Episode 16: Deep Dive, Spirituality and Relationships

What People Get Wrong, and What It Really Is

Hey everyone, thanks for joining the Awaken24 Podcast with me, Zi Yi. This episode is going to hit many of you in different ways, because it challenges the way most people define spirituality, and the way people think about spirituality in relationships.

Before we get lost in the modern versions of spirituality, the aesthetics, the trends, the wellness branding, let’s look at what the word actually meant before all of that. The word spiritual comes from the Latin spiritus, meaning breath, vital force, the animating principle of life. It comes from spirare, to breathe. So originally, spiritual didn’t mean mystical, holy, or enlightened. It simply meant of the inner life, of the awareness that animates the body.

And spirituality literally meant the condition or cultivation of that inner life, the investigation of what perceives, what is aware, what moves the mind. There was no identity attached to it, no high vibes, no crystals, no personas, no curated aesthetic, just the study of the inner world.

In classical Daoist and Buddhist traditions, this meaning is reflected in phrases like 心法 xin fa, the methods of the mind, 修行 xiu xing, cultivation, and 明心见性 ming xin jian xing, clarifying the mind to see one’s true nature. None of these point to performance.

They point to clarity, awareness, and recognizing the nature of mind. The original meaning was lost, and spirituality got turned into something people try to look like. In reality, spirituality is not about being calm, pure, or morally superior. It is simply the investigation of the mind, the cultivation of clarity, and the recognition that the animating force of life is not separate from daily living. That’s the foundation. Everything else is noise layered on top.

The Popular Idea of Spirituality, and Why It Became Delusional

Modern spirituality became confused the moment it was severed from real practice and sold as identity. What was once discipline, introspection, and training the mind turned into a wellness aesthetic, crystals, sage, high vibes, manifestation quotes, soft voices, curated personas, and a subtle sense of moral superiority for looking awakened. Instead of transformation, people learned to perform spirituality.

This leads to assumptions like: “If I’m spiritual, I shouldn’t feel anger,” “everything should be positive,” and “my partner must also be spiritual.” From this confusion comes the idea that spirituality and relationships must be balanced, as if the two are separate forces competing for space. They’re not. The issue is mistaking spirituality for an aesthetic instead of a way of understanding the mind.

What Spirituality Meant Before the New Age Rebranding

Historically, in Buddhist, Daoist, Yogic, and other classical traditions, spirituality meant understanding the mind, seeing through illusion, dissolving suffering at its root, cultivating humility, discipline, and clarity, and dismantling the ego, not inflating it. It required method, structure, effort, and introspection.

But once spirituality became commercialized, everything became subjective. People mistook feelings as insight, imagination as truth, dissociation as ascension, and comfort as awakening. Without standards or lineage, clarity disappeared and delusion filled the space. That’s when spirituality stopped being a practice and became a costume.

Real Spirituality Isn’t Separate From Life

True cultivation isn’t a hobby, a mood, or something you activate during meditation and turn off during arguments. In the past there was never a distinction between this is spiritual and that is not. Real spirituality is the recognition that nothing is separate, the spiritual and the mundane arise in the same mind, and every experience reflects your framework of perception.

Your senses, emotions, habits, stories, and reactions are created by your mind. One of the biggest modern misconceptions is this unconscious equation: good equals spiritual, bad equals not spiritual. But in real cultivation, joy arises, anger arises, confusion arises, clarity arises, and all of it is part of the path. Everything arises within the same field of awareness. The real question is: are you aware of your mind’s movements, or are you being dragged by them?

How This Applies to Relationships

People often ask, “How do I balance spirituality with a partner who doesn’t cultivate?” The question itself is mistaken. If your spirituality collapses because you’re in a relationship, if you lose yourself, cling to purity or some lofty ideal, or try to force your partner onto your path, that isn’t spirituality. That’s insecurity wearing spiritual clothing.

A relationship doesn’t block cultivation, it reveals what you have not yet cultivated. Partners expose attachments, expectations, emotional reflexes, dependency habits, desire for control, and unexamined fears. Your partner is not a threat to spirituality, they are the mirror through which your mind becomes visible. You use that reflection to go inward and investigate the mind.

What Balancing Really Means

Balancing does not mean shielding your spiritual life from your relationship, forcing spirituality onto your partner, or needing them to validate your path. Balancing means keeping clarity while fully engaging in life.

It also means allowing your partner to be who they are, and even that is interesting, because we tend to believe we are “allowing” someone, when in truth we don’t control another. The illusion is that we have control, and the other person believes it. So we think we’re giving them space to be as they are, but if they knew their power, if they realized what makes them believe others have control, the whole idea of “allowing” would crumble, and our own insecurities would shine.

Balancing also means not using spirituality as a moral weapon, recognizing your reactions as your own patterns, and letting daily life become a method of self introspection. A mature cultivator knows their partner does not need to cultivate in order for them to cultivate. Take that as a direct message: your path requires you, not anyone else’s participation.

The Big Point

Real spirituality has nothing to do with being calm, acting enlightened, maintaining a serene image, avoiding conflict, or presenting a high vibe persona. Real spirituality is seeing clearly, acting with wisdom, dissolving unnecessary suffering, engaging life without clinging, and recognizing no separation between the path and the world.

If spirituality feels separate from your relationship, then it isn’t spirituality.

The Simple Answer

How do you balance spirituality and relationships? You don’t. You dissolve the illusion that they’re separate, and suddenly the entire relationship becomes part of your cultivation, for self introspection, realizing cyclic sensory habits, so you can make choices that nourish the seeds of wisdom, and the conditions of clarity and awakening.

Of course there are nuances to everything, but don’t use nuance as an excuse to not see clearly. Contemplate, and reflect on the wants, desires, and habits you hold to.