The Sacred Circus

As a meditation teacher, I end up in a lot of conversations about spirituality and religion—occupational hazard, I suppose. What's funny is how often people assume we won't have much to talk about once they mention they're "not religious" or "not really spiritual" or "definitely not a meditator like you." That's usually when I offer a broader view of what religion actually is, and if we’re lucky, suddenly we're deep in fascinating conversations about what really matters to them and how they structure their lives. Huzzah!

I've never really considered myself a writer, but I had so much fun with these conversations that I decided to experiment with putting this expanded religious view into an essay. The result is what you're about to read—my attempt to show that we're all a lot more religious than we think, just maybe not in the ways we expect.

It turned out to be such an enjoyable experiment that I think I might keep posting on substack for a while. Consider this the start of what I'm calling "Sacred Mischief"—explorations into the sneaky ways the sacred shows up in all our lives, and what to do about it.