In my professional life, starting a business with almost no financial resources for start-up money. In my private life, subduing appetites and letting go of ego. Also in my professional life, letting go of ego. I get the idea, but every time I try to smash it, it somehow creeps back into the picture, sometimes in disguise. In masage therapy, particularly, one has to be wary of this as healing power comes with complete concern for the client and a kind of blurring of normal boundaries. It isn't the time to be neurotic or overly self-critical.

That's easy. The plan is a simple one, though perhaps difficult to coordinate and enforce. Have all 6,736,940,383 or so people on the planet both give and receive a massage every day! That is, inbetween their morning and evening meditation.

Spirituality, it seems to me, seeks to answer the question, "what are we" beyond, or in addition to the merely physical and ego-driven socio-historical selves that we trot out each day to go to the office, pay the rent, get ahead, stay healthy, and so on? So one of its major purposes is to help us understand who and what we truly are. The answer to that most always seems to be that we are far less finite, physical, and mortal than we have grown up to believe (even though we might be that too) and that we are far more connected than the illusion of separate bodies and minds each doing their individual thing would lead one to believe. So connected, in fact, that we may be considered a single consciousness that includes the entire universe. Another question that would ultimately lead to the same territory is "what is God" or "what is ultimate reality?" Or perhaps the route is less verbal and consists of the experience of one's own mind while sitting on a meditation cushion or just the ordinary experiences of everyday life, from giving birth and raising families to  watching loved ones die and everything inbetween.

While I think the identity question is fundamental to what spirituality is, what seems fundamentally important about it comes down to the matters of how we are able to experience and deal with our emotional lives (cultivate compassion and empathy, deal appropriately with anger, avoid jealousy, let the love flow, etc.) and how we treat each other and all other living things, and even things, our ethical lives. And these are really flip sides of the same coin, one being more interior, reflective work and the other being more active and external. So witholding sharp words for your lover while you reflect on and process your anger can be a spiritual act just as imagining yourself into someone else's suffering. Creating a sustainable business, smiling at someone or teaching them, treating a homeless person as an equal, or drafting a peace proposal are all spiritual acts.

The role that spirituality plays in my life is to keep me aware of my shortcomings, on the one hand, and the infinite possibilities of the imagination, on the other hand.  It is right now a set of practices, readings, viewings, or investigations that expand my awareness of mind, body, consciousness, self, others, God, the world, the universe, the visible, and invisible. It keeps me more grounded than I might be sometimes and allows for soaring, vertical flights of fancy other times. The question I most ask myself right now is what is my "lived" spirituality, by which I mean a spirituality that manifests itself concretely and in relation to others rather than the investigative or soul-searching spirituality described above. I feel a lack at the most basic level of relating to family, friends, and other people. I feel geat gaps between my ethical sense and my behavior. Yet at the same time I intuitively know that I am involved in a progression leading in the right direction. Massage is a part of that movement because of the healing and the service that it involves, as is making meals for my partner, helping him with his business, or trying to lighten his emotional load. Rethinking profession and place in the world (and the world's meaning) is another part of that movement, as is asking for recycling in the building and making improvements in diet. And despite some colossal recent failures that I have had, behind every failure lies the attempt to progress in this direction. In the end, this may be nothing more than coming up against particular developmental edges or seemingly irresolvable conflicts right now, at this moment, rather than a problem of not having "lived" spirituality. Indeed, thinking that it is a problem at all may be primarily a problem of awareness rather than a problem of lived experience, since so much of who we are and what we do comes from spirit in ways that are encoded or habitual and therefore might go unnoticed by ourselves.

As for others, I find it hard to say. While we all have spirit in common, manifestations of it are as diverse as are people. The people I know might express it in the concerned parental advice they give, in creating a dinner and inventing things to do together, in building a collection of manuscripts or with love and diligence trying to get inside the heads of people from the distant past, in the sociability they have with other people, in the gift of always being there no matter what, in sex, in creating new institutions, processes, and paradigms of thought, in adjusting people's spines and caring after their health, in selfishly exploring themselves or in creating art, or in participating in religion. Spirituality, really, is everywhere because spirit is essential to our very nature.