Ask any spiritual student or seeker, "What are the qualities necessary to be a spiritual seeker?" They will be quick to answer: to be kind, to be loving, to be honest, to be truthful, to be empathetic, to be supportive. While all that is true, very few will say: to be strong, to be courageous, to have a will of iron, to be capable and competent and not afraid of confrontation.
Why? Because there is a false belief that spirituality is about being soft and gentle, not strong and tough. Actually, both these qualities are equally vital. In my almost forty years as a spiritual teacher, and ten years before that, as a student of spirituality, one thing has been very clear to me in seeing hundreds of spiritual seekers, students, and masters: unless one has both these qualities—the soft and the gentle, the strong and the tough—one will not progress in spirituality.
So much so, that in Taoist philosophy, they are presented as the yin and the yang. The balance of yin and yang makes a person spiritual. Other spiritual texts in India also present these as your feminine and masculine sides, which is another way of saying ‘yin’ and ‘yang’.
Since being spiritual involves a great degree of personal competence, spirituality is not a refuge for failures in life, for escapists, or for people who are running away looking for some new-age mystical solution to their problems. It involves taking a good, hard look at oneself, one's life, one's psychological reality, and being able to fix what is needed. It requires discerning the existential issues in one's life and determining what one can do, not only to manage them but also to solve them.
It is only spirituality that offers solutions to these existential issues, though I can hear many psychologists say, "No, they can only be managed." That's only because they have chosen to stop at psychology and not take the spiritual plunge. Once they do that, they will see that spirituality is the only source that offers solutions to our existential issues of purposelessness and loneliness that spiritual seekers face.
The writer is the founder of Aarsha Vidya Foundation. You can write to him at [email protected]