What If There's No Such Thing as a Spiritual Life?

What if the most honest answer to "what is practical spirituality?" is that the term itself is broken?

Spirituality exists, of course. But the moment you add "practical" to it, you've already divided your life into two bins: one spiritual, one everything else. And that division is the problem.

A Sunday morning. Spring. Coffee on a terrace after group meditation. Birds, sun, flowering trees. Someone at the table said something I've heard variations of a hundred times: "This is why I love Sundays. This part is spiritual. The rest of the week is just... material."

Everyone nodded. I almost did. Then something caught.

If everything comes from the same source, whatever name you give it, then the separation doesn't hold. If it only feels spiritual on Sundays, it's already a compartment, not a practice. There's no cosmic committee sorting your hours into categories.

That coffee on the terrace was pleasant. But it wasn't more spiritual than the argument I'd had with a colleague on Friday, or the groceries I'd carried upstairs on Thursday, or the silence in the car when I didn't say the thing I was about to say on Wednesday. Those moments weren't less. They were untitled.

The industry of the special

Every spiritual system I've encountered, and I've been inside more than one, eventually did the same thing. Each presented itself as the path. The first tradition I followed, I believed it. Genuinely, almost to the point of fanaticism. I was certain we would become a universal movement.

My certainty lasted about seven years. Other people's lasts longer. Some never leave.

By the second tradition, I could spot the pitch within weeks. The vocabulary changed, the technique changed. The message didn't: "We got it right," wrapped in just enough humility to pass as modesty.

The teachers aren't all that different from the rest of us, either. They're dedicated. That's the difference. Take someone, redirect their focus to contemplative practice for twenty years, give them an organization to run and students who look up to them, and you'll produce what looks exactly like spiritual mastery. Because it is expertise, built the same way a surgeon builds expertise: by doing the thing, repeatedly, for a very long time. Ericsson's research on deliberate practice suggests as much: extraordinary ability in most fields reflects sustained effort more than birthright.¹

This doesn't diminish what good teachers do. But they're good at it because they chose it, not because something chose them. Dedication explains more than mystique. The middle option, where certain people are born closer to something sacred, is a convenient story for everyone involved.

The hidden comfort of separation

Why does the compartment persist? Because it's comfortable.

Zeigler-Hill and Showers, in a study that wasn't about spirituality at all, found something that maps well onto this pattern: people who compartmentalize their self-concept, keeping the good parts in one mental box and the bad in another, report high self-esteem, but that self-esteem is fragile and collapses under pressure. People with integrated self-structures have lower peaks but much more stability.²

The spiritual version of this looks familiar. If Sunday morning is your spiritual self and Tuesday afternoon is your regular self, Sunday feels elevated. Then Tuesday arrives, and you're stuck in traffic thinking unkind thoughts about the driver ahead. The gap between those two selves isn't a gap. It's a fault line.

Temporary compartments can teach attention. Permanent ones become identity.

Just be human

Practical spirituality isn't a practice. It's a way of being in a day. Any day. The condition is simpler than most systems make it sound: don't forget to be human.

That means two things at once, and they don't separate well. First, awareness: are you actually present for what you're doing, or running the internal script about how your life should be different? Second, integrity: not just toward yourself, but toward the people around you. At the end of the day, does anyone, including you, deserve an apology you haven't given?

"Be human" is not a permission slip. Being human means owing something to the people you share a Tuesday with. Awareness without responsibility is just spectatorship.

A day where you go to work, come home, tend the garden, have dinner, go to bed. That's a full day of practice if you lived it with your eyes open and your conscience quiet. No mantra required. No app. A study from Monash University found that the quality of informal mindfulness, the kind you practice while eating or walking or listening, was associated with psychological benefits comparable to formal meditation.³ The cushion trains attention. Daily life is where you find out if it trained anything.

If you're living that same day but narrating it as "trapped in the system" or "meaningless loop," then no amount of Sunday meditation will fix the narration. A consistent pattern in motivation research suggests that people who take ownership of their choices tend to be healthier, more resilient, and more satisfied than those who frame themselves as victims of circumstance, not because their circumstances are better, but because the relationship to them is.

Meditation, philosophy, journaling, retreats: these aren't the foundation. They're maintenance. Without them, you risk forgetting the most basic thing. But confusing maintenance with the thing itself is how you end up measuring your spiritual progress in hours per cushion, which is like measuring your marriage by how many date nights you've logged.

What gets lost

Without a system, without a teacher, without a community, you might never find the door. I know people, good people, perfectly content with the house, the job, the barbecues, the beach vacation. For them, that's the full picture. They aren't wrong.

But they don't know there's wider. And you typically don't find wider on your own. A book, a teacher, a crisis, a community, something has to interrupt the pattern. The traditions I've been part of, for all their marketing, opened a door I wouldn't have found alone. The mistake isn't walking through it. The mistake is stopping in the doorway and calling the doorway home.

The question was never "system or no system." It was always: do you use it to become free, or do you use it to become a fan?

Keep Exploring

If this landed, you might also find value in:

• What Twenty Years of Meditation Actually Taught Me — what remains after you strip away everything that was performance
• I Am the Foundation — why the base was always you, not the system
• What Your Guru Forgot to Tell You — the verification habit that changes everything

The Only Prerequisite

Pick one day this week. An ordinary one, the more boring the better. At the end of it, write down two things: the moments when you were actually present for what was happening, and the moments when you owe someone, including yourself, an honest word you didn't say. Don't try to improve either list. Just notice what's already there.

That's the practice. No tradition necessary.

Notes & References

¹ Ericsson, K.A., Krampe, R.T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993) — "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance." Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406.

² Zeigler-Hill, V. & Showers, C.J. (2007) — "Self-Structure and Self-Esteem Stability: The Hidden Vulnerability of Compartmentalization." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33(2), 143–159.

³ Kakoschke, N., Hassed, C., Chambers, R., & Lee, K. (2021) — "The importance of formal versus informal mindfulness practice for enhancing psychological wellbeing and study engagement in a medical student cohort with a 5-week mindfulness-based lifestyle program." PLOS ONE, 16(10), e0258999.