What is Spirituality?

When we talk about Tantra, we talk about sex and we talk about spirituality. We say that Tantra is the fusion of these two together. But the question I want to explore is ‘what does spiritual actually mean?’. We know what sex means, we kind of get that, but what does being spiritual actually mean? For me, when I start to think about or feel in that topic, one thing that that comes up for me is this sense of knowing that there is something more than the human that is Steve on a day-to-day level. So I kind of feel inside that I have this sense of knowing that there is something more than me. We could call that your higher self, we could call that you're being, or your essence or something, or even your soul - something that’s greater than the physical person that you are.

Now, for me, in some spiritual practices, the guide often talks about ascending to the higher realms, pulling in love, light from outer realms and kind of giving out-of-body experiences. For me, when I look at the world that we live in and I see the issues of climate change around us it feels for me that we’re not living here on earth. So for me, a spiritual practice needs to be embodied in the body, here on planet earth, right here. And for me, spiritual is about being able to be connected to the higher parts of yourself, here in your body on planet earth. Some people, say ‘bring heaven to earth’…for me, it’s about bringing in that higher self. When I mean that higher self I can also feel it and describe it as that sense of being. I feel that in my belly, and it’s beyond my day-to-day ego, my identity as Steve, the person that gets up and makes decisions…critical, judgemental and all those sorts of things. It’s who I am aside from that. For me that’s my being, it’s my essence, it’s my soul of who I am. That’s the part of me that’s going to carry on and live after my human form has died. It’s the spiritual side of me that I want to make a relationship with; I want to know more about my being. 

In my meditations, I get glimpses of when that being is connected. It can be the same for every other being. For me, when we connect to our being or our spiritual place, it’s the one thing that makes us all the same, it’s the place where’s there no division, there’s just - as other people describe it - the oneness. It’s that place where we are not divided and where we are all one. The thing I really love about Tantra is the different practices and techniques bring you into contact with that part of yourself, it brings you into contact with your spiritual self. I talk about the eye of the storm and in Tantric practice, at the height of my sexual peak, of my sexual energy, what I actually experience is this eye of the storm. And in that eye of the storm is that sense of my spiritual self, feeling connected to my being and feeling connected to my spiritual self, that part of me that feels like a whole being. 

So for me, when we talk about sex and spirituality, we use the sexual energy to take us to forms of being our whole self. It takes us to the part of us that is being, to the spiritual, to the enlightened, to the realised parts of ourselves. So I invite you this week to spend some time pondering that, pondering who your spiritual self is, who is your being and see how you get on. Thank you.