Since spirituality is such a uniquely individual experience, it is difficult to define, much like love.
Before we begin, a note.
The understanding of spirituality is unique from its practice and your spirituality is coloured from your own experiences and understandings. There is no pressure to believe the same credence nor any intention to convert in this post; these are simply the philosophical musings that inform the importance of our Spiritual natures. I’ll be addressing my own experiences deconstructing Christianity - my critiques are for the church itself as a system and are not meant as a personal insult. I sat in those pews for decades so I hold no judgement for you. I do encourage you to reflect upon the church’s undeniable hand in colonialism, environmental decay, capitalism, widening the wealth gap under the name of prosperity, destruction of traditional, land-based spiritual practices, general violence on a personal and social level along with countless injustices. Consider who you are associated with.
Spirituality is far beyond a particular dogma, religion or set of beliefs. Spirituality is presence, oneness, meaning, being. Spirituality is an intimate aspect of our Selves, present in the Moments that life expands within, experiencing the movement of life in the smallest places. Spirituality is a mirror, where we see our Selves in everything: trees, rivers, clouds, people.
Spirituality is the Being experience of our Human-ness, rather than our typical way of Doing in the world. When we are engaged with our spiritual practices, we see Life outside of our Selves, we witness our Selves from outside our skin. It is not dissociated, but a birds eye view on life. Spirituality transcends the limitations of our Ego, sees beyond the ordinary pressures of our life and viscerally experiences Meaning in the mundane. We are able to see the Wholeness of our Selves when we engage in our spirituality, we experience the fullness of our Being.
A core aspect to spirituality is Mystery. Spirituality is not meant to be analyzed, it is meant to be Understood. To accept our Selves as spiritual Beings, is to accept Mystery. There is so much of the World, of Spirituality, of our Selves, that we won’t understand, that have no cut-and-dry answers. To accept our Selves as spiritual Beings, is to reside in the Grey. As a culture oriented around certainty, and the need for certainty to quell traumatized nervous systems, engaging in spiritual practice is the salve for creating inner expansion - if the spiritual practice doesn’t fall into the trap of peddling certainty too.
The certainty that Christianity peddles is a facade. They say that all you need is faith the size of a mustard seed until they remind you of Matthew 7:23 where many will enter the kingdom of heaven and Jesus will turn away from them because they never knew him.
Our spirituality is powerful. We have the power to create Heaven or Hell in every moment. If we Pause to connect with someone’s suffering, we have created space for Heaven. If we act out of revenge, we have create space for Hell. The power we hold means we are responsible for the world we Create.
A commonality between most major religions is the striving for More, whether it is Salvation, Enlightenment or Eternity. There is always More of Life we can taste. Rather than interpreting religious doctrines as pleading for mercy from gods who reign above the human condition, I like to think of these gods as the same consciousness coming in different forms across time & groups to plead with us to remember our divinity. I think spirituality is less about apologizing for our humanity and more about recognizing how our divine nature resides alongside - embracing the Both And of humanity.
The idea of many avatars of the same spiritual Being is not new or my own theory; it is a spiritual Truth that has been known for thousands of years by other religions. My deconstruction began in my yoga training. So I guess Christianity’s fear of yoga that it’s devil worship is warranted because its freedom created a path to myself I never knew existed.
If you’re deconstructing, this resource may be supportive in your process.
My yoga training was philosophically integrative so part of our training was becoming familiar with yogic texts. I read the Gita, a holy text of Hinduism, and found the mythology of Christianity is not unique. The Gita is written 5000 years before the Bible (there are interesting accounts of Jesus actually learning yogic practice during his incarnation) & the stories are the same.
I read stories of Abraham and Isaac, of Moses and Noah - they had traditional Indian names but the mythological themes were unmistakable.
Christians believe they special access to divine knowledge and they don’t. They have a meagre interpretation of distorted views of spirituality like the telephone whisper game that inevitably distorts the original message. Christianity is a cheap reproduction of embodied spirituality that predates its capitalistic control.
