What comes to mind when you hear the word spirituality?
For many people, it brings to mind religion, belief in a God or particular rituals and practices. For others, it suggests mysticism, extraordinary experiences or a search for something beyond the ordinary experience of being human.
Some people feel uncomfortable with the idea. They may be drawn to practices that cultivate awareness, understanding and connection, yet regard spirituality as new age or irrelevant to their lives.
I think this reflects something about our modern understanding of spirituality. We've made it into something separate from us, something outside day-to-day life or something to be avoided because it doesn't fit within a scientific understanding of the world.
What if spirituality isn't something to believe in or pursue? What if it has more to do with the nature of who we are?
What If Spirituality Is About Knowing Ourselves?
We tend to think about different aspects of ourselves as though they belong in separate categories. We look after our physical health, work on our thoughts and behaviours, learn to manage our emotions and look to religion or spiritual practices for answers to bigger questions about life.
These distinctions can be useful. The difficulty is that we can start to think of these aspects of ourselves as separate, when they're all part of the same human experience.
The way we inhabit our bodies influences how we experience the world. Our thoughts and beliefs shape what we notice and how we interpret what happens. Yet spirituality is often treated as something beyond ordinary life. We look for it in particular beliefs, practices or states of consciousness, as though it belongs somewhere else.
I think we've lost a sense of ourselves as spiritual beings. We're so accustomed to understanding ourselves through the material, psychological and social dimensions of our lives that it can be difficult to consider another perspective on our own nature.
I'm not suggesting that science, psychology or religion are at odds with spirituality. My concern is that we can become so focused on what we can categorise, explain and measure that we overlook the possibility of understanding ourselves in a different way.
Spirituality and the Luminous Self
My understanding of spirituality has developed through my own experience, my study of different philosophical and spiritual traditions and my years of working with Qigong. What I'm sharing here is my own synthesis of these influences, rather than an attempt to represent any single tradition.
At the heart of my understanding is the sense that there is something fundamental about our nature that we've lost touch with. In Daoist thought, Shenming (神明) encompasses ideas of spirit and illumination. My understanding of what I call the luminous self draws on this concept, alongside my own experience and study.
I'm not referring to a better version of ourselves, a perfected personality or an ideal we must work towards. I'm pointing towards something more fundamental, something that is already present whether or not we recognise it. I can't offer a complete explanation of what this means. My understanding continues to unfold through practice and through glimpses of something I'm still coming to know.
We grow up within families, cultures and societies. We acquire ways of thinking, behaving and understanding ourselves. We develop identities, beliefs and expectations shaped by our experiences and the world in which we live.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. These are part of being human. The difficulty is that we can become so identified with what we've acquired that we mistake our familiar patterns for the limits of who we are. We interpret the world through established assumptions without recognising how much those assumptions shape what we can see.
Our understanding of ourselves becomes confined by the ideas we've been taught. What if spirituality involves seeing beyond these limitations?
Maybe we need to start rejecting the ideas we've been indoctrinated with. Maybe we need to open our bodies, minds and spirits to the possibility that the world is very different from how we've been programmed to understand it. We can fully embrace our human experience while remaining open to the possibility that our understanding of ourselves doesn't tell us everything there is to know about our nature.
Spirituality, as I understand it, isn't about becoming something we are not. It's about coming to recognise something fundamental that has been present all along.
I think remembering describes this well, although not in the ordinary sense of retrieving a forgotten fact. It's a different kind of recognition, one that becomes possible as we begin to see beyond the understanding of ourselves we've acquired.
Qigong as a Way of Knowing Ourselves
Qigong is commonly approached as a practice for health and wellbeing. People come to it to improve mobility, develop balance, work with their breathing, cultivate Qi or establish a regular practice that supports their lives. These are all valid reasons to practise.
Qigong also offers us a way of exploring our own experience directly.
Through movement, stillness, breathing and the cultivation of presence, we begin to notice things we'd ordinarily miss. We become more familiar with the sensations of our bodies, the movement of our attention and the ways we respond to what arises. We may notice how quickly the mind wanders, where we hold tension or how easily we become distracted by our thoughts. We begin to recognise habitual ways of approaching life that we may never have questioned.
