Spirituality Definitions

One of the major focuses of this site is spirituality. Part of the appeal of getting the “stuff” off our plate is not just creating room to do more work, but having a chance to concentrate on who we are on a deeper level. It’s not just about gaining knowledge, necessarily, but having more of a felt sense of the self. But what is spirituality anyways?

What do people think when they hear the word spirituality? Are we just talking at cross-ends?

Recently, my grandmother, Ester Leutenberg, was working on her new book, Discovering Your Spiritual Path Workbook on clinical applications of spirituality. It is now available via A Space Within for pre-order.

She had done a fairly extensive survey of 88 people, asking them a number of spirituality questions, including asking people for their definition of spirituality. She asked me to look through them and pick out my favorites. I one-upped the assignment, and did a bit of thematic analysis, trying to group the quotes into categories of understanding. As you read the categories below, think about yourself and your idea of spirituality. Which category or categories does your definition of spirituality fits into?

Here are the categories I came up with from the spirituality definitions, and some explanation of each:
Spirituality is seen as -
Healing/Growth – a force behind personal or world coming to greater health.
Understanding/Meaning/Answers - the drive towards greater knowing
Connection - a related connected feeling
Feeling - a particular sense-state, (e.g. a state of flow or perceived in quiet moments or moments of meditation)
Force/G-d/Higher Power – spirituality is seen as some kind of a relationship to a higher power
Inner/Within - an internal construction, a knowing inside
Energy/Metaphysics - awareness of an underlying energy or reality undefined by contemporary science
Negative Case - these people didn’t see themselves as spiritual, and defined it in a negative way (e.g. spirituality is superstition for weakminded people)

Before you go on, which definition of spirituality do you usually use?

Or do you think about spirituality in some other way altogether? If spirituality is internal and individual, then we each have the right to define it for ourselves. In conversation with others, though, it pays to think about if you're using the word to mean different things. Consider coming across to their understanding, imagining what the world looks like for a moment with that conception of spirituality. Is it scary? Do you trust yourself?

In A Space Within, I invite you to hold your own definition lightly. Exploring the different resources on the site can create the possibility for expansion and deepening. I hope to provide space and resources for all these different experiences and conceptions of spirituality.

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