Spirituality is embodiment. We transcend through our Bodies, not out of them. Our body is not the obstacle. The kundalini of inner union happens within the divinity of our flesh - our salvation is uniting with our Bodies, not rejecting them. It is always root before crown. Our bodies are the container of our consciousness, not in opposition to our consciousness. Disembodied spirituality is not spirituality, it is just fancy dissociation.
The Divine is within you, not separate from you. The Divine is not only within us - we ARE divine. As Ram Dass says, “we are all god in drag”.
In fact, the holy books have all emphasized this.* To use Christian-specific language for a moment, the Second Coming of Christ has already happened. Christ Consciousness, the awareness of our higher Selves, is already within our Bodies. We are promised that the Spirit dwells within us. The Rapture is merely the ecstasy that accompanies being Embodied. After all, the Divine became Flesh to demonstrate the Holiness of our Skin.
Genesis 1:27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Ezekiel 36:27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.
Colossians 2:9-10 For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness.
1 Corinthians 6:19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?
2 Timothy 1:14 Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you--guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.
Even when I was Christian, I could never make sense of the depravity mentality. If we are made in god’s image, with the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, Christ living within us and god making her home within us AND if god cannot co-exist with “evil” (which just means that which is unripe), then if we were evil, we would be inhospitable to the divine. The mythology of Christianity as depravity can only make sense by denying its own holy texts.
Any spiritual doctrine that requires your depravity, that externalizes your authority is not spirituality - it is control. Spirituality meets two of our most prominent existential needs: belonging and meaning. The thread that sews gangs, cults and churches together is the needs of belonging and meaning being met with easy answers for life’s complex questions. Take a look to see if your spirituality is fundamentalism.
Spirituality becomes unbalanced when it is rigid, when Fear dictates rules derived to control. Spirituality becomes unbalanced when it is exclusive, when arbitrary conditions determines who is In and who is Out. Spirituality becomes unbalanced when it Consumes our whole lives, when we are unable to hold conversation without bringing spiritual dimensions into it, when our Time is sanctioned to meet expected dedication. Spirituality becomes unbalanced when it violates the boundaries of others, when people try to Convince, Convert or Condone “unbelievers”. Spirituality becomes unbalanced when it cannot peacefully coexist with other belief systems, when it becomes intertwined with Colonialism. Spirituality becomes unbalanced when we are jaded, dismissive or insulting to those who hold a Belief or don’t.
Spirituality is expansion of perspectives, holding contradictions and strive for universal Justice. Spirituality connects us to each other, so we see more of what we are, and less of what we lack.
As a former Christian, I am all too familiar with the narratives of depravity that require the externalization of my authority. The cognitive dissonance embedded in the ideology is rampant. Christians purport our relationship with God is personal, but if you’ll hear about it if you miss a Sunday. I grew up with the adage that going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car but the collective church sure didn’t believe those words for the sake of safety in a global pandemic. I was told we all hear from the Lord but I’m supposed to listen to a man at the pulpit with $500 sneakers talk about Peter’s faith for the 10, 000th time?
https://www.instagram.com/preachersnsneakers/
An ideology that requires constant penance for absolution, begging for mercy from eternal damnation is nothing more than abusive relationship with a tax break.
What I do value about my Christian upbringing is it created a container for mystical experiences I have always had. I often hear the audible voice of god, I have interacted with angels many a time (one even rescued my friend and I when we were stranded out of gas in the middle of nowhere in California). I couldn’t deny the divine. But I couldn’t keep giving caveats about what kind of Christian I wasn’t: I wasn’t pro-life, I wasn’t anti-gay, I wasn’t conservative. The list got too long.
