Exploring the essence of spirituality, look deep into the personal journey towards understanding and living a spiritually aligned life. "What is Spirituality" uncovers the multifaceted nature of spiritual practices and beliefs, offering viewers a comprehensive guide to finding peace, purpose and connection in the modern world.
In this Journey episode, we explore the concept of spirituality beyond traditional boundaries, emphasizing its accessibility and individuality.
Starting with a powerful personal narrative of transformation from a life in combat zones to founding a spiritual community, the video explores how spirituality is intertwined with our daily lives, decisions, and the quest for inner peace.
It challenges common misconceptions, highlighting that spirituality isn't about reaching enlightenment or following a strict set of practices, but rather about aligning the mind, body, and soul in harmony and love.
You will discover the importance of self-acceptance, the power of intuition, and the role of community in the spiritual journey. This episode not only asks "What is Spirituality?" but also invites you to reflect on what spirituality means to you personally, encouraging a path of self-discovery and connection to the universe's vast wonders.
Exploring the essence of spirituality, look deep into the personal journey towards understanding and living a spiritually aligned life. "What is Spirituality" uncovers the multifaceted nature of spiritual practices and beliefs, offering viewers a comprehensive guide to finding peace, purpose and connection in the modern world.
In this Journey episode, we explore the concept of spirituality beyond traditional boundaries, emphasizing its accessibility and individuality.
Starting with a powerful personal narrative of transformation from a life in combat zones to founding a spiritual community, the video explores how spirituality is intertwined with our daily lives, decisions, and the quest for inner peace.
It challenges common misconceptions, highlighting that spirituality isn't about reaching enlightenment or following a strict set of practices, but rather about aligning the mind, body, and soul in harmony and love.
You will discover the importance of self-acceptance, the power of intuition, and the role of community in the spiritual journey. This episode not only asks "What is Spirituality?" but also invites you to reflect on what spirituality means to you personally, encouraging a path of self-discovery and connection to the universe's vast wonders.
I spent 12 out of the first 15 years of my adult life at war. I worked hundred, 110 hours a week. And my job and mission to find who I was and what I was. It was everything to me. And accomplishing the mission was like this religion. And I think we're all on a journey, even if we don't know it. I definitely didn't know I was on a journey back then. But in some ways, there's amazing ties between the person I was back then at war and the person that I'd later become who is now. And this intention or beautiful path. And I can talk about war. I can talk about peace. I see light. I see dark. And I realize now that I'm walking that balance in between. And I have a choice of where I focus my attention and where I focus my energy. Do I focus on that dark or do I focus on that by. Even as I walk that balance in the middle? so what is spirituality to you? I get this question a ton when I'm a guest on podcast and what spirituality is to me, what it is to you. It's not something deep or unobtainable. It's real. Like, you can touch it. It doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't even have to be about obtaining and enlightenment or some magical thing that seems almost unattainable. It comes down to how we choose to live. And it's right there. And we can take it. We find ourselves suddenly knowing what our life is about and what spirituality is all about, if we can kind of slow things down. It's about finding peace and joy, and Spirituality is deep acceptance, and you could call it surrender or release. You're aligning your mind, body and soul. And we have to love ourself. And then we're being spiritual. And you have to ask yourself, do you know what your higher purpose is that your Dharma and being aligned with your Dharma is this great spiritual thing in life. So if you know your Dharma, if you live and walk your higher purpose, you're going to be naturally walking a spiritual path. So there's all these things out there. Some of them may seem kind of like disparate and disconnected, but it all connects into how we see our own individual spirituality. And and that's important because spirituality can greatly differ from from person to person, from me to you. Ultimately, it's impossible to define for me right here, right now because of this. You know, you pick the definition of spirituality for you and you may have an essence of it. Right now, I'm sitting where you're at. And it's going to be fiercely personal for you and it's going to be unique to each of us. It's not tied to religion or a particular philosophy. It may be. And that's okay if it is. Sometimes that's for people and for other people, it's not for them. That's okay. So what's beyond you looking at it from another perspective? What's inside of you? What connects you to everything around you? And do you understand that you're stardust? That you're literally made up of the stars, that you share energy with all of these things around you and you're connected to something bigger, that spirituality. It's a lot of things, but that's part of it. And that connection to all things around you is very spiritual. Even if the the bigger thing, that thing that you're connected to is your self, your inner self, that's I call it that self with a capital s, this big thing inside of you. If you're in touch with your intuition and you know that is speaking to you and that it's separate from your mind, then that's your spiritual