I Don’t Care How Spiritual You Are

I’ve always found it a little strange (and off-putting, honestly) when people talk at length about how spiritual they are.

They’ll tell you how connected they’ve always felt to the spiritual realm. They’ll list their experiences as evidence: I think about someone right before they call. I can sense other people’s emotions. I see signs everywhere.

And maybe those experiences are meaningful to them. I’m not interested in taking that away. But I’ve never understood why spirituality needs to be presented as a collection of impressive experiences.

The most spiritual people I know rarely talk about it. Not because they don’t have profound experiences. I’m sure many of them do. But spirituality isn’t something to prove.

That’s also why you’ll rarely hear me talk about my own spiritual experiences in any kind of exhaustive way. It’s not because I don’t have them. It’s because I’m not interested in convincing you that they happened. I’m not here to prove anything, especially not through a carefully assembled collection of words that is supposed to demonstrate how evolved, intuitive or perceptive I am.

I feel that spirituality is much less about what you’ve experienced and much more about how you exist.

It shows up in how you carry yourself.

How you interact with other people.

How you move through uncertainty.

How you respond when your ego is challenged.

How you make people feel in your presence.

It’s embodiment. And embodiment is very different from collecting spiritual experiences. You can have a hundred synchronicities and still be completely disconnected from yourself. You can have profound intuitive experiences and still treat people terribly.

You can know every spiritual concept and speak the language fluently, but none of that necessarily tells me anything about how you actually live. At some point spirituality can become another identity to perform. Another thing to be good at. Another way to distinguish yourself from other people. And once it becomes a competition...something has gone sideways.

You don’t have to turn every synchronicity into evidence. You don’t have to convince anyone that you’re intuitive. You don’t have to announce how connected you are.

Now of course there is absolutely a place for talking about spirituality, learning about it and exploring your experiences with other people. That’s part of why spaces for spiritual education and reflection can be so valuable. But there’s a difference between exploring spirituality and performing spirituality. You can talk about your experiences without needing them to make you more impressive or more evolved than someone else.

There’s nothing to prove. And there’s nothing to win.