The only practice that broke my complicit connection with Christianity for good was beginning to refer to god as “she”. In referring to god as “she”, I bypassed the Christian god, known in the Nag Hammadi scrolls as Yaldabouth, and connected directly with Sophia herself. In referring to god as “she”, my psyche released the patriarchal conditioning of Christian control and my lunar energy was able to come into her embodied power. The vitriol I received when I referred to god as “she” is unmatched. I was told I was poisoning peoples’ children (somehow) and that I was insulting the very fabric of peoples’ faith and family. I was told this from women. Even in softening my response, saying god embodies both energies if we are made in “his” image - still, the very concept that god could be a woman is offensive. The internalized misogyny is ripe. The reason Christians refuse to call god “she” is because it creates freedom. The communication we receive is very different because we are accessing a completely different divine being - we are connecting with Sophia.
Univerisalist Theology
Since my deconstruction, my spirituality has evolved beyond what I could have imagined. I have always been a universalist in nature - believing all paths lead to heaven. I couldn’t conceptualize that cultures with another name for god could be punished. It was just a different word to describe the same indescribable. I thought it would make the most sense for the divine to reveal themselves in different ways to different people - even with a different name.
Gnosntic Cosmology
Then I began to study the Nag Hammadi scrolls. If any Christian wants to debate me, I implore you to read these scrolls first. Read the pages with your own eyes. It is through the study of the Nag Hammadi scrolls, I stumbled upon Gnosticism. I love Gnosticism as a cosmology because there are about 8 different versions of how the universe came to be and none are more or less correct - they all coexist together. It takes me 18 minutes to describe the full breadth of this cosmology, which you can watch here.
Wiccan Practice
The parts about Christianity I loved were intentional ritual. In my journals as a Christina, I wrote “I wish I could incorporate more nature into my spiritual practice” - I was a Wiccan waiting to emerge. There were many ancestral blocks to move through because it hadn’t been safe for my ancestors to practice. The fear I felt in engaging in witchcraft was indoctrination from Christianity because Wicca requires no priest, no authority and is in deep relationship with the earth, rather than benefitting from Her exploitation. The fear I felt was also an ancestral fear of the repercussions - I was able to thank my ancestors for protecting me but assured them it is safe now. I can practice openly. In fact, I must.
Egyptian Thanatology
Doctrines that deny freedom and purport repression do so out of fear-based control. The control of purity culture denying any type of pleasure (sexual, food-based, ecstatic states through drugs or spiritual emergence) is to maintain population control. If the French are correct that orgasm is the little death, death being the ultimate orgasm, then the power of pleasure in our salvation is clear. The place of divine union we reach in orgasm, in dreams, when high and in death is all the same place because we are the universe incarnate. At death, our heart is weighed by Ma’at the goddess of divine chaos and justice and if our heart is lighter than the feather, our consciousness unites with the Universe. But if we lived in fear and our heart is heavier, our heart is eaten by Ammut the Devourer, the lion headed turtle, and our consciousness gets reborn for us to try again.
Inner Divinity
To engage with your inner spirituality, make space for yourself. Take time to meditate, to be in stillness, to be in silence. Listen to what comes up within you. The Divine is within you. The Divine IS you. Take a walk in nature and feel yourself connected to the Earth, to the Foliage. Take your time to feel each step upon the ground, moving with you, communing with you. Look at yourself in the mirror. Making eye contact for an extended period of time is a practice to increase relational intimacy and can be incorporated to witness the Divine within you. To be connected with the Divine is to be connected with your Self.
Videos
What is the Point of Spirituality - The School of Life
Science and spirituality - Jeff Lieberman
Reading
Behold the Spirit - Alan Watts (or anything else written by him)
The Universal Christ - Richard Rohr
Meditation
A Spiritual Journey - The Honest Guys
Ritual
*My upbringing was in the Canadian Evangelical Church context, so my knowledge of Christianity has much more depth than other spiritual traditions. My deconstruction of the Christian belief system began in the study of other faith traditions so I incorporate knowledge I have garnered in my time exploring diverse spiritual practices, though I do not hold expertise in any particular religious belief.