In this first lesson for beginners I would like to introduce you to spirituality the easiest and most comfortable way. Let’s start.
I think that the friendliest way to approach spirituality is to think of it as our home. Home is the place where we feel “at home”, we feel comfortable, loved, living, comfortably connected to other people. So is spirituality.
Now we can consider similarities and differences between “home” and “spirituality”, to gain a better idea of it.
Like home, spirituality is something that we perceive as ours, either because it belongs to us, or to our parents, or even to our friends: what is important is that we feel “at home” there because we feel enabled to consider it as ours. A friend might tell us “make yourself at home”.
Like home, spirituality is also a place of pleasant activities: at home we like to have rest, but also to meet friends, to play, to make plans. Sometimes we even like to exchange houses, which is a sign that we trust very much the other person.
Like home, we like to adapt it to us, to keep it with specific aspects and characteristics that we like, but we like also to make some progress with it: for example, some people like to rearrange the furniture sometime, or to repaint the walls with different colours, to build a new floor, new rooms, to buy new accessories.
Let’s consider some differences now.
The most evident difference is that our home is material, made with bricks, it has a hard structure, while spirituality is instead something we perceive inside our mind and our body, it is invisible, we carry it always with us, in a way that is a bit similar to a snail or a tortoise.
Another difference is in the connection to our personality: if our home is destroyed by an earthquake, we will be strongly distressed, however we can rebuild it with some patience, time, money. If our spirituality is destroyed, we cannot easily rebuild it with just patience, time, money: spirituality coincides almost totally with ourselves, so that, if it gets destroyed or hardly damaged, we need a totally different kind of resources to rebuild it.
Finally, spirituality is able to be the basic motivation of our entire life, so that we can even say “I live for my spirituality; everything I do is because of my spirituality, because it makes me open to other people, love my children, my partner, my relatives, I would even sacrifice my life to defend my spirituality”. On the contrary, we cannot say “I love you because my home drives me to love you” or “My home is the fundamental reason of my life”.
Well, I think this is quite enough for an approach to spirituality starting from zero. We haven’t worked on a strict theoretical definition, we can’t say that now all ideas are clear, but we have made a big step, which is like saying to spirituality “Hello, nice to meet you”.
What we have said can be expanded or deepened now by doing some kind of exercise, because spirituality is something that needs to be absorbed over time, rather than quickly understood through short explanations. So, now, during the next week, you can try to rethink about this, by comparing what we have said with the different situations you will meet over the next days. Most probably, along this week you will realize more and more that your ideas about spirituality are far from being clear and definite. Don’t worry about it: our purpose with this very first lesson was not to gain a clear and exact idea of what spirituality is; our purpose was to approach it by perceiving its friendliness, its similarity to what we really expect to meet. It’s just a starting step that should make you looking forward for next lessons, with the desire to gain a better knowledge of this friend, whose abilities and potentialities are far from being easily figured.