self. And so do you ever feel your intuition? I mean, most of us do. And when you feel it, do you listen to it? Do you follow it? That's being spiritual because you're listening to that thing deep down inside you. And when you do that, you're quieting that busy mind that's racing and you're listening to that kind of base thing behind the mind. So imagine being able to talk to yourself and having the whole universe answer. That's the powerful thing, that intuition is. It's that universe talking to you and that spirituality. Before we move on, please subscribe by hitting the watermark in the lower right hand corner. And if you think friends or family might benefit from this video, please share it out with them. I'd love to share my own perspective on spirituality with you. One thing that immediately comes to mind for me is loving kindness. It's this fact that I have lots of values and beliefs that define kind of how I see the world and who I am and who I see myself as by loving kindness for me, as has been this guiding light. And I live my life according to loving kindness and that for me is very spiritual. It's present from the Vedas to Buddha and Jesus Christ. And I also know what my Dharma is and we just talked about it, you know, a couple of minutes ago. Your Dharma or your higher purpose. Kind of what you're meant to do in this world and what my higher purpose is, is going to be different from what your higher purpose is. And you might say, Well, what's my heart? That's for us to figure out, each of us individually. What do you what do you love to do? What do you, think about before you go to bed and you think, man, I can't wait to wake up and do that. You know, that's probably something close to what your higher purpose is, is It's more complicated than that, my dharma. Or higher purpose is to help others help themselves, to be simple guides so that people can know that their whole inside, whether they can feel it or not, that they have a light inside, even if they can't see it, and to connect people so that we can share warmer journeys together and that you can believe in Hinduism and another can believe in Daoism and another can believe in Christ consciousness, and we can still stand together and we can ask these great questions and we can find better answers. I see spirituality as the universal oneness of everything. And when I finally realized that I was on a spiritual path, that was the thought that hit me most like a bolt of lightning that I believe, you know, at the heart of spirituality. It's this connection that we have with one another that we can talk about it, come together and be open minded and I believe in the heart of spirituality. There's an intersection between our spiritual path and the path that we walk every day through this kind of real world. And most of us aren't going to be a monk that lives in the foothills of the Himalayas. So how do we live spiritually moving through this crazy world that we, kind of share with everybody else? And I think if we can answer that question, then we know what it is to be spiritual in and of ourself. Spirituality, for me is also reading about great human thought from around the planet, across time. So I can have better conversations with people like you. And I want to know what people think about all of this. And that's one of the reasons I do what I do. Finding our way spiritually is finding our way in all aspects of life. You know, you can pursue alignment of your mind, body and soul. And if you're wondering what exactly alignment is in this context, think of it as harmony and this seamless connection between all aspects of your being that you can gain knowledge to enhance your mind and be that knowledge that you gain in your mind becomes wisdom through this life experience that you gain and you live and you learn that knowledge becomes wisdom. There's other things like rituals that are a bridge between this concrete reality and the spiritual realm. And so if you use rituals, then you can align your mind with your soul. You can align your body with your soul. And we have a great video on rituals, and it even goes into detail on how you can create your own. I'm not going to go too in-depth on it here, but you can check it out by hitting the card in the upper right hand corner of this video. If we understand, our spiritual path can really only be seen or traversed if we have some form of grounding and centering here in our day to day life, we know that we can focus on our lifestyle a little bit and this is going to lead us to have more time and space, to be spiritual, to see our spirituality and to know what our spirituality is. So if you're sleeping well, if you're exercising and moving, you eat well, you have good relationships and all of that, you're going to be in sync with both yourself and the whole world around you, and that opens you up to know what spirituality is to you and truly love and accept yourself. Know that you are the most important thing in the world. This isn't about having a huge ego or being arrogant or anything like that. It's knowing that you're not any good to anybody else if you aren't good to yourself. So if you lift yourself up, suddenly you're lifting up the whole world around you. It's this natural thing. You change yourself. You absolutely can change the world. You do change the world. And if you work on being aware of all of this and these other things that that we're talking about here in this video, you'll be able to carry through with that. And so maybe you ask yourself, how do I remain aware? Like, how do I be aware of being aware? So think about that for a minute and decide what works best for you. I mean, there's different things that people use to remind themselves of things. So figure that out. Think about how do I remind myself to maintain awareness as I'm moving through the world? It actually leads to more peace and calm. It's not this hyperactive, hyper vigilant