Your Spirtuality

What Is Spirituality?

The word itself is difficult to define and belongs in a category with the words love, God, creativity, talent and charisma. All of which are subjective. Like the heightened emotions we might describe as loving feelings, spiritual experience can be completely different for each person, being thoroughly dependent as it is, on a person’s culture, stage of life and state of mind.

For instance, spirituality for me is the experience of connecting with the deepest impulse within myself to ‘create’ something. Sometimes felt as an underlying anxiety, or undefined agitation and at other times it presents as feelings of excitement. But, I translate these feelings as coming from an energy and intelligence emanating from the infinite, boundless, timeless ground of being. An eternal process of creation, seeking to express a non dual, always, already, ever present sense of self. Some might call that spirituality, others would call it the force of nature and a scientist might describe it as delusion.

But my personal realisation has led me to understand spirituality as a connection with the essential quality of the source of creation, which I personally translate as an infinitely bubbling, creative ferment. Not a ‘being’ as such, more a potential state of suspended ‘doing’. Something that I am integrally a part of but also something that fills me up and makes me feel whole.

I like to describe the feeling of this ferment at the heart of me and in the ground of being as the ‘Primal Anxiety’. The stress of an infinite and eternal energy only ever able to manifest itself in finite forms.

I’ve long suspected that the Buddhist concept of the wheel of Samsara is an inescapable ride, because if you think long and hard on the idea, it is the ultimate process of creativity and itself is an expression of the eternal ferment (or primal anxiety). After all, how could it ever cease turning? Under what circumstances could an eternal, boundless, timeless, spaceless, uncontainable being ever contain the infinity of itself in a finite form anyway? It will always have a part of itself that remains outside of, and separated from itself. Anxious about being left out of all the fun.

In my view riding on the wheel Samsara is essential. Waking, sleeping, dreaming, doing and being all use energy and are perfect activities on which to focus the ever present primal anxiety. Relief comes by making and taking form, manifesting the material universe so that the impulse that began this particular cycle can become conscious of itself, through all of us. We have developed conscious minds so we can experience the difference between pain and pleasure, happiness and sadness, sleep and awakening. With our bodies and our minds we can experience ‘being’ rather than remaining anxious in an eternal state of potential, doing nothing. After all, how happy could Adam and Eve really have been in that garden? If you’re that happy and have everything you want and need, you’re not going to be tempted to do anything that would risk your happiness. Not unless there was always that twinge of anxiety, wondering if one bite of the forbidden fruit would lead to something better. Clearly, they were both waiting for something better.

Back to the impulse of the primal anxiety. How can we understand it? Well, in its most basic form, it is the desire to procreate. The sexual urge. In its most sublime expression, it is the desire to co-create the world. To pick up where the blind, random, groping hand of evolution and natural selection left off. Music, maths, painting, dance, scientific theories, theological propositions, poetry, sport, love, beauty, birds, bees, bubblegum trees, everything and anything is simply an expression of the primal anxiety.

So, for me spirituality means relieving the (often unconscious) subtle, yet ever present anxiety by creating things to share. Music, poems, training programmes, drawings, ideas, cooking and of course the occasional article for Ezine!

What does it mean to you?

Specialising in training and development in the areas of employee engagement, leadership, creativity and innovation and communication skills. I work extensively with clients at all levels in business and particularly with people at executive level. More information can be found by visiting my website http://www.4Dhumanbeing.com