A working definition of spirituality

Spirituality is one of those great undefinable words. It is doubly undefinable: the word itself is difficult to define, and the thing it describes is also undefinable: ephemeral, opaque, unseen.

But when they’re important enough to accompany us throughout life, things that defy definition need to be defined.

Even if it’s just to give ourselves a helping hand as we go through our days.

Spirituality is different for different people, from different cultures, at different stages of life, with different experiences behind them.

For me, a working definition of spirituality as of today.

Spirituality is thinking with feeling, and feeling while thinking.

Those Myers-Briggs personality tests and other psychometrics tools place people into buckets, or at some point along a spectrum: are you a thinker or a feeler?

To be spiritual is to be both, at the same time. To think with feeling, and to feel while thinking.

Thinking is our great gift as a species, honed over half a million years of evolution.

Feeling is all the matter of the universe’s great gift to us, collectively and as the unique, one-time-in-history individual that each of us is.

If we embrace both thinking and feeling, if we can hold in our hands at the same time both the light-bulb of thought and the candle-flame of feelings, a deep spiritual experience is available to all of us.