Bursting self-delusions in the spiritual environment

The assumption that our yoga, meditation, cacao ceremonies, women’s groups or spiritual books clubs are in themselves a path of awakening… must be one of the grandest delusions I know of in the spiritual environment.

In itself, standing on our heads for ten minutes a day, sitting still in meditation for hours, volunteering in an ashram, doing nose-cleanses and attending cacao ceremonies, haven’t got anything to do with self-realization. That is… unless we USE THE ENERGY these practices generate to take on our REAL work: The inner one. 

Our spiritual practices are at best the very BEGINNING of our inner work. And unless we proceed to take on our (dirty, challenging, painful, scary) inner work, our daily asanas or weekly ceremonies or silent sittings turn into mere spiritual entertainment - something to pass our time with to prevent us from going KO-KO. 

A consumption of spiritual activities has nothing to do with awakening or self-development!

I spent the years between 2017 and 2020 in a fulltime spiritual deepening. Much of that time I lived in Ubud in Bali: a spiritual heaven for seekers from all over the world. Apart from yoga, there was daily ceremonies, womens groups, crystal healing, massage therapy, oil treatments, meditation sessions, spiritual movie nights, ecstatic dance parties… you name it. 

After I returned to Norway in 2020, I wrote this essay of all the self-delusions I'd observed in this environment: 9 Traps of a Spiritual Journey. And today’s essay is sort of a deep dive into trap no. 7: Refusing to take on the challenging parts of our personal journeys – and by that reducing our practices to mere… spiritual entertainment.

Rest assure, it's not only Bali that’s a heaven for spiritual seekers… Spirituality and self-development has become among the world’s biggest industries, and we are flooded with trainings, events and retreats that claim to support our self-development or awakening journeys.

Join an online ceremony? Learn to meditate! 3 weeks in the Amazonian jungle! Yoga teacher training? 5 steps to building your own tea practice! 

I love drinking tea, and attending ceremonies, and meditate – and for a long time I did consider a yoga teacher training. 

But after 3 years fulltime in the self-help environment… I realized something was missing in my self-realisation. I needed something else to move forward. 

Daring to do the descent 

Of course our divine self needs nurturement! But - after arriving at that initial point where we have recognized and remembered our divine essence, it’s time to proceed in our journeys! Now, we don’t really need to focus so much on those divine meeting fascilities anymore. 

Rather, we need to sort out: How do we EMBODY our divine essence in our everyday life? 

Here is the thing: we don’t build our capability to embody our divine essence, through attending more yoga or meditation sessions or cacao ceremonies. The gateway to embody our divine selves in the world goes through our… humanity. And if we sincerely wish to embody our divinity in our world, it’s OUR HUMANITY we need to shift our focus onto. 

We all bring with us some personal wounds onto our spiritual paths. Chances are our bodies carry memories of being rejected in our true essence, and we might’ve even developed some unhealthy compensations to deal with those rejections. 

No matter how passionately we feel our divine selves as we sit silently in meditation or dance high on cacao or do our yoga practice, it´ll be impossible for us to live our divine selves in the world - before we have faced these wounds, rejections, shadows, and relationship compensations.

That means, we need to move on to our often-challenging psychological journeys. I'm talking childhood revisions, shadow work, feeling work, relationship work…

We cannot do our human maturity work on the yoga mat or our meditation pillow. Basically, it won’t happen as we peace out. That work happens as we descend into our deepest darkest and most wounded parts, dare to stare these parts of us in the white of the eye - and stay present to them until they relax their hold of us. 

Our personal work happens as we get radically honest with ourselves, and decide to befriend our darkest shadows, memories, wounds and primal impulses. 

That befriending is scary and very uncomfortable - and that's why we want our practices to inspire and support us to take it on! 

At their best, our spiritual practices are powerful vitamin injections - making us content, inspired and emotionally stable enough to proceed to the challenging and painful parts of our personal development journeys. In other words: Our spiritual practices help us gather the guts to go where it hurts!

From spiritual entertainment to spiritual egos

Unless we proceed to address our human growth as a part of our spiritual deepening, our spiritual practices are eventually reduced to spiritual entertainment. Now, our asanas and silent sittings and rituals and ceremonies just become wellness or stress-management tools – momentarily making us feel a bit better about ourselves. 

Basically, our world starts resembling a grand spiritual Tivoli.

Except for the lack of personal growth typically going on in Tivoli’s, there’s another problem with this approach: All the energy of our practices needs to go somewhere. When we have no idea how to channel that charge into our personal growth, our ego begins eating away at our practices instead:

“Look at me: I’m so deep and smart and well-developed, just notice all the meditation I do and my fancy asana practice. You should definitely do it too.” 

Hello spiritual ego.

As we boost our egos on high-vibe spiritual practices without facing our humanity and going where it hurts… we become both self-delusional and uncomfortable to be around. 

Auch.  

Our inner work is done… within

I love my meditation and tea ceremonies, and I'm looking forward to find the inspiration to pick up my daily yoga practice. My spiritual practices make me feel happy and nurtured, and that’s superb! 

But the thing is, that unless I use the energy these practices give me to boost my inner investigative work, neither my tea or meditation or at-the-moment-non-existing-yoga-practice has much to do with either my spirituality or my self-realization. 

Can I acknowledge my shadow sides when they play out in my relationships? Can I adjust them? Can I catch myself in a self-lie? What does it take to let that resentment go? 

Eventually, it's through supporting me to SHOW UP to my challenging human maturity work, that my tea ceremonies and my prayers and my meditation practice… gain their spiritual value.