9 Traps of a Spiritual Journey
There are so many ways we can use our spiritual deepening to delude ourselves
In 2017, I sold out on my life to fascilitate my full-time spiritual deepening. I was set on knowing myself. But little did I know that I would fall into SO many traps while attempting to realize who I was. At one point, I even pondered if going “spiritual” generally takes us further away from ourselves than if we had just kept living a mundane life.
Today I am a bit more optimistic. But I am also aware that there ARE a lot of traps to stay clear of, if we ever are to know ourselves.
Therefore, this essay is a little gift for all of you who are on a spiritual path, and love to explore the potential stumbling blocks on your way. Through the following 9 points I will describe what I observe to be the most common delusions on the spiritual scene. Some of these points I´m guessing most of you will agree with me about — and some are more my personal opinion.
(Ps: I built the points inspired by the Enneagram of Personality Types, but you don’t need to know that system to get my point. It’s just another little funny layer if you’re a system nerd as I.)
So, let’s start:
#1 A Quest For “Goodness” that Sets Us Up for Self-Delusion - Spiritual Repression
Let’s first of all address the greatest delusion of them all: the illusionary quest of becoming “good”. This is one of the most distorting concepts on the spiritual scene (or in the world), because it’s doomed to set us up for self-delusion.
How is that? I’ll explain:
If we put up a demand for only being good, we simultaneously tell ourselves that we cannot be “bad”. How to cope with that? We don’t know what to do about these “bad” feelings, thoughts and behaviors of ours, other than to tell ourselves that we don’t have them. So that is what we do. We push the feelings, thoughts and behaviors that don’t fit with our image of “goodness” away from sight. Then, we might use our spiritual discipline to reinforce our experience of “being/doing/acting good”. But in reality, our denied feelings, thoughts and behaviors now run around in our field like ownerless dogs, visible to everyone except ourselves.
This is such an irony. We have stepped on our spiritual path in order to know ourselves. And now; we use that very path to create a delusional image of who we are.
None of us are only good and light. And if we delude ourselves that we are, can we evolve?
No, we can’t.
I say: The only way to become a “better person” is to acknowledge our shadow sides, and keep them where we can see them. Healthy spiritual trainings assist us in exposing our shadow sides, get to know our shadow sides and learn to love our shadows sides - not to repress them out of sight.
#2 Attempting to Save the World Before Doing Our Personal Work – Spiritual Confusion
A commitment to wake ourselves up is on one level the most egocentric thing we can ever do. Our awakening has little to do with anybody else, and we must walk our path on our own.
If we from the beginning of our journey - without having any idea of who we are – make our spiritual quest into a rescuing of the world, that is just a futile ego game: We are attempting to raise our value by making ourselves indispensable to our community.
But how can we help somebody with anything before knowing ourselves? What experience are we collecting from when we say we´ll wake our world up?
As we come to know ourselves better, the experiences we have collected from our spiritual journey will surely be of use to our communities. When we are ready, our service will be revealed naturally. Until then, it’s much more honest to keep our focus on ourselves – and allow our world to do so too.
Photo by Jaunathan Gagnon on Unsplash
#3 Making Our Spiritual Deepening into a Performance – Spiritual Show-Time
Even if we do cacao ceremonies every month, yoga twice a day, meditate in every break we have and always speak nice about everyone, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we are coming to know ourselves better.
In a world where a lot of focus is put on how things look like on the surface, it’s oh so easy to mistake superficial expressions of spirituality for a journey towards awakening. But an inner work is done within. Obviously. And if our spiritual path turns into a nice-looking idea rather than a devotion to knowing ourselves, all we do will simply become a way of deluding ourselves. We can sit still for hours and make a nice-looking downward dog, but that’s it. Nothing moves on the inside.
Mistaking “doing-the-spirituality-thing” for self-realization is a common trap of the modern spiritual journey, and a delusion we benefit from paying close attention to - especially in the initial years of our self-discovery. All of us need to question ourselves: Am I doing this because it makes me “look good”? Or am I doing this because it takes me closer to myself?
