How Are You, Really?

How Are You, Really?

One of my friends likes to ask this question: “How is your spiritual condition?”

I love it.

It's not asking “How's work?” or “How are your kids?” or “How are your life circumstances?” It’s asking how you are really—how are the things that matter most to you, and what is the state of your inner world?

When I work with clients, it becomes clear pretty quickly whether someone has spent time in that territory.

They have done their work—therapy, deep reflection, recovery, time in community, or the kind of art or learning that cracks something open.

People like this have a sense of who they are, and they have an awareness that they are not their circumstances. They also understand deeply that they have had a hand in shaping themselves.

They have a sense of agency.

And they tend to be ready to go even deeper.

But then there are others who tend to move through life very focused on the world around them—focused on the day-to-day, the urgent, the visible. And there’s nothing wrong with that, until life interrupts.

A death.

The end of a relationship.

A job that disappears overnight.

That’s when some individuals tend to turn inward for the first time, because suddenly the outer world has no answers and they don’t know where else to look.

Can you remember a time when something shook your outer world so hard it forced you to look inside?

What did you find there?

Before those moments happen, here is something to consider: If we don’t tend to our inner space with some intention, the outer world will move in and fill it.

Mark Nepo wrote in The Exquisite Risk, “we must meet the outer world with our inner world or existence will crush us. It is a spiritual law, as real as gravity. If we don’t assume our space as living beings, the rest of life will fill us completely the way water fills a hole.”

That image has stayed with me: Water and holes. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does life.

And the problem with the outer world taking up all that space? We have very little say in it. You can build a meaningful career and do good work and still have almost no control over what that world decides to do on any given Monday. If we let too much of that seep in and take over, we can find ourselves trying to manage something that was never ours to manage.

So, ask yourself honestly: How much of what’s living inside you right now is actually yours—your values, your voice, your knowing—and how much of who you are today crept in from the outside?

How much are you driven by the calendar that tells you what you are doing today?

This is why practices like meditation, journaling, time in nature, or movement matter—not as self-care luxuries, but as a form of boundary-keeping. Even five minutes of stillness in the morning before you pick up your phone can begin to shift the ratio.

Such practices help us breathe ourselves bigger. They expand our interior spaces. They help us process the noise and release what may not be ours to carry.

What is one practice you could protect this week, not because you have to, but because your inner world deserves that kind of tending?

And what might emerge if you give this to yourself?

When we do this kind of internal work consistently, something shifts. The answer to “How’s your spiritual condition?” starts to feel less like a question we’re afraid of and more like one we can actually sit with—because what’s inside is crystalline clear, spacious, and genuinely ours.

And that’s space worth protecting.

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