All of the great spiritual traditions extol the virtues of humility. In Christianity, there is the famous quote from Matthew about “turning the other cheek.” Judaism’s greatest prophet, Moses, was praised for being the “humblest of men.” The Quran speaks of the “servants of the Beneficent God are they who walk on the earth in humbleness…” In Hinduism, humility is the first virtue mentioned by Krishna. And in Buddhism, humility is one of the 10 sacred virtues attributed to the Buddha.

OK, so how are we supposed to translate this noble virtue into our lived reality? Does this mean I should never speak up, never get angry, and never have needs or wants if someone else has a competing need or want?

I think a lot of us get confused by religious values because many of us learned them in childhood in very concrete and global ways. Some of this is because that’s how we learn as children. And some of this is because some of the teachers we’ve had have not themselves had very sophisticated ways of understanding religion. It becomes a list of “shoulds” held in very superficial ways, where the more you do the better you are, and the less you do the worse you are. As if the spiritual realm is some kind of bowling league where you’re trying to score points for your team by acting virtuous in a concrete way.

My favorite definition of humility comes from my own tradition, Judaism. It states that humility is taking up the proper amount of space for whatever the particular situation is. In some situations, we should take up a lot of space because of the circumstances. If you are the leader of an organization and you don’t step fully into your responsibility as a leader because of some misguided notion of “Who me? I don’t know enough to guide us here,” you are not being humble. It’s actually your ego at work in disguise, afraid to make a mistake or worried about perceived criticism. Your job in that situation is to do what you think is right, even if others might object.

The more common circumstance, what we usually think about, is someone who needs to take up all the oxygen in the room, even if he or she doesn’t have any particular role to fill or valuable contribution to offer. There it is the ego of “Look at me” that is at play, and that definitely is not being humble.

What I like about this definition is that it is flexible enough to fit all of the situations that life has to offer, and it challenges us to grow up into mature adulthood along the way. We cannot hide behind superficial applications of superficially understood religious doctrines but need to step into a discerning relationship with a spiritual truth. We need to ask ourselves why we are or are not doing whatever we are doing and if it is our ego that is making us act or preventing us from acting. We all have unique roles to fulfill in life, and this practice will help us do so. Not contributing what we were brought here to contribute is not being humble in the same way taking up space when we have nothing to contribute is not humble.