How to stop trying to get spirituality right.

There is a very funny thing that can happen when you start exploring spirituality. You begin because you want to feel freer, more connected, more alive, more you.

And then suddenly…

there are 44 new ways you’re wrong.

You’re not meditating enough. You’re too attached. Your vibration is low. You’re operating from ego. You had a negative thought while manifesting. You skipped your morning practice. You reacted emotionally to something objectively shitty that happened to you. You ate the thing. Said the thing. Thought the thing.

You think, “Oh god. I’m out of alignment!!”

Congratulations. You’ve found a new home for your shame to live. 😂

What started as exploration slowly becomes another thing on your list to optimize.

Instead of your practices serving you, spirituality becomes a second full-time job you’re somehow failing at and it’s fucking exhausting.

I call this being:

Spiritually Anal

Spiritually anal is what happens when spirituality becomes another vehicle for control, perfectionism, superiority, or self-abandonment.

And I say this with love because I think a LOT of us have been there or know someone who is there. Maybe you still are? Let’s see the common symptoms below.

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DIAGNOSIS: SPIRITUALLY ANAL

Common symptoms may include:

• getting so serious about your spiritual growth that you forget to have fun
• over-intellectualizing the entire process and journey
• judging other people for their “level of consciousness”
• worrying that one negative thought just fucked up your manifestation
• believing being spiritual means you’re supposed to react perfectly to everything
• trying to transcend very normal human needs
• policing anger, grief, jealousy, or other emotions because they aren’t “high vibe”
• treating your nervous system like another employee who isn’t meeting KPIs
• turning healing into an endless self-improvement project
• believing you’re “out of alignment” every time life feels shitty
• being so busy observing yourself that you forget to actually BE yourself
• using “discernment” as a fancy spiritual word for judgment
• living from the neck up while calling it “higher consciousness”

And perhaps the sneakiest one:

believing there is some final version of you waiting at the end of all this work who will finally get life right.

“Finally I’ll be healed enough… conscious enough…regulated enough…detached enough…disciplined enough…spiritual enough…”

“And THEN I can finally relax and enjoy being alive.”

Except… what if that’s backwards?

HOW TO UNCLENCH, SPIRITUALLY

Just like everything else in life, how you experience your spirituality comes down to the relationship you’re having with it.

You took the same perfectionism, shame, self-doubt, and need to get life right…

and put crystals around it. 😂

Spirituality didn’t create the rules. You did.

You can use spirituality to liberate yourself OR you can use it to construct an even more elaborate set of rules for yourself.

And that’s why I don’t think the answer is necessarily another practice.

Sometimes the answer is: UNCLENCH.

Let your practices serve you. Not the other way around.

Meditate because you want to, not because your spiritual attendance record is suffering. Be pissed off without worrying about your vibration. Skip the ritual if you aren’t in the mood. Change your mind about something you once believed wholeheartedly. Let an experience just be an experience without immediately needing to extract the lesson, identify the wound, or figure out what the universe is trying to tell you.

Allow yourself to FEEL.

Give yourself permission to be human. Make the mistake without turning it into a shame spiral. Have the weird emotion. Want the material thing. Care deeply. Get attached. Laugh at yourself. Have absolutely no idea what something means.

You don’t need to optimize your way into enlightenment.

Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is stop working on yourself, stop counting every spiritual calorie, and LIVE.

PRESCRIPTION: SPIRITUAL FLUIDITY

I think we need a more fluid relationship with spirituality.

Not wishy-washy. Not “everything is true and nothing matters.” Not abandoning discernment.

Fluid.

Able to move. Able to evolve. Able to encounter new information without immediately building another cage out of it.

Spiritual fluidity looks like:

• believing deeply without needing to believe rigidly
• letting your practices serve you
• exploring ideas without immediately turning them into laws
• using the tools without mistaking them for your master
• letting yourself change your mind
• trusting your lived experience
• letting your practices and priorities change with the seasons of your life
• keeping your discernment, curiosity + humanity
• embracing the messy spectrum of being human
• getting off the self-improvement hamster wheel because you’re allowed to just BE
• treating life as a playground, not an enlightenment final exam
• remembering that life seems to have a sense of humor, so you might as well have one too

Because there will be seasons when your spiritual practice looks like meditation, ritual, journaling, tarot, prayer, study, ceremony, whatever.

And there may be seasons when your practice looks like making dinner.

Sleeping eight hours.

Going dancing.

Having sex.

Making something with your hands.

Sitting outside.

Calling your friend.

Laughing until you can’t breathe.

Or paying attention to the ordinary little life happening directly in front of you.

None of that is separate from your spirituality.

That’s part of what embodiment means to me.

We’re not here merely to understand life from some increasingly elevated vantage point.

We’re here to come all the way into it.

Into the body. Into emotion. Into pleasure. Into relationships. Into creativity. Into the mundane. Into the ridiculous. Into Tuesday fucking afternoon.

If your spiritual practice makes you less able to laugh, play, be absurd, feel deeply, change your mind, and participate in your own humanity, I’d question whether it’s actually liberating you.

Maybe the measure of a spiritual practice isn’t how “spiritual” you’ve become.

Maybe it’s:

How much more available are you for your life?

How much more can you feel?

How much more can you love?

How much more can you experience?

How much more you can you be?

There is no gold star for being the least human person in Earth School. So please.

Unclench.

Spirituality should give you more room to be ALIVE, not less.

✦

Your turn 😂 What did I miss?

What would you add to the Spiritually Anal symptoms list? And what does being spiritually fluid look like for you?

Drop it in the comments. Consider this a communal unclenching.