Business Fit Magazine January 2020 Issue 1 | Page 30

Spirituality
Founder, director and lead teacher of the
Engaged Yoga Institute and Yogasara CIC,
Christopher Gladwell, explores the true
meaning of spirituality and the true meaning of
spiritual practice.
Imagine
There Was
No Such Thing as
Spirituality!
Imagine we humans made spirituality up as a
way of making some kind of sense out of our
experience as beings who feel separate from
each other, and everything else in a vast and
scary universe? Imagine we created spiritual
philosophies as ways of making sense of our
short lives and the injustices of the world. As a
way of finding some kind of purpose in the chaos,
imbalance and violence of the great restaurant
of life where everything eventually gets eaten by
something else?
Imagine we invented
whole religions and
methods of spiritual practice to give us the
feeling, even temporarily of being connected,
a harmonious part of this vastness? How would
it be to imagine all of that? You see I ask my
students to go into this place of vision before
we begin practices of Meditation, Conscious
Breathwork or Yoga. I teach from the perspective
and through the lens of evolutionary biology and
psychology. I ask not what do the various belief
systems tell us about being human, interesting
though those beliefs are, I ask what do we know
about being human? I’m interested not in belief
stories but direct experience. What do you feel,
sense, know through your direct experience?
Naturally people get stuck in their belief stories,
we get invested in them at an ego level so they
can be very hard to drop. People say to me “I’m
a spiritual being having a human experience”. Is
that a belief or a lived experience? Or is it simply a
nice story we might tell ourselves to make sense
of our experience and feel a bit safer?
We have to be clear. If we are not clear we
accumulate psycho-emotional debris as a shell,
a boundary to our self-sense which limits our
awakening to what actually is. If we are not clear
we build a spiritual ego, a self-story that cleverly
immunises us from the complexity of very real
pain and suffering that our fellow humans and
ourselves experience. We engage in a kind of
spiritual materialism which accumulates neat
beliefs; clever mind phrases like the one above;
practices that are like anaesthetics; teachers who
look good on our internal spiritual CV; kinds of
clothing which define us as different from the
‘herd’; special diets which ensure us immunity
from the ravages of old age and death. That kind
of thing.
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We might craft stories so that when something
complicated, difficult, painful or disturbing
happens to someone else, they attracted it, they
created it. We might get into ‘victim’ blaming,
not that there are victims really, there are just
people who are going through very complex
challenges. But either way, we find a way out
with our ‘spiritual stories’ of being fully present
and empathic to what is really happening in
someone’s living experience, all through some
attribution of personal agency as blame.
The thing about blame is it is always wrong. It is
a misunderstanding of just how joined up and
connected everything really is. Blame is always
wrong. What I’m getting to, is that all spiritual
beliefs and stories can be an anaesthetic, can be
ways of bypassing, dodging the curve balls of life,
avoiding the painful feelings of being fully human.
Spirituality can in fact be just like an addiction to
an endogenous substance, a way of getting out
of it all!
So now we begin. Breathe. Breathe consciously.
Pay attention to every single breath as it enters
and leaves. Notice the wind. The wind that has
blown across oceans, mountains and deserts,
What matters is
that we directly
experience
and know this
beyond words
and concepts
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