Inside: Asking what is spirituality? Who is spiritual? What is spirituality for children? What is the meaning of a spiritual child/spiritually aware child? How do I teach my child spirituality?
Don’t we all wish to evolve as parents? As individuals?
Lately, I have realized how significant our definition of spirituality is to the shared spiritual walk we take with our children.
What is spirituality for you?
What role does spirituality play in your life?
Is it something private?
Is your spiritual walk tied to religion?
Does your spirituality incorporate alternative ceremonies?
Is it about the connection to the natural world?
Is it about becoming a good person? A better human? A better version of how you perceive yourself?
And what defines a good person? Am I a good person if I set boundaries for my children? Or if I don’t? Am I a good parent if I walk a spiritual journey or if I don’t?
Why define spirituality for ourselves?
There are as many questions to ask as there are human beings.
We are all spiritual beings walking a human life. Yet we each asked for different lessons while here and formulated for ourselves a unique path. Thus, defining what is spiritual for us, our belief system, what guides us, is more challenging than most perceive it to be, as it holds both shared perceptions and personal soul choices.
As challenging as these questions may be, for the shared discussion I am proposing on my little space on the web—and for offering spirituality to our children—we must awaken to the challenges of our personal definition for ourselves. Our perception of spirituality affects what we can offer and what we choose to offer to our children, the why and the how.
Why are we here on Earth?
Why are we here on Earth?
When I ask this question, when you ask yourself, we probably both wonder: Do we know? Should we know? Do we want to know?
Why are our children here? What did they come for? What gifts do they bring?
For the much younger children, new arrivals, we might also ask: where did they come from…?
The questions about our journey.
The questions about our journey largely affect our perception of spirituality. And the questions are actually more important than the answers.
When we ask these questions, we allow our human selves to accept that we are more. We are on a journey. We are more than our dense physical beings. More than matter. We are energy… and so are our children…
When we accept that we are more, we start to tend to and pay attention to this “more”: the more in ourselves and the more of our children.
We become aware of the nourishment we offer as food, environment, guidance, and tools: as a message to the self, guiding information, and soul choices.
We become aware of our daily choices and decisions. We grow in our inner Ayni (See an article about Gratitude and Ayni)—the congruence between who we are in our essence and how we walk our current lifetime—offering our children an example of the possible.
What is spirituality?
I choose to see spirituality as the walk of one’s essence in the here and earthly now.
We walk our spirituality in this life on Earth when we walk the path we wished to walk.
It can be about developing our spiritual abilities and transcendence beyond our physical limitations.
It can be about manifesting our spirituality in matter.
Depending on one’s path.
If one’s path includes meditation, inner development, and growing kindness, that’s spiritual for them.
If that path is about being an artist, possibly a very realistic artist, that is also a spiritual path.
If that path is about being an engineer contributing to the amazing developments of our world, that’s spiritual as well.
So is any choice we walk as long as it aligns with our luminous essence, the journey we came to walk, and our path beyond time.
Hence, one can be the most spiritual when one is most present and grounded.
Our perceptions affect our children’s ability to walk their path.
Our perception of what spirituality is affects our children’s ability to walk their potential, their spiritual potential.
The more aligned our walk, the more we are at Ayni with our essence, the wider the field of possibilities for our children is. As when we offer the example of alignment, we offer the legitimacy to walk their spiritual selves as they asked to, and are guided to, by their own inner knowing.
It is our awareness of this question that matters.
This short post refers back to asking: who are spiritually aware children and teens?
The intention is not to anchor or fix any specific perception of what spirituality is.
I wish to invite you to walk with the awareness that it is something to think about and explore.
The exploration guides us in the further choices and evolution we will walk with our children. Our answers and theirs may be different. And that is fine, as while our paths merge, and they choose us as their guides, we each walk our unique path.
What is spirituality for you?
How does it apply to your parental choices?
It’s not related, but actually very related. In my resource, 147 Useful Questions to Ask About the Wellness of Your Family – I share questions related to Soul Journey and Spiritual facets of family wellness. You can receive this comprehensive list of wellness questions below.
