Wherever I went, he was surrounded by flowers and trees if not entire forests. Even in city temples in the busiest areas, he was adorned with petals of various colors, scents, and food offerings. 

I saw a Buddha not of overly detached transcendence (like a Sky God), but one of profound connection with Life - a Buddha of the mud.

When we expect sex to make us feel better, we might forget that true freedom has no problem at all with feeling one way over another. It has room for all, it is that free! Yet, anything can be a doorway to primordial peace. So why not sex?

In the world of spiritual correctness, there is no room for critique. When you criticize someone or something, you sure aren’t being spiritual - at least according to those who are under the spell of such “politeness.”

This is how you get spiritual bypassing: The use of spirituality to bypass, downplay, or deny the impact or importance of different dimensions of our lives. Such dimensions include the physical, the social, the emotional and relational, and the personal and anything else that could simply be called, “the practical.”

Do not underestimate spirituality’s power to further delude people. A whole lot of spirituality is no different than empty beliefs and assumptions about the nature of Reality.

When we sit, we are not in a state of frenzied doing. We rest and soften, and touch the ground of Being which is ever full and complete exactly as it is. Already whole. Getting established in Being is a requirement to live as Being.

Acceptance is the process of our will’s alignment with What Is. Moving through resistance, denial, and often deep pain (including grief) brings about acceptance. When something is thus “accepted” which is not at all a merely intellectual process, it is also gone beyond.

What is called “presence” in spirituality is actually an absence. An absence of what? An absence of resistance. When we are not resisting What Is, we find ourselves experiencing a kind of fluid groundedness. We are alert yet softened, awake yet at rest at the same time.

Power, love, humility - precious capacities of our selves that we recognize and deepen into over the course of our whole lives. Each a mystery, each longing to be honoured and embodied. To understand power, we must explore powerlessness. To feel powerless is to feel depleted, flat, incapable of action. It is common to feel powerless in moments when we actually are not powerless.

Spirituality is not immunity from pain. It is not a hiding-from-life strategy. Not a self-numbing technique, nor is it a place of untouchability from life’s challenges. Spirituality is non-fixation. It is neither duality nor non-duality. It is the inquiry into every place of hiding that masquerades as us. It is the ultimate home coming, having never left.

The evolutionary impulse towards freedom from suffering comes with being alive. This movement of Life is both the best and the worst thing that can happen to you, through you, as you. A quest for spiritual freedom can help gather the energies of our dissatisfaction to such a degree that we are fueled from within to transcend our illusions.

Let’s explore what a nuanced and all-inclusive vision for true well-being and sanity can look like. This essay is for those who no longer wish to settle for partial views on healing, growth, and awakening - and for partial lives.

Many of us take ourselves to be this limited-human-separate-from-everything-else. The illusion of separation permeates every aspect of our lives. No wonder why we feel alienated from the World and each other! There is also trauma that contributes to this, but for the purpose of this article, let’s leave that out for now. 

I used to expect meditation to cure my depression and anxiety, to take away my emotional pain, and to remedy any kind of relational challenge I was going through. “It is enough,” I thought to myself “to be aware of pain.”

God is a big word, no doubt - a word that comes with much baggage. To me, God is that which makes dissatisfaction disappear. Call it Love, call it Peace, call it non-separation, call it the Unknowable Mystery of our Being. Labels cannot define God. 

There is nothing extraordinary or special about these experiences. They are the taste of the most ordinary, most fundamental truth of the nature of reality and our being.

Maslow called these experiences “peak experiences,” but I’m intentionally changing that. That which does the “peeking” is God, it is Reality itself and not the individual who is trapped in (and as) the illusion of separation.

How could anyone overemphasize the significance and beauty of love? Love makes life worth living. Love dissolves each paradox. Love resolves each conflict. Love loves love. When my heart is open, a deep stillness takes over my being even when I might look very active on the outside. Moving from the heart feels natural and ease-y.

I can say so much about love. Love makes life worth living. Love softens and grounds our being. Love celebrates with all there is. Love is the essence of all religion and spirituality.

It is also so easy to be confused about love, to mistake love with pity, to mistake love with enabling of hurtful or unhealthy behaviours of others, to mistake love with blind tolerance.

To me, spirituality is about what we take to be the most sacred and significant in our lives. For a lot of people on a spiritual path, these include Truth and Love.

Relationally, we can translate Truth as authenticity and honesty. Am I betraying myself by saying “yes” to my partner’s request right now? Do I express what I truly want or need?

A lot of people get involved with spirituality for reasons that have little to do with awakening or Enlightenment. Many seekers hope that their very human struggles and relational pain would simply disappear if they had an awakening. I used to think that way.