Is being a spiritual person something you become after practices or is it who you are?

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What does it mean to be spiritual? Rather simply, it means that you both believe, and participate in, a spiritual reality. Does it really matter whether you believe in the reality before you start practicing it or whether the practices lead you into the belief?

It doesn’t. When I was a wee lad, I wasn’t spiritual at all. I had no belief in any mystical reality whatsoever, and much to the consternation of my mother, proclaimed my atheism at the ripe old age of 16, forcing her to include in her daily prayers, “bring my dearest son back into your grace,” for some 10 years until I finally got around to telling her I changed my mind.

Not being spiritual and being an avowed atheist didn’t stop me from being curious about alternative religions and ways of being spiritual. I joined a Wicca coven a couple of years later, where I had to at least pay lip service to the existence and reality of gods and goddesses.

Lip service it still felt like when I left the coven a year later, not because I hated it or wasn’t having fun or anything, on the contrary it was the most fun I’d ever had in my whole life up til then, but because I’d run out of financial rope and had to leave the area for greener pastures.

I didn’t believe in astrology or tarot, but that didn’t stop me from running my own natal charts and doing tarot readings. I didn’t believe in imbuing energy in things, but that didn’t stop me from buying a few crystals and a necklace and trying it out anyway.

I did them because I was curious and it was fun, and I found it absolutely fascinating that grown-ass adults believed, or at least pretended really really hard to, in these silly things. And the women there weren’t all 70 year old crunchy granola hippies either.

I wanted to know why, and now, at 35, I can finally answer all these question. Normal life is boring. Sharing is amazing. Pretending really really hard that something is true is way more fun than you would ever think it is. You’re turning your rational brain off and just getting out of your own skin.

Even when you believe in it you still have to suspend disbelief. That’s what all the practices are for, so that your connection to that part of your mind, to that part of life, where mundane reality steps aside and the gods and goddesses are invited to play along, never goes stale.