To be spiritual means to go beyond the physical

What is spirituality? Let me first make it clear that what it is not,: Whatever you do with your body, mind or emotion cannot be a spiritual process. Let me make a distinction between being spiritual and spirituality. We may do asanas, which is a physical activity. We may talk, look and think, which psychological processes are, or we may do some emotional process or energy process. None of it is spiritual, but it is spirituality. That is, you are doing all these things so that your physicality, mentality and other aspects of who you are, allow you to go beyond themselves. Let me take the physical as an example.

When you wake up, one part of you says, “Oh, I have to get up and do my yoga” but one part of your body says, “Sleep.” Both are physicality – getting up and starting your asanas is physicality. Falling back in bed is also physicality. They are not different, but they are different. One leads you to get trapped in physicality. Another leads you to make way beyond physicality. So we call that kind of physical activity which allows you to make way beyond itself as spirituality, because it is allowing you to or at least paving the way for you to go beyond the physical.

When I say physical, it is not just the body and mind. Everything else that you perceive through the five sense organs is physical. If you transcend that then you are spiritual. But all the activity that we do towards that possibility is spirituality. It is not spiritual, but we are trying to be spiritual; that is spirituality.