Essentials: Develop a Personal, Authentic Spirituality
Being who you are is truly one of the hardest, scariest and most terrifying things you could ever do in life.
It takes a lot of courage. From school, to work, to social media, and everything we see around us, there's pressure to perform, to prove and to please, and over time, that pressure disconnects us from ourselves. We forget who we truly are. We sometimes forget that we even forgot who we truly are. We just feel like zombies sometimes. That's why spirituality matters. If you're going to live as your true self, you need to be connected to your spirit.
What exactly is spirituality? How can it help you come home to yourself?
A lot of people don't even realize that they have a spirit. We're often taught we're just a mind and a body. People talk about their mental health, people talk about their emotional health. People talk about their physical health, but people don't really talk about their spiritual health.
We're also taught to focus on outcomes in life, like how productive you are, what grades you get, what school you go to. You end up feeling disconnected. I've seen so many people who just feel like they're going through the motions, feeling numb or lost. And it's not because something's wrong with you, if you're feeling that way - it's often a function of the systems that we live in. Systems that are designed to disconnect us from the deeper parts of who we are from the human parts. They're designed to diminish us and disconnect us from our true power, and that's where spirituality comes in. Let’s go over the dimensions of spirituality.
The first dimension of spirituality is about reconnecting to yourself. It's about reconnecting to your own power again.
When you are aligned with yourself, when you are aligned with your spirit, you're in touch with an authentic power within yourself. You can come home to the truest part of you and live from that. It's a place inside you that remembers who you are, even when you've forgotten. It's a place you can always go back to. It's always there, it's already there. You can return to your spirit if you've been feeling lost or disconnected from it, or numb or exhausted. Your relationship with spirit might just be the key to everything for you.
Let me start with something I've seen again and again.
I'm trained as a clinical child psychologist, so I see things from a developmental lens across the lifespan. Over the years, with every age group, one theme keeps showing up in my work, and it's that so many people are disconnected from who they really are. Kids and teens, especially, have a natural essence, a purity that's there. They know what lights them up, but then the world around them gets louder and louder and louder, the older they get. It starts saying:
You need to make money to be secure.
You need A's, and to take IB courses and AP courses, and courses you may not actually be interested in at all, to compete against all the other students to get into college.
You can't do art or something creative with your life because it's not practical.
How are you going to make money and survive in society? You need to be realistic and be safe.
And I see so many kids end up feeling crushed from all these societal expectations. It's not necessarily their parents that are telling them this, it's society and the systems we exist in.
Even if these messages aren't said out loud, they're oftentimes implicit, and they're absorbed, and they very strongly shape how young people see their worth and understand the world. They see their worth as something that must be earned, something that has to be proven, something that's compared against, and you end up not realizing that you have power inside yourself. Instead you feel like you have to earn it and hustle for it.
The systems that we exist in, the systems that we all have to function and work in, take away our power of being ourselves.
Slowly, kids begin to shrink. They start doubting themselves. They stop listening to the inner voice inside them, the one that actually knows what's true, what's real, what's authentic for them, because it's not mirrored in society, or it feels irresponsible to believe in that voice. It might sound naive or even foolish. So this discrepancy between what you know is true inside yourself and what society is mirroring back to you, it leads to anxiety, and depression, and this quiet feeling of being lost, even after doing everything right.
One of my favorite psychologists, Carl Rogers, the founder of humanistic psychology, talked about something called the self-actualizing tendency.
It's the natural drive we all have to grow into who we really are. It's not something you have to create or earn. It's actually already built-in inside you. Inside you is an inner wisdom. It's this built-in guiding force that already knows how to grow into your fullest potential. It knows how to move you towards wholeness and how to lead you back to the person you are truly meant to be.
But here is what happens to the self-actualizing tendency within us - its wisdom gets buried under fear, pressure and the belief that you have to be who the world needs you to be in order to survive and to be good.
I see this in young adults in their 20s all the time. They follow the plan. They got the grades, the job, the apartment, and eventually the house. And then one day, they wake up and they just feel empty. They climbed a ladder only to realize it was leaning against the wrong wall. When that moment comes, they're depressed, they're anxious, they're lost, they're disconnected.
And I tell them, this realization you're having actually isn't a failure. It's an awakening.
These big existential questions arise, like: What am I doing? What is my life really about? And it can feel scary. It's terrifying because your whole world view is in shambles, but this crisis is actually a calling. It's your spirit trying to speak to you. And that's where spirituality comes in.
Spirituality is the process of getting to know your spirit. It's letting go of who the world has told you to be, and rediscovering the self you've always been beneath it all. So if you take away one thing from this episode, let it be that spirituality is the process of coming home to yourself.
It's not about becoming someone new. It's actually about remembering who you've been all along. It's about reconnecting with the self that's there under all the noise and conditioning. It's about reconnecting to that quiet voice inside you, the one that you may have been taught since you were a child to ignore or silence.
This fear, the doubt, the disconnection - these are the trials that all of us face in learning to live from your truth again. That's the return, that's the journey that all of us are actually on. It's a spiritual journey. If you've been struggling, feeling lost or questioning things, just know that that's not failure, and it doesn't mean you're off track. It just means your spirit is waking up, and it's asking for your attention.
