How My Spirituality Defined Me
Spirituality - the quality of being concerned with the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.
It seems pretentious to say I’m a spiritual person. To some, this pronouncement might come across as ‘holier than thou’, pious or overly righteous. Conversations I have on a day-to-day basis rarely take an esoteric turn, and I can’t remember when I last donned my sackcloth and ashes. But I guess I do practise my own version of spirituality.
In recent years, spirituality has untethered itself from its uptight older brother, religion, and forged its own path, welcoming into its inclusive fold souls who do not feel the need to identify as Christian, Jew, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, or any other faith in order to enjoy the benefits that accrue from having a belief system. Organised religion no longer owns the rights to peace of mind, integrity, kindness or generosity. You no longer have to rock up at a place of worship, bow your head and close your eyes, or recite verses to be spiritual. Don’t get me wrong, I respect all faiths, I just don’t think I need to adhere to one to be the person I am.
Being the child of Caribbean parents, I was, of course, raised a Christian. My grandmother, interestingly, practised a ‘Spiritual Baptist’ faith, a combination of Christianity and remnants of a West African religion passed down the generations like Chinese Whispers by her enslaved forefathers and mothers. My mother, for her part, could be found reading her Bible before going to bed every night, something she did her entire life. And unlike today, all schools in the 1970s started the day with religious assemblies, where we would listen to a story that always had a divine message, sing a hymn and say a prayer. We would pray – en masse – in the dining room before tucking into our cabbage, roast potatoes and lamb with mint sauce and again before we filed out of the classroom at the end of the day. That was my normal back in the day, and I’m thankful for the grounding these rituals gave me.
My early experiences of religion encouraged me to contemplate (as far as any child could) the existence of something that I knew was there even though I couldn’t see, touch or hear it. It offered me a framework of something that, by the time I was twenty, I knew I had to fashion to suit the person I was becoming.
In truth, my spiritual journey began before I was ten years old. I used to hang out with some girls at school and Nicola was the head of the ‘gang’. What she said went, so if she was friends with you, everyone was friends with you. But if she rejected you, usually for some minor infraction, the other girls would reject you too. By the time I was nine, I was heartily sick of these shenanigans (and hurt, to be honest), and though memories of my youth can be hazy at times, I definitely remember having a conversation with myself about what was important to me when it came to friendships. I decided there and then to seek out people who were kind, honest and principled, people who were prepared to get a bloody nose for sticking up for themselves and other people. Overnight, I became very discerning when it came to figuring people out and adept at recognising insincerity and perfidy. It helped that I enjoyed my own company, so I never felt the need to compromise what was important to me in order to avoid being ‘Billy-no-mates’.
Little did I know back then that my childish inner dialogue would be the first of many that I would have in a bid to discover what it meant to ‘be’. I would add as an interesting aside, I started reading my horoscopes when I was about eight, and I’ll always remember Capricorn children being described as having old heads on young shoulders.
My friendship rule of thumb served me well at university. At the start of my first year, I observed other girls and boys latching on to each other in an attempt avoid the terror of being on their own. But the idea of swearing undying allegiance to, or sharing my deepest secrets with, Jane or Roberta only to find that three weeks later I couldn’t stand them nor they me made me shudder. Extricating myself from a forced friendship was not my idea of fun, so I wandered around campus on my own, taking in the sights and sounds and keeping my own counsel until I met people who became firm, and in some cases lifelong, friends.
Everyone has uncomfortable conversations with themselves at points in their lives, but rather than drown them out, I decided to engage. One conversation I had when I was nineteen went as follows:
‘I don’t want to get to twenty-six years of age and wonder how I got here.’
More a declaration than a conversation, I know, and an example of what someone with an old head on young shoulders would say. Whatever it was, from that point on, I made a commitment to myself to live consciously, to be aware of my thoughts and feelings in real time, so to speak, and to interrogate them. I didn’t stuff them down, engage in displacement activities or go into denial. I allowed them to be.
At twenty-one, as part of my linguistics degree course, I went to work in Germany. I’d already spent three months in Berlin and Stockholm the year before and had lived with students from my class. Having friends around you while navigating life in a foreign country gave me a huge feeling of safety, but for some reason, as I prepared to embark on my second placement, a voice told me I needed to be on my own because I had important inner work to do.
