What Does it Mean to be a Spiritual Person?
Encountering our own humanity is central to spirituality. Symptoms and life events are primary ways of getting in touch with ourselves. The way we interface with life provides guidance and develops insight. This is what the body is for—to give us a means to experience, learn and grow.
Learning and expansion of awareness come about by encountering real life through the medium of our senses, by experiencing.
Relevant questions:
- Do we embrace our experience and explore life with courage, curiosity, and wonder, or do we cram what we experience into little categories that fit what we know intellectually? (Wonderful exercise illuminates principle!)
- Do we accumulate the internal resources to accept the actualities of life and of our own natures, or do we limit what we are willing to observe and refuse to accommodate the parts of life and Self that we do not like?
- What is spirituality if we use it to create fantasies to buffer ourselves from life by ignoring the parts of life we fear?
Spirituality is about wholeness. We embrace wholeness by encountering our own humanity. This means being willing to discover our authenticity. Spirituality is not about being a nice person or a good person, but about finding out what it is to BE a person. We explore this through courageous self-observation, by making ourselves complete, and by learning to truly love. It does not happen by indulging fantasies of being better than others or exempt from suffering.
The many spiritual leaders I have known are not exempt from discomfort. Few have been wealthy or even abnormally healthy. Spiritually developed people do not live in a fantasy world untouched by pain, need, or challenging situations. They do bring an open, undefended, engaged, and constructive form of attention to these human challenges.
This attention does not come about by denying feeling or conveniently reinterpreting events to color them rosy but by going deeply enough into life to find or create real value from difficult experience. The skills we require to develop attention and Presence are learned skills. They come about through experience and practice.
Spiritually developed people do not demand a disproportionate excess of worldly goods as if accumulation and luxury were badges of spiritual accomplishment. The notion that fulfilling worldly desires is a measure of spiritual success is silly.
Spiritual success is totally independent of material interest. A spiritual person may have almost nothing or may be wealthy, but getting and having are not a central focus.
Service, contribution, learning to love more 
profoundly, and expansion of consciousness are intrinsically more meaningful than getting and having.
Spirituality is about deep connection with life. No you do not need to put down or avoid wealth or give things up, unless you are called to do so for your life missions. Just don’t imagine that attaining stuff can fulfill you. Stuff is a means to an end, an expression of who you are, or a distraction.
Which is it for you?
What does it mean to be a spiritual person?
Please share your insights below, and pass this post along if you like it.
I especially like the point that spirituality is not about being a good or nice person, but about discovering one’s being. If you set out with the goal to be a good person, you’ve put huge blinders on your process before you’ve even begun, and so you’ve restricted what you can see. (I am remembering the highway in the movie Brazil that was totally enclosed in billboards, so that the person traveling along it couldn’t see the surrounding countryside at all.) And, since you discover your values through the process of exploring your being, you may find after you’ve done a certain amount of work, that what it means to you to be a good person is quite different than what you’d imagined before anyway.
I also think that a common trap is to believe that being spiritual means to suffer nobly; that without pain life has no meaning, and so in order to find meaning one must create or deliberately invite suffering. Doing so can just lead a person into a circular path of drama without actually bringing any greater self-knowledge or meaning into the picture. Accepting what life actually offers, whether it’s pain, joy, love, distance, or whatever else is currently residing on one’s plate, is the best way to honor spirit.
Brilliant points and well stated, Mary! Thank you. And I truly hope you will comment regularly!
Hi Teresa,
The new website looks great. It is warmer, more welcoming. Good job.
What does it mean to be a spiritual person?
For the majority of my life, being spiritual meant being un-affected by life. What a painful, lonely, failure rought result that belief caused!
I am healing into congruence, but I entrained “disconnect” energies pretty deeply. Spirituality, for me, today, is about re-connecting.
Absolutely, Jim. Wholeness/Connection is key.
I’d be interested to hear more about what you mean be “entrained ‘disconnect’ energies.” I believe I know what you mean and think the concept is vitally important. Would you be willing to spell it out more for those who don’t?
Sometimes I can’t distinguish when I am and when I am not being spiritual. I am trying to drive my practice into each moment. For me all of my life is a spiritual path. I am working to appreciate the gift in each moment. As you point out to us, some of those moments are struggles, some are boring, some are resplendent. Thank you for this article. It helps me keep the question burning before me.Blessings.
David you pose a very important point. The “place of not-knowing” or better yet “the place of wonder” is a Doorway into exploration. And yes, even boredom can be a sacred doorway when we bring ourselves to it fully!
Keep burning yourself into your moments, Friend.
This gives me a lot to think about. I do realize I believe that, if I am really spiritual, I will never get angry or react. I see that my feeling of not being good enough spiritually is just punishment and I’m already there. We all are. We go through each day doing the best we can and learn what we can. It’s a lifelong process and there is no end. Being willing to pursue the process may be what makes me spiritual.
Exactly. Beautiful insight.
Be kind to yourself Dear One.