#4 Using Our Insights to Torture Ourselves - Spiritual Masochism
Sometimes, as we step onto our path of self-inquiry and discover all the ways we have acted out unconsciously in our life, we cannot cope. We are ready to be honest with ourselves, but there, our courage stops. We can see that we have been asleep, but we don’t really want to wake up from that sleep. And so; we collapse.
Spiritual collapses sound like this: “I’m a terrible human (poor me). I will never find my way to work through this. I will never become happy. I will never know my purpose. It’s all broken. I might as well die.” Instead of heading at our upgrade work, we take what we have discovered about our sleep state and decide to torture ourselves.
Many people entering a spiritual path have periods, or at least moments, where this attitude presents itself. It’s as the gap between where we are and where we would enjoy to be, becomes so great that we cannot see any way of even starting to bridge over to the other side. If we stay in this mode over time, our self-inquiry turns into a self-torture - from where nothing good will come. And it’s very tiresome. Both for ourselves and our environment.
The remedy of this pattern is to acknowledge our self-torture as an escape from responsibility. Then, we need to swallow our pride and our addiction to misery - and start doing our actual work.
#5 A Mental Consumption of Spiritual Knowledge – Spiritual Intellectuality
There are countless trainings that claim to support our journey towards awakening. And there are millions of books and quotes that we can dive into to get an insight of the spiritual journey. It can be very tempting to enroll into these trainings or read a lot of books, and then assume that us doing that automatically is a step towards coming to know ourselves. We take a course or read a book, and then cross out that box: setting intentions - check. Been there, done that. I've mastered it.
But did we understand what we were doing? Did we integrate what we learned? Did the information we gained open up a portal in us of actually feeling who we are? Did anything within us change? That's the question.
People that fall for this trap love speaking about their spirituality. But their energy is uncomfortable to be around: stressed, contracted, intellectual. Despite all their knowledge about spiritual concepts, they haven’t moved an inch towards their self-discovery. Actually, they have done the opposite: By entertaining their minds with spiritual knowledge; they have escaped themselves.
#6 Assuming that Following a Discipline or Teacher Will Awaken Us - Spiritual Immaturity
At the beginning of our spiritual journey, we may feel dominated by our unconsciousness. To point us in a healthier direction, we seek a teacher to guide us, or devote ourselves to following a spiritual system.
And yes, having the support of a spiritual guide or system can provide crucial assistance to our inner journey, because sometimes we need a little help to get us on the track. But at one point – and I say that point comes earlier than most people think - our teacher or system cannot follow us anymore. They are just there to point us in the right direction, and then it’s up to us to walk our path. I'm sad to say so, but our teacher or system simply cannot do our inner work for us!
When we fall into this trap, it’s as we surrender to the sanity of someone or something to evade approaching our inner work. Following rules given by someone outside of us, we feel protected and may function better than we did before. But that doesn’t mean we are awake. We have just upgraded the source from where we take commands.
I say it’s crucial to recognize when our surrender to authority or system becomes an obstruction rather than an assistance to our evolution. If we keep falling straight back into our old and unconscious ways the moment we stop meditating every day or don’t have our teacher around, that is a clue that we are not moving on our own account. We have swapped our path to God for playing with a spiritual babysitter.
You can read my story of spiritual immaturity here: Why Meditation Never Served to Awaken Me.
Photo by Elia Pellegrini on Unsplash
#7 Just here for the fun part – Spiritual Consumerism
Initially, our spiritual activities can feel like a big warm hug: we get to relax and be ourselves, there are lots of stimuli for our subtle senses, and everyone are sweet and loving.
But all this support is just the beginning. Our spiritual practices and activities are there to build our energy for taking on our human maturity work – to inspire us to work through our wounds, compensations and relationship issues. That work is the only path to our personal growth, and isn’t comfortable at all!
