Spirituality and Dating

And where is the spirituality in all of this?what? what?

Spirituality. A spiritual path. Such a potentially charged question and yet one that I really, really want to discuss.

A little background…

I was baptized Greek Orthodox and raised in and out of Christianity. My parents were born-again back when Bob Dylan was, way back then. Do you remember that album?

I briefly attended a very strict evangelical elementary school in the countryside where in fourth grade girls and boys couldn’t have recess together.

As a teenager, I went to Christian summer camps, attended a Catholic high school and my parents eventually joined the Lutheran church because they have the best music. Bach.

My German grandmother was her own kind of Tibetan Buddhist (traveling there for her 80th birthday) and also inspired by the Black Madonnas of Europe.

I went to college, took religious studies and quit Christianity but missed the rituals, the connection to history, and faith. Oh, to have faith…

For decades my spirituality has been informed by my yoga studies. People often assume I’m a Buddhist. I like to say I play one on TV.

I have taught World Religions and now I coach people in their quests for love.

My coaching training included practices from Taoist and Tantric traditions. Sometimes I want to celebrate this, sometimes I tie myself in knots about colonialism, cultural appropriation, and the watering down of knowledge.

As an adult, I think of myself as spiritual but not religious. And yet, I have never signed up for any of the spiritual dating sites, because somehow I am wary of other people who call themselves spiritual.

I see spirituality as a constant practice and one of the ways we can be challenged by our own beliefs is when we look for love. As a Buddhist friend just said, “a lot of our pain lives in relationship.”*

Whatever your spiritual path, it surely includes reflections on desire, on love, on ethics and on the meaning of life. I have come to believe that we can make dating a spiritual practice. Where better to confront our ego, our little rituals, our faith and our beliefs?