, to me they were spiritual.
One was ym grandfather and one was my uncle who passed away a few months ago. My grandfather was a Muslim since he was born in a Muslim household and he did believe in Allah, but he wasn’t staunchly religious at all. However, he was incredibly in peace with himself and his place in the world, and come what may, one would hardly find him losing his calm.
My uncle was extremely religious and was clear on his purpose in this life. He aimed to help people and believed that to please Allah, he needed to serve the human race. He always prioritized others before him even complete strangers and not once did he ever think when helping anyone in need. It was after his death that we came to know about many of his helpful acts that he did when he was alive. We were aware of the fact that he was a compassionate being and loved helping out people, but we never thought highly of that because from what we saw, his kind nature never enabled him set his own business. Since he was always busy helping everyone out, he often used to hand over his business to others and suffer loss in the end only to help his friends out. So we lost in materialism, considered him to be stupid, but sadly we didn’t know that he was just being his genuine and spiritual self-. For him, having a huge business and materialistic wealth did not matter at all. For him, all that mattered was to serve the human race and his God in every possible way.
On the day he was going to be buried, a young guy met my other uncle (that uncle’s brother) and told him about one of the kind acts of my uncle (His name was Naeem.) My uncle had taken my grandmother to visit her eye surgeon to deposit her operation fee (she had to have a cataract operation) and was waiting in queue for their turn. He saw that young guy looking perturbed. He had never met him before but thought to ask him about what was bothering him. On inquiring him, he found out he had to get his father operated to save his life as soon as possible but was short of money. My uncle had about 40,000 rupees with him and without thinking for another second, he handed that amount of money to that guy. He told my grandma that the doctor was unavailable and they’d come again. During his lifetime, he never mentioned this or any of his other compassionate acts to anyone. When we find out about this, we were surprised, happy and upset at the same. Surprised because we never knew he was that selfless. Happy because he had set an amazing example for us and upset because we had failed to understand him when he was alive.
While he was a person who took the help of his religion to nurture spirituality, I slowly came across people who did not believe in any religious faith. I know of a guy who does not believe in God, but he is at peace with himself. Come what may, he has a smile on his face and does not ever think about why he faces hardship. This guy is quite like the one you mentioned in your post @sasha-genji
After pondering on these examples and many others, I have come to the conclusion that to be spiritual, you need not take a specific route.
Do You Have to Act a Certain Way to Be Spiritual?
Spirituality takes many different trajectories. The path to understanding, exploring and accepting yourself Is different for every single person in the world. Some of us take the religious route to do that while others travel the world to figure out who they are. Some meditate to identify their true self and embrace it while some on the other hand do nothing in particular to nurture spirituality.
If u see it this way, then it becomes quite clear that to be spiritual, you don't really need to do something in particular to be spiritual and to nurture spirituality because there isn't one particular thing that will help you do that especially since all of us are different and different things help us in different ways.
Sadly, there are some people who think otherwise and believe that to be spiritual, one needs to abstain from all sorts of leisure based activities and need to eliminate everything from their life that gives them any sort of pleasure. This is sadly far from truth. To be spiritual, you need give up sex, alcohol, drinks, food or anything else. You just need to just be in peace with yourself and to do that, you can take whatever route, road and employ any strategy that does the trick for you.
I am not a very spiritual person right now. Yes, I am trying to be one and am investing efforts to unlock my spiritual side. For me, mindfulness breathing meditation and praying helps out a lot. However, this isn’t what works for my husband. He likes to ponder on things and think about things that puzzle him for hours and hours to better understand them and then be in unison with them. I have accepted that and never force him to do what I do to become more spiritual because that is not what spirituality is about.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Thank you for bearing with me and taking out the time to read this.
Love and light,
Sharoon
If you enjoyed this, you will love to read the views of others on the topic. For that, visit @ecotrain.
I am also a part of #thealliance that is working hard to help people grow on Steemit.
I would also like to give a big shout out to @jaynie for starting @steemitbloggers which is a community designed to help bloggers grow on Steemit.
