Exploring our spirituality: a journey of discovery
Updated: Sep 2
'Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer.'
Rainer Maria Rilke
For most of my life, my experience of myself has been that I am first and foremost a spiritual being, that I am spirit and soul as well as mind and body. Looking back at my life, I can see, moreover, that at the heart of my life’s journey, there has always been a spiritual quest, a searching and reaching for what David Elkins calls ‘the sacred stream’ of our existence. Over the years, my spirituality has at times lain dormant and at others, been powerfully awakened. It has led me to explore a number of different spiritual pathways and it has found expression in a variety of different ways. But it has always been there, sometimes a subtle presence waiting quietly and patiently to be attended to, sometimes a more powerful one that bursts into my consciousness and cannot be ignored.
As it is for me, this spiritual aspect of our being is of fundamental importance to many of us and, it seems, is becoming more so. Over the past twenty years in particular, there has been a worldwide upsurge of interest in spirituality. More and more of us are hungry for a greater spiritual reality in our lives and are searching for a deeper meaning and purpose, for an inner peace that often eludes us and for new ways of expressing and living out our spiritual self. Many of us find our spiritual home within one of the world’s major wisdom traditions, but there are also many of us who are wrestling with organised religion and searching for alternative spiritual paths to follow. This can be a lonely experience. It can be very difficult to find like-minded others to share the journey with as the struggles we experience are so often misunderstood. It can also be hard to identify the kinds of resources that might help us to make sense of our experience and encourage us to trust our own inner wisdom.
This series of posts is for those of us who are seekers, who live with the conviction that ‘there must be something more than this’ and who are yearning for that mysterious Other dimension of reality which the philosopher William James calls 'the more'. It does not matter where we are on our journey, what we believe or don’t believe or whether we know what it is we are searching for. There are no creeds that we have to sign up to, no teachings or doctrines that we have to embrace and it does not focus on any one particular spiritual pathway. It does not set out to teach or convert us to a particular way of living the spiritual life. For it rests firmly on the belief that there are many paths which lead to the More, whoever or whatever we conceive it to be, and many ways of expressing our unique spirituality.
Neither does it set out to give us the answers we are searching for it sees each one of us as having deep within us the wisdom to find our own path and to make the choices that are right for us. And so it seeks rather to resource and support us in learning to ‘live the questions’ that are meaningful to us as Rainer Maria Rilke puts it. It seeks to enable us to discover our own unique spiritual self and to make our own individual spiritual journey.
Together we will explore what it means to be a spiritual being. We will look at what shapes our spirituality, what different forms it may take and how it changes and develops as we move through our lives. We will explore the many ways in which we make sense of and connect with the More. We will consider what it might mean for us to adopt a broader way of thinking about spiritual practice. And finally, we will look at some of the many different forms of practice that we have come to draw on in our search for a deeper relationship, both with our spiritual self and with the More.
My hope is that making this journey of discovery will be as eye-opening and as liberating for all of us as it has been for me, that it will enable us to find out who we are as spiritual beings, to trust our own deeper knowing and to forge our own spiritual path.
‘You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.’
Sue Monk Kidd
©Copyright Kaitlyn Steele 2026
Kaitlyn Steele
Comments