Spirituality is how you start listening and trusting the voice inside you, even when it's inconvenient or quiet. It's how you start living from your truth again.
The second dimension of spirituality is that spirituality is your relationship to your spirit. It's recognizing you're not just a mind or a body. You're also a spirit. But what exactly is a spirit?
It's the word our ancestors used because they didn't have a better one. And even today, with all our science and studies, we still don't quite have the language for it.
Science explores the brain, the nervous system. It explores energy and consciousness, but it still can't fully describe that spark inside of you, that force that makes you feel alive, that part of you that loves deeply, dreams, grieves, wonders, it's what makes you human. It's what makes you different from AI. It's what makes you, you. It's the part of you that keeps going even when you want to give up, the part of you that fights for the people you love, the part that feels purposeful, even when life doesn't make sense and is difficult and you keep going. Some people call it your soul. Some people think of it as an inner fire, and you can even think of it as life force energy.
For example, you eat food every day, and your body breaks it down into energy through metabolic processes. That's life force energy. The Chinese called it Qi. The Hindus called it prana. And you already know it. It's inside you. And spirituality is how you care for that energy, how you tend to your spirit, how you keep that flame inside you alive.
Whether it's through stillness, movement, art, prayer, spending time listening to music, nature - whatever helps you reconnect to your spirit - that's you practicing and living out your spirituality. Spirituality is what you do to keep your inner fire burning.
The third dimension of spirituality I want to talk about, is that spirituality is about the sacred.
What exactly does sacred mean? It's not just about religion, and it's not about rules or rituals, which you might associate the word with. Sacred is anything that feels deeply personal and meaningful to you. Something that feels set apart, even if it's small or ordinary. It's what makes you pause, and makes you realize that your life is more than just the things you do every day, the to-do lists and the errands.
It could be a sunrise that stops you in your tracks, a deep breath that brings you back to the present moment, a piece of art that moves you to tears, a moment of stillness, someone's laughter, whatever it is that makes you feel connected, awake and deeply human, that's sacred.
And when you engage with those moments, when you protect them, honor them, and let them nourish you, that's spirituality. And sometimes spiritual moments can be the most quiet ones. When you engage with what feels sacred to you, that's spirituality.
The fourth dimension is that spirituality is your search for meaning.
It's what brings you to the deeper questions, the ones that don't always have easy answers. Like:
Why am I here?
What is the purpose of my life?
How do I live in a way that feels true to who I am?
These are big questions, and they can be uncomfortable and even overwhelming, but they're deeply human. Spirituality is a space where you ask these questions, where you don't have to rush to a conclusion or have them all figured out. These questions help you live with intention and approach life with curiosity and make meaning, even when life doesn't make sense. In a world that's constantly trying to pull our attention outward, to screens, to computers, to pressure, to performance, spirituality is what calls you inward, reminding you to slow down and ask these questions and reflect on them.
The fifth dimension of spirituality is that it’s your connection to something greater than yourself.
Something transcendent that you might not be able to fully explain, but you know it when you feel it. People call it different things, God, love, nature, the universe, or simply life itself. You don't have to define it perfectly or even totally understand it, but you can feel it.
It's a moment of awe when you're standing in an ocean watching the sun rise, or when you're looking at the Milky Way and just feeling how vast the universe is, when you witness the birth of your child and everything inside you just feels complete. It's the moment when you suddenly remember you're part of something much bigger than yourself, something beautiful, something far beyond comprehension.
I remember standing in Canyonlands National Park in Utah, just looking out onto all these ancient canyons, reading a sign that said the rocks were millions of years old. And in that moment, I felt awe rushing through me. Like something much bigger has been going on for millions of years, billions of years, and I felt tiny in a way that felt spiritual. It's the thing that reminds you you're part of something more.
Sixth, some people also consider spirituality as the journey towards oneness.
It's the path of feeling more connected to yourself and to others, and realizing that you're not as separate as you think you are. That beneath all the differences, there's a deeper unity. That your pain is connected to someone else's healing. That your joy has the power to ripple outward, and that we're not just isolated individuals, as it so often can feel like in our society, but that we're part of a larger whole. Spirituality invites you back into that sense of belonging, into the truth that you're never totally truly alone.
Lastly, spirituality can also be considered your relationship with God or whatever you call that highest part of yourself.
For some it's the voice of their highest self, the part that's wise, that leads with love, that intuitively knows what's right, especially when it comes to people you love. It could be God, the divine, the Holy Spirit. There's different words, terms, language around it, whatever name you give it. Spirituality is the relationship you build with that part of you. How often you listen to it, how much you trust it, and how willing you are to live from that place. And the journey of learning to live from it is what we call faith. It's not always easy, but it really can be very beautiful.
So those are some of the core ways to think about spirituality. And now I want to leave you with something to reflect on this week.
Try asking yourself: What does spirituality mean to me? Have there been moments in your life when you felt connected to something bigger than yourself, or times you experienced something sacred that made you pause, breathe, and feel fully alive? And if so, what kind of relationship would you like to have with that feeling and with that presence? You don't have to have all the answers or anything. Just begin with curiosity, and that's more than enough.
Listen to the full episode of the Inner Calling podcast “Essentials: Develop a Personal, Authentic Spirituality” to learn more about this here, & get the workbook to go along with it in our Resource Library!