thing that you have to do. It can be this peaceful, calm thing. and that leads me into getting rid of all the noise you have, all this noise around you. It's this noise on the outside of you. You've got all these people that want your attention. You've got the phone in your pocket wanting your attention. You've got streaming services that want your attention, and then you've got all the noise on the inside of yourself. You've got your racing mind and you've got the what ifs. And what about and that runaway inner monologue inside of you that's telling you all these things, most of which are never going to happen? Probably aren't true and they're not serving you. So you have to learn how to begin filtering out all of that internal and external noise. And when you can do that, that's when you really see spirituality. You feel what's always been right there inside of you. It's like this amazing peace and calm and it's free like. Like that. Spirituality is free inside of you and it makes you free. Once you know that it's there and it's free, free to grab it, set you free. And that is truly this this wonderful thing. Spirituality is in the surrender. We're holding on so tightly. A lot of times in this world and our possessions, our relationships, our beliefs about politics and all of that, there are things that we hold on to and there are definitions of who we are, but we're not any of that. We hold on to that stuff. We hold on to the past. Sometimes we're even. Hold on to a future that may never even come to be true. And especially if we think that it's going to happen the way that we think it's going to happen, that doesn't usually happen. Right? And maybe that's not a great way to say it. But what I'm saying is, when we think about the future, we think X is going to happen. The X really happens is usually something else that comes to pass in the future. So worrying about the future is this exercise in futility because we're worrying about something that probably isn't going to happen. And so when you let go, you find this great acceptance and an acceptance when you accept things that spirituality is by itself, that's very spiritual. And so stop holding on to all this stuff and you'll realize the things that are most important to you and those things that are most important to you that you let go of. They're still going to be there if you let go. And I kind of want to replay that these things that are really important to you that really matter. If you let go, they're still going to be there. And if they're not still there once you let go, I think that probably is the universe telling you something. I think that's probably a very spiritual moment for all of us when we surrender, when we release, when we let go, if it's important to us, it will still be there. And again, that acceptance, that surrender, that release, that's free. It's going to set you free. You're going to be free to be the self that you were always meant to be. And it's not the self of all those things that you're holding on to When I read comments from people around the Internet, I often see this theme that the spiritual journey has to be this lonely, sometimes painful thing. And yes, I think sometimes it might be like that. I think it can be difficult, but it doesn't have to be the standard way. Humans are these communal creatures. We do well when we're amongst each other and we're sharing so we can find our community that works best for us. And what what works best for me might not work best for someone else. And that's okay. But there's great spirituality and community, and we should realize that we can maintain our own empowered, unique spiritual journey and still walk alongside others that have different beliefs from us. The nonprofit online spiritual community behind this channel is called Kishar and we believe there is a place for authentic, meaningful connection in the digital world today. And we can share our journeys and ask great questions and find better answers. You know, look at affirmations or meditations or just chat. And share memes we have conversations just like we're having right now. And if you're interested in that, please check us out at Kishar.org Your own spiritual path doesn't have to be just one branch. It's one solid path, one straight line. You don't have to choose just one single spiritual philosophy or religion and say, okay, that's it for me. This is it. that's something that you can do and a lot of people do that is perfectly valid. But you can also look at spirituality as this box of blocks or Legos and like it's an all you can eat buffet of options. Take some of this, take some of that and find what spiritual aspects you like that work best for you. Because I can tell you through all that I've read and everything that I've studied, everything's pointing in the same general direction. We're saying we're all saying the same thing. You know, we all came from the same place and we all walked out of Africa together, our ancestors, and we walked all over this planet. the scientists tell us that. Anthropologists tell us this. And so make use of all this amazing thought that you have available to you. Explore and be bold with your spirituality or, you know, on the other hand, you can just be content and kind of warm in the corner with it. It's really up to you which path works best for you. And that's okay. You know, it's a very personal decision. with all of that said, what is spirituality to you? What is your spirituality look like? Do you agree with the ideas that we discussed today? And please let me know in the comments and I'll absolutely get back to you. For me, it's about having a conversation with with each of you, with all of you. And it's definitely part of what spirituality looks like to me, is having this warm conversation. And please like this video, if you want us to keep making content just like this. And until next time, I wish you peace on your journey.