How Spirituality, Happiness and your Purpose of Life are related

In the past two days I wrote about people who travel to other countries and preferably to India, often with the goal to find themselves or to find inner peace. Another nice thing that people are often searching for when they are on travels is the meaning of life. Most of these people usually consider themselves spiritual. Not too long ago I had talks with some of our guests about this topic, spirituality and the purpose of life.

We were talking about different ways how people practice spirituality. Some do yoga and meditation while others like to pray or speak mantras. Some perform rituals – with a religious direction or also without, just mixing their own belief together from many places or their own experiences. For them, this is necessary in their daily lives, this is their spirituality.

For others, being spiritual does not only mean a certain practice once per day but a certain lifestyle and philosophy. They include an environmental-friendly behavior as well as a generally peaceful attitude towards others. You can describe them as ‘modern hippies’ if you like but they are often more down-to-earth than their ancestors of the flower-power time. And their main goal is to find the meaning of life.

Of course people would normally agree that the answer to this question is different for every single person on this earth. Well, fine, I believe that spirituality may be different for everyone but I think if you have a meaningful life, no matter whatever this is for you, you live in spirituality. If you feel that you fulfill your purpose of life, you are happy and that is, in my eyes, true spirituality.

To tell you personally about myself, I have found my purpose and meaning of life simply in bringing happiness to others. This is what makes me happy. We are running this school for poor children and I can see that they are happy that they can come to school. They may not all realize the effect of this on their lives to its full intent but they are happy and that makes me happy. Even more clearly I can see the happiness of those children who live at the Ashram, here with us. Also our retreats, the Ayurveda and Yoga, this all makes people happy and this, in turn, makes me happy.

You need to do whatever makes you happy. So maybe this is the real search of people who come to India for a long journey. They take their time out from their life at home, some of them sell their homes and all their belongings and don’t fix a date when to return. This all with this intention: I want to find what makes me happy.

I believe you should take such a step before you are burned out and before you fall into depression. Find your meaning of life and be happy. That is what I call spirituality.