What's Wrong With Spirituality?

I set out to start this personal brand as a path to financial freedom and to solve my own problems in public.

5 months in, the dissatisfied corporate drone has turned into something other people would call a spiritual path.

Maybe it is. Maybe it’s not. I don’t know where it takes me.

What I do know is every time I think I’ve found the path, I catch myself turning it into one more thing to be good at.

Meaning Construction

I sat on the edge of a cliff looking out over a gorge.

I let my mind wander and drifted into nothing.

Then, in what felt like an instant, I was in the open. No more observer.

Then it closed. The observer came back scrambling to reach for what it couldn’t hold.

I spent the next several weeks spiraling. Trying to make sense of it.

I caught myself drafting a text message to a close friend and then just staring at the screen. What purpose does telling him serve?

I started an article about “my spiritual awakening.” How would this be a part of my brand?

My mind kept hunting for a frame. I couldn’t stop

I was watching myself try to become spiritual – and that was the trap. Not the experience. The reaching to make it mean something.

Part of it was the dissolution of the self.

Part of it was the hunger to be seen. To belong to something. To be the kind of person who has these experiences.

They are two different hungers wrapped into one word – spirituality.

Why the Word Can’t Hold

If you’re anything like me, you look at spirituality with skepticism.

The word gets slapped on everything from meditation to the Bali bros. But there is a common thread underneath all of it – survival.

The ego is a survival machine.

It takes whatever the environment hands it, cop-opts it, and uses it to persist.

Self improvement, truth-seeking, even transcendence – it will wear any of them.

It will take you to the brink and let you watch yourself because looking enlightened is a subtler way to stay in control.

You’ll end up looking awakened while the ego runs the same program it always has – which makes it one more identity you’ll eventually have to put down.

Most of what gets called spirituality is survival in different clothes. The insistent need for frameworks, the “good vibes” bypass or even the retreats as community.

All real practices. All mislabeled.

What’s Wrong With Spirituality?

I don’t particularly care for the word spirituality if I’m being honest.

I’m trying to outgrow a way of being that prizes measurement, proof, control.

Part of me still runs on it. Spirituality, with its emotional and unmeasurable underpinnings, threatens that part directly. So I resist it.

I notice my objection is the word ‘lack precision.’ The need to measure, to label, to make things definitive – that’s the exact mindset I am trying to outgrow. It’s defending itself.

The discomfort isn’t proof the word is wrong. It might be pointing at something real.

I believe spirituality is seeing reality for what it is.

When we entangle social and materialistic overlays into practice it adds to the complexity - ultimately becoming more things that need to be deconstructed.

There is value in being precise in my practice. To label my spiritual practice as just that, and be honest with myself what the other practices are – survival.

It’s not to say that this is diminishing other practices or communities. For me to deconstruct the illusion, solitude is the best working condition.

You cannot observe the constructor of meaning while it’s actively constructing social meaning.

It’s no different than trying to hear a faint sound and then going to a noisy room thinking that you’ll be able to hear it better.

Though this is not immune to pitfalls. The mistake is thinking that solitude doesn’t produce an identity – it still does.

It produces different identities. The meditator. The seeker. The contemplative. All different versions of the self.

The advantage isn’t an escape from identity, but there’s fewer social-overlays running.

The Other Side of Survival

A young woman passed me on my left while walking.

She looked back at me, smiled, and said something kind.

I hung onto it. Instead of turning back at my usual spot, I kept walking hoping for another shot at talking to her.

I caught up where she’d stopped to photograph the river. I stumbled through a few pleasantries. She looked me in the eyes and felt it land where I usually keep shut.

I felt seen. I couldn’t hold it. I left.

These exchanges always come mixed – there’s warmth yet an uneasiness flows within. And it always leaves me wanting more.

The isolation has shifted something real. It opened me up. But it didn’t fill me. There’s still an emptiness underneath.

Solitude quiets the social noise, but doesn’t satiate the deeper hunger. It develops one side of me and starves the other – which needs the exact thing deconstruction needs gone. Other people.

The way that woman looked at me is exactly the scenario my relational work needs. And it’s exactly the thing solitude clears away. The two cannot happen in the same room.

Crossroads of Reality

I am emerging from a significant healing arc. But it’s been in isolation.

I’ve built the capacity for relationships. I can’t build the rest of it by myself.

And here’s what I’ve never said aloud – I don’t know how to form healthy attachments. I’m scared of being vulnerable.

I’m slowly putting myself into different rooms and communities.

And I can feel the risk. My need to belong gets folded into the spiritual pursuit and everything gets relabeled ‘spiritual.’

The deconstruction gets diluted because the community runs on social reward. And social reward activates the ego instead of dismantling it.

The relational work gets spiritualized into a bypass – and the nervous system repair never happens.

Yet this is only one side. The other risk I run is my solitary work becomes the thing that shields me from contact.

I stay on the cushion. I refine my thinking. I call it depth. But the relational gaps I started with are exactly where I left them.

I’ve caught my ego reaching for a new identity of spirituality, but I’m unsure how to catch it reaching for isolation – because the work is the identity.

Is solitude the work or the hiding?