By Srinivasan Vaidyaraman
In most circles today, spirituality is narrowly understood. It’s seen as mental renunciation, aloofness, detachment — something high above the noise of the body, the messiness of emotion, the heat of desire. But this, I believe, is only half the truth.
True spirituality is not the rejection of the body. It is the sublimation of the body through the clarity of the mind and the purity of the heart.
The mind and the body are not separate in reality — they are mirrors of one another. The more refined the mind, the more graceful the body. The more aligned the body, the more peaceful the mind. In this harmony lies the ground of spiritual growth.
Great traditions like Tantra, Ayurveda, and even Vedanta — when rightly understood — never shunned the physical. They recognized that the
life force (prana) flows through both body and mind. To neglect one is to distort the other.
- Courage, a physical virtue, becomes divine when joined with clarity.
- Compassion, a mental quality, becomes transformative when expressed through action.
- Desire, when harnessed, becomes the engine of devotion.
Even the feminine and masculine, often polarised, are not opposites. The woman is associated with
mind, emotion, and time — the sustaining flow. The man is often linked to
space, form, and initiation. But at the deepest level,
time births space, just as
the feminine births the masculine. The body holds time. The mind carves space. And both return, ultimately, to the spirit — the unchanging Self.
As I’ve seen in my own work — especially in developing food products energized by spiritual intention — it is not enough to have sterile purity. What uplifts and preserves is the
presence of inner alignment — a subtle coherence that begins with the mind but manifests through physical matter.
Let us then move beyond the idea that spirituality belongs to caves and scriptures. Let it return to our kitchens, our laboratories, our families, our daily choices — where
body and mind meet in reverence, and the soul quietly shines through
Idea: Sravna
Expression: Chatgpt