EP 01 Are You Spiritual?

Sometime in July 2023, a member of my community, True Spirituality with Ange, asked me a question: Am I Spiritual? I have known this woman for over ten years both online and off line and I could have answered the question immediately for her: Yes, in my humble opinion, and yet still my opinion only, she was. This led me to consider that an answer to this question that offers a process would actually be helpful to my future podcast audience, hence the first episode now being about how to answer this question. But in order to give you the tools to find out, I first had to debunk quite a few myths around what it means to be spiritual because let's be frank here, there is a lot of BS in the spiritual circles. I always like to start with definitions. I owe this process to my late father who always invited us to pick up the dictionary around family meals to check our understanding of words. (Thanks, Dad. I love you and I miss you.) The Oxford Dictionary defines spiritual as the quality of being concerned with the human spirit and or the soul as opposed to material of physical things. It's a good starting point, but it seems to, at least to me, to exclude people who are living in the modern world. It's creates this divide between people who have renounced the material or the physical, and people who, you know, have jobs, houses, cars, families, friends, et cetera, because this is quite a material world we live in. I also want to express my concern about this definition because it leaves so many people out. Now let's look at the definition of religious, which my father was. Pious even. The definition of religious is someone who has a strong belief in God or gods. That's, you can see is different from spiritual as well, in the sense that they're bringing in the whole notion of God into it. This highlights right away that you can be spiritual without being religious. I really need to make this point. In this podcast episode, I go through a meme I found on the internet and that I will share in my community when the podcast goes live that lists twelve signs that you might be spiritual created by the Mind Journal. I am not going to list them here as I talk about them extensively in the podcast episode but suffice to say that out of the twelve listed, most of them are not actually signs that you might be spiritual. Not in my world anyway. Mindfulness and meditation, of themselves, do not make people more spiritual. I know someone, who I won't name although the temptation is real, who meditates every day and who is a complete arsehole. in fact, some narcissists meditate or pretend to meditate and use this to lure innocent victims into their web. I will be talking about the danger of manipulation on your spiritual in next episode, so watch this space. This led me to compile my own list of five signs that you maybe spiritual. I am happy to share it here: Sign #1: You have kindness as your highest value Sign #2: Your intent is to refrain from harming or hurting other people Sign #3: You take responsibility for your feelings Sign #4: Accept you have an ego and learn what ego is Sign #5: Aspire at being a better person Is meditating or eating pure food on my list? No. And I would like to warn you if it is on yours. You might just be buying into false spirituality. To join my free FB community, click here https://www.facebook.com/groups/1270150046502922