And, so it was that in 1990, I found myself on my own in a self-contained room (with an en suite shower room. Very boujee) in nursing quarters in Dusseldorf. With a handful of tapes for company, I started the solitary process of unpicking and unpacking who I was. It wasn’t pretty: I spent weekends sitting with feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. I admitted to myself that I felt ugly and stupid and worthless, and I compared myself to other girls my age who seemed know what they were about. It was excruciating, but I was prepared for it and reminded myself of the promise I’d made two years before.
I met an elderly woman who took me under her wing and talked to me about reincarnation. Her favourite line was, ‘I’ll be back!’. I came across an esoteric bookshop and bought a handful of books about past lives and being, books I still have thirty years later. One was called ‘Living without the Mask’, which summed up perfectly the kind of life I had chosen to live.
The six months I spent in Germany were the most important of my life, not least because I made friends with people who practised everyday spirituality. I had conversations that allowed me to say out loud the things I thought without people thinking I was mad. I recall feeling sad at work one day, and my much older colleague, a woman who has remained a friend to this day, asked me what was wrong. She said,
‘Is it seelisch?’
The word seelisch, can mean psychological, mental, emotional, or spiritual. I could have hugged her because she was spot on. She was asking after my soul, and I was so moved because no one ever talked about the soul when I was growing up in the context of self-discovery. No one talked about self-discovery full stop. I was still working things out in my head, trying to find out who I really was beyond my external reality – my nationality, my culture, my family, my status and it was confusing and sometimes I felt sad. I knew what I was but was still trying to figure out why I was.
My time in Germany became the blueprint for the rest of my life. Observation – inward and outward – reflection and interrogation became regular practices. I learned to have courage of my convictions, even when those convictions went against what the people I loved the most professed to be right.
I became a seeker, and as I reflect on those months abroad, I can see that my mother, who was my greatest influence, was also a seeker. She did not feel shackled by her faith. When I was about eight, she bought a book on the occult, something her West Indian contemporaries would have been scandalised by. When I was eighteen, I snuck a read of a book her English friend had lent her about a Medium called Doris Stokes, and by the time I was well into my thirties, we were swapping so-called new age books by the likes of Gary Zukav, Eckhart Tolle and Esther and Jerry Hicks.
I wouldn’t say I chose the spiritual path, rather it chose me. In order for my eight-year-old self to survive the slings and arrows of outrageous friendships, I needed to adopt a philosophy that ensured my closest relationships left me feeling whole and happy. All I did from that point on was discover other philosophies that helped me to live a contented life where I recognised that while fancy clothes, fine food and a successful career might be nice, there were other, intangible goals that were worth striving for.
Another book I read while in Germany was called the ‘The Road Less Travelled’ by M. Scott Peck. It is quite possibly the book that changed my life, not least because I knew that the path I was embarking upon would not be easy (FYI: Greta Thunberg is also a Capricorn).
The road has been bumpy at times, but I’ve never regretted my choice. I’ve made myself question my motivations and my beliefs over the years, and I’ve always aimed to ‘live good with people’, as my granny used to say, while being true to myself and honouring my values. I stopped believing I needed a religion to tell me how to exist, although ironically, given what I’ve said about having a faith, I did find this gem in the Bible which has stayed with me:
‘Be not conformed to this world, rather, be transformed by the renewing of your mind.’
I liked this verse a lot, and in my twenties I took great pleasure in quoting it to born again Christians who feared my idiosyncratic ideas might prevent me from entering the kingdom of God.
Socrates was credited with saying the unexamined life isn’t worth living. That’s a bit harsh, I think, but I’m with him when it comes to examining your life. For what it’s worth, I believe examination (honest), reflection (quiet) and transformation (of words and deeds) make for a life steeped in a spirituality that you get to define for yourself.
Written by Laurie O’Garro
Laurie has recently come out as a writer of poetry, flash fiction, including her hilarious 'God Monologues', and articles. She has lived in London for twenty-seven years, having moved to the capital to take up her first teaching job.
Laurie's hobby is string art which she discovered off the back of a childhood art from the 70s. The craft is best compared to embroidery, except it's done on card. And it's funkier. Her plan is to go global with string art and turn her creations into clothing and other accessories that people will fall in love with.