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Spirituality is often portrayed as an escape from the hard realities of the world, a way of avoiding the responsibilities of life one should be shouldering by taking refuge in some otherworldly realm. Spiritual people claim just the opposite: that spirituality is all about accepting life and understanding the true meaning and purpose of why we are here.

For example, when making a practical decision, we can let ourselves become victim to hesitation and doubt, swaying one way or the other before going for one option (and still wondering 'what if' after we have chosen it). A spiritual person, on the other hand, aims through prayer and meditation to dive deep within and become centred in the stillness and vastness of one's own being, and to connect to something deeper and greater inside himself. Then once he is centred, he is then best able to choose the most practical way to act in any given situation.

Many people who choose a lifestyle of prayer and meditation are sometimes accused of being selfish, of putting their own needs above others. But during prayer and meditation, we feel our heart expand, and we feel a tremendous sense of connectedness and goodwill towards the rest of the world. More importantly, we get an inner feeling about how we can best offer our own capacities to serve others. We learn that, in he meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy's words: "the joy of a self-giving life can never be measured or expounded." By serving others, we expand ourselves.

Spirituality teaches us how to cope with the tides and storms of life. In the Bhagavad-Gita, India's most famous spiritual text, we read the immortal lines "Thou hast the right to action, but not the fruits thereof" Much of our stress, anxiety and disappointment come when we place a burden of expectation on something happening, and then it does not turn out the way we hoped. In truth, we have no control over outer events - we only have control over the way we react to them. Prayer and meditation gives one the inner strength to do what needs to be done without worrying about the outcome, and to take the result of one's actions as an experience, whether it be success or failure. This allows us to face the ups and downs of life with tremendous equanimity.

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