Spiritual seekers who’re unwilling to embrace pain and challenge as gateways to their personal growth, will escape when going gets tough. They jump from retreat to retreat; from one teaching to another teaching; gathering the fun parts while never staying long enough to address the deep, wounded and painful parts of themselves.
Terrified of stopping up and go where it hurts, they turn into peace- and fun- seekers rather than spiritual seekers. And their daily asanas and weekly ceremonies and silent sittings… turn into mere spiritual entertainment.
Read more: Is Your Meditation or Yoga Practice Just … Spiritual Entertainment?
#8 Imposing my Spiritual Insights Upon My Environment – Spiritual Intimidation
Are you familiar with the cliche of the person who goes “spiritual”, and comes back home and cannot enjoy herself anymore, because she is so busy telling everybody else how they should change themselves to become as wise as her?
I've been playing that cliché, several times. At a point though, I realized that my intention with my missionary work was not at all to support my world to grow. I was just latching out on my environment to discharge my frustration of being imperfect.
As we start awakening our consciousness, and realize all our disillusions and self-lies, it’s very tempting to look for ways to vent our frustration. Especially at the beginning of our spiritual journey, any attempts to use our newfound spiritual insights to “upgrade” our environment are at risk of being a method to discharge or distract ourselves from the rage towards ourselves – for having slept for such a long time.
#9 Using Spirituality to Escape Reality - Spiritual Bypassing
Being awake means that we are staying conscious to everything that is going on inside and around us. And in order to do that, it’s not enough to have a stable meditation practice or be able to stand on our head for 10 minutes a day. We must teach ourselves to deal with… life. Until we can move fluently with practical life, relate consciously to others, and deal maturely with our emotional world, there is no spiritual growth.
Therefore, a wholesome spiritual teaching needs to address the world outside our spiritual practice, too. Retreats that deepens our connection with the transcendent realms or facilitates a positive experience in relating to others can be very soothing, but is seldom enough for us to live a conscious life. To live a conscious life, we need tools to manage our challenging feelings! If our retreats are rigged to keep challenges away, they will never teach us what we really need to thrive! They are just pockets of peace, within a less-than-peaceful-life.
Of course, it can be beautifully revitalizing to experience pockets of peace sometimes. The problem I'm addressing here is when we become peace-seekers fulltime, running from protected pocket to pocket, while never really teaching ourselves to be with life outside of peaceful retreat.
And we do know it: this flight is the cliché of the new age-community. If we simply use spiritualty to escape our challenging life, that is mere bypassing. Lets go deeper than that! Spirituality has little to do with declaring love and light and beauty. Spirituality is about embracing the full complexity of life, and developing tools to face it.
This is my personal story of spiritual bypassing: A Love, a Lie and a Meditation Practice
So, What Are Our Keys to a Healthy Spirituality?
#1 We will never manage to be only love and light. After all, we're human beings. Acknowledging our complexity and keeping our challenging sides within sight; is the only path to goodness.
#2 Our service will be revealed in time – there is no need to grasp for it. Until someone asks us to do otherwise, we can just as well focus on ourselves.
#3 Spirituality is not about what we do, but about how we feel. Since our ego is such a great trickster, most of us are benefitted from doing regular check-ins with ourselves on getting lost in the external expression.
#4 Self-love is the remedy of everything.
#5 Awakening will never happen through our intellect. It's not our ability to grasp spiritual concepts that awakens us: it’s our capability for self-honesty.
#6 It's beautiful – and often essential – to have assistance on our path. But remember: we are the ones waking ourselves up! Nobody - neither a living teacher nor the perfect system - will do that for us.
#7 Our way to God goes through our feeling world. Therefore, we need to learn to KNOW and befriend our feelings, not to control them.
#8 Be kind! Assisting and leaving alone is a precious balance to manage. Is us telling our surroundings about their potential for upgrades, a service to them? Or is it better that we leave people be?
#9 Our awakening happens through us mastering life, not escaping it.