None of this requires us to adopt a particular spiritual belief. It begins with the practice itself.
A simple Qigong movement, approached with presence, can become an encounter with ourselves, body, mind and spirit. The movement is no longer simply something we perform. It becomes an opportunity to know our experience more intimately. As practice deepens, our familiarity with ourselves can expand. We become more sensitive to what is happening, more aware of patterns as they arise and better able to discern how we wish to respond.
For me, this is where Qigong as spiritual practice begins to take on meaning. We aren't simply moving and breathing to support the body's functioning. We are refining the way we perceive, becoming more conscious of the experience through which we know ourselves and the world.
Practice doesn't tell us what we must discover. Nor can we guarantee what will emerge for any particular person.
From Intellectual Understanding to Direct Experience
There is a difference between understanding something intellectually and coming to know it through direct experience.
We might know that we have a tendency to be critical. We might recognise that we interrupt people, become impatient or approach situations with particular expectations. We may even understand where these tendencies originated. Intellectual understanding, though, doesn't necessarily change our relationship with these patterns.
Recently, I invited a group of students to bring their awareness to particular qualities, including loudness and criticism. Rather than simply discussing these qualities, we explored their felt experience. The common reflection was that these qualities felt uncomfortable and weren't experiences the students wanted to remain in. The value of this practice isn't that we've identified something undesirable that we now need to eliminate. It's that we've developed a direct familiarity with an aspect of our experience.
Later, when we notice ourselves becoming critical in everyday life, that familiarity may become available to us. We have a reference point beyond the intellectual idea of being critical. We know something of what it feels like to inhabit that state and can begin to discern whether we want to continue expressing it. We might choose to cultivate a different quality in its place, giving attention to self-acceptance, compassion or appreciation. The choice comes from a more informed relationship with our own experience.
We don't need to eliminate our human characteristics to become more deeply acquainted with ourselves. The shift is in our capacity to recognise what's present without being entirely identified with it. We have more room to understand a pattern, question it and choose how we respond.
Something that once operated beyond our awareness becomes available to our discernment. We begin to see ourselves from a wider perspective.
This is one way practice can change our relationship with ourselves. We move beyond knowing about a quality to knowing something of it through experience. That distinction matters because no one else can provide this kind of knowing for us. We have to come to it ourselves.
Remembering Our Fundamental Nature
We live in a culture that directs our attention outwards. We're encouraged to acquire, achieve, improve and continually seek something more. Even spirituality can become another pursuit: another experience to have, another product to buy, another state to reach or another version of ourselves to become.
It's easy to come to understand ourselves through what we do, what we have and what we achieve. Within this way of seeing the world, the possibility that there may be more to our nature than what we can identify, explain or measure can be difficult to consider.
Could we reconsider what spirituality means?
What if it isn't something to acquire, a belief to adopt or an experience to pursue? What if it has more to do with our own nature, with something that has always been present whether or not we recognise it?
Could this be what it means to recognise the luminous self?
I can't give you a definitive explanation of what that recognition might be. I can speak from my own experience and about the possibilities that practice opens.
Through Qigong, we cultivate the conditions in which our perception can deepen and our perspective can shift. What emerges through direct experience is something no one else can give us. We can be told about it, but we have to come to know it for ourselves.
There is no guaranteed outcome, nor any particular experience that everyone must have. What unfolds through practice is different for each of us, and some of it remains unknowable.
For me, this is the invitation of Qigong as spiritual practice. Rather than pursuing something beyond ourselves, we can begin with what's already here and remain open to the possibility that our familiar understanding of who we are doesn't tell us the whole story.
People come to Qigong for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, through the experience of practice, the way we see ourselves and the world begins to change. Questions arise that hadn't occurred to us before. We start to see things differently, or to consider possibilities that once seemed beyond our reach.
There's no need to know in advance where practice might lead. We can begin by giving attention to what's here and allow our experience to unfold through practice.
In time, something may become apparent that we hadn't previously recognised or even considered possible.
If you're interested in exploring what Qigong can reveal through direct experience and practice, I share further reflections on Qigong, self-understanding and the nature of our experience by email.