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In this first lesson for beginners I would like to introduce you to spirituality the easiest and most comfortable way. Let’s start.

Think of spirituality as your 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 get 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 the other person very much.

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 their 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, like a snail or a tortoise.

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, this is quite enough for an approach to spirituality starting from zero. We haven’t worked on a theoretical definition, we can’t say that now all ideas are clear, but we have made a big step, which is like saying “Hello, nice to meet you” to spirituality.

Now what we have said can be expanded and deepened by doing some kind of exercise, because spirituality is something that needs to be absorbed over time, rather than quickly understood through short explanations. Next week you can try to rethink about this, by comparing what we have said with the different situations you are going to meet over next days. Along this week you might realize that your ideas about spirituality are far from being clear and definite. Don’t worry about this: our purpose with this very first lesson was not to get 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.