What does it mean to be spiritual? Do you have to meditate every day, give up alcohol, stop swearing, eat perfectly, and maintain a state of inner peace while everyone around you is driving you absolutely up the wall?

Psst…good news. As Miwa put it in the Live, “You can drink, swear, be a troublemaker, and still be spiritual.”

Why? Because you don’t earn your spirituality through good behavior. You already are a spiritual being. Spiritual practice is about becoming more conscious of yourself as spirit while you’re here having a very human experience.

That distinction changes the conversation significantly.

What Does It Mean to Be Spiritual?

There’s a difference between being a spirit and practicing spiritual awareness.

It doesn’t matter what you do in the body. You’re still spiritual. You don’t become more spiritual because you meditated this morning or less spiritual because you had three margaritas last Saturday.

Spiritual practice is something different. Meditation, healing, psychic development, and other practices can help you become more conscious of who you are as spirit while you’re in a body. At the BPI, we teach that everyone is born with psychic abilities and can develop them consciously through practice. The practice develops awareness. It doesn’t determine whether you qualify as spiritual in the first place.

That means the more interesting question isn’t: Am I spiritual enough? It’s: How conscious am I of myself and the choices I’m making?

And please don’t immediately turn that into another spiritual rule. We’re just getting started.

Spirituality Isn’t a Purity Contest

Ideas about spiritual purity have been around for a long time.

Depending on the tradition, spiritual people may be expected to avoid certain foods, substances, sex, possessions, pleasures, or other parts of physical life. Modern spirituality can create its own version of this, too. Food becomes “clean.” Certain lifestyles become “high vibe.” Someone else’s choices become evidence of how evolved they are.

Suddenly spirituality starts looking suspiciously like a very complicated rulebook.

What you do in your body doesn’t determine whether you’re spirit.

That doesn’t mean physical choices have no consequences. Of course they do. Bodies respond to what we eat, drink, do, and experience. Choices can affect other people, and some behaviors can cause real harm, but that’s different from turning every physical choice into a measurement of spiritual worth.

You don’t need to become perfectly pure to consider yourself spiritual. You’re already spirit.

Can You Drink Alcohol and Still Be Spiritual?

Yep.

The better question is what drinking does for you.

One person might enjoy a drink and feel fine. Another may notice that alcohol doesn’t feel good in their body at all. Someone else might discover that what started as enjoyment has become something they rely on to relax or feel okay.

Rather than starting with Is alcohol spiritually good or bad?, try paying attention to what actually happens.

What does your body communicate when you partake in it? The body gives feedback. A glass of wine might feel enjoyable, while the second one doesn’t. What felt good five years ago may feel completely different today. Perhaps alcohol doesn’t feel good at all.

That’s information.

Spiritual awareness gives you space to notice that information and choose from there. The goal isn’t to follow somebody else’s universal rule about what a spiritual person is allowed to do. It’s to become more conscious of your own experience.

Your Body Gets a Vote

We can get so focused on spirit that we forget we’re also living in bodies.

And bodies have opinions. The body can tell you when it’s tired, hungry, overwhelmed, delighted, uncomfortable, relaxed, or very much regretting whatever happened last night. Learning to listen is part of the practice.

This doesn’t mean you have to follow every desire or avoid every uncomfortable sensation. It means the body gets to participate in the conversation instead of being treated like an inconvenient vehicle dragging the spirit around Earth.

Ask what feels good. Notice what doesn’t. Pay attention when something that used to work stops working.

You can choose, see how it goes, and consciously choose differently next time.

A Tool or a Crutch?

This same question becomes especially interesting with substances used to create altered or spiritual experiences.

People have used psychoactive substances in spiritual and ceremonial settings for a very long time. An altered state can open the door to experiences that feel expansive, mystical, healing, or completely outside someone’s ordinary awareness.

But there’s an important distinction. In the Live, Miwa describes traditional ceremonial use as “a tool, not a crutch.”

A tool may help open a door. A crutch starts to feel necessary for walking through it.

If the story becomes I need this substance to connect with spirit, access my intuition, have a spiritual experience, or feel whole, it’s worth taking a lookie at that dependency. Psychic development gives you another way to explore those states. Through meditation and practice, you learn to access spiritual awareness on your own.

And no, we’re not replacing you must use substances with you must never use substances.

That would just be another rule.

Spirituality Doesn’t Require Constant Optimization

Another sneaky way perfection can creep into spiritual practice is trying to optimize absolutely everything. 

Food. Sleep. Exercise. Hormones. Supplements. Meditation. Productivity. Spiritual practice. Probably the precise angle at which sunlight should hit your face at 7:13 a.m. Taking care of the body is wonderful. So is learning more about yourself.

You can get so busy perfecting the human experience that you forget to actually have one.

Sometimes the body wants the healthy choice. Sometimes the ice cream cone sounds fantastic. Maybe you go out with friends, stay up late, eat something delicious, and have a great time. As Miwa says, “You’re not on the job every second.”

Spirituality doesn’t require constant self-improvement. You’re allowed to enjoy being alive.

Guilt Doesn’t Make You More Spiritual

So what happens when a choice really doesn’t go well?

Maybe you drank too much. Said something you regret. Made a decision that hurt someone. Or simply woke up knowing, Yep. I don’t want to do that again.

Great information.

Guilt can be useful for a moment when it helps you recognize that something didn’t align with who you want to be. The trouble starts when guilt turns into a place to live.

Beating yourself up doesn’t undo the choice. Shame doesn’t magically make you wiser. Instead, notice what happened. Take responsibility when responsibility is needed. Repair what you can. Ask what you’d like to choose differently next time. Then let yourself move forward.

Otherwise, the punishment can become much larger than the original mistake.

Can You Swear and Still Be Spiritual?

We can clear this one up pretty quickly.

Obviously, yes.

Your spirit doesn’t evacuate the premises because you dropped an F-bomb. Words can carry energy, though, and context matters. The same word can express anger, humor, affection, frustration, or approximately 47 other emotions depending on who’s saying it and why.

So rather than sorting vocabulary into spiritual and unspiritual, pay attention to the energy behind the words and what you’re creating with them. Much more interesting.

Being Human Is Part of Being Spiritual

Spirituality can get weird when it becomes an attempt to escape being human.

Bodies eat. They need food and sleep, experience pleasure and desire, get tired, and make choices. Some choices feel great, while others become excellent material for figuring out what we’d like to do differently next time.

None of that makes the spirit disappear.

Spiritual practice gives us a chance to bring more consciousness into the experience, rather than trying to transcend it altogether.

That’s why grounding plays such a big role in psychic development. The goal isn’t to float farther and farther away from ordinary life. It’s to become more present for it.

You can explore intuition, energy, clairvoyance, meditation, and expanded states of consciousness and still be a person who laughs too loudly, enjoys dessert, gets annoyed, changes their mind, and occasionally says a bad word.

That’s the fun of being here.

Maybe the most important warning in the whole conversation is this: “Please don’t take this conversation and make a rule out of that, too.” Because the point isn’t to replace one set of spiritual rules with another. It’s to become conscious enough to make your own choices.

Ready to Explore Spirituality for Yourself?

Reading about spirituality is fun. Experiencing your own energy is even better. Self Healing 101 teaches practical tools for grounding, meditation, and working with your own energy, or you can get a one-on-one BPI psychic reading or healing. No spiritual perfection required.

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