When Spirituality Cannot Withstand Reality

I spent the first several decades of my life inside a religion that was very good at making painful things sound beautiful.

There was an answer for almost everything: If you were suffering, there was a lesson in it. If something didn’t make sense, you needed more faith. If you were angry, forgiveness would set you free. If the requirements of the religion were hurting you, perhaps you needed to surrender more completely to God. There was always an eternal perspective available to make the unbearable seem temporarily insignificant, always a higher principle hovering somewhere above the messy reality of the human being expected to live it.

And some of those ideas really were beautiful. Some of them helped people. Some of them, at least for a time, seemed to help me. Until they didn’t. And I had nowhere else to go and nothing left to turn to. 

That is precisely why I am wary of beautiful spiritual ideas now.

Because I have seen what happens when a spiritual system becomes so committed to its profession of goodness that it loses the ability to recognize the suffering being produced in its name. I have seen people contort themselves around teachings that were supposedly designed to set them free. I have seen pain interpreted as weakness, doubt treated as spiritual deficiency, anger suppressed in the name of forgiveness, intuition overridden in the name of obedience. I have seen people remain in circumstances that were hurting and abusing them because they had been taught that endurance was holy. I have seen an entire culture become so fluent in the language of love, family, faith, and eternal happiness that it could become remarkably bad at hearing someone say, “This is hurting me.”

Eventually, I learned to ask a different question of spiritual teachings.

Not: Does this sound beautiful? Not even: Is there truth in this? But: What happens to a human being who tries to live inside this belief?

That question changed everything.

And years later, when my life took the strange twists and turns that eventually made me an ascension teacher, I found myself encountering another spiritual world filled with beautiful ideas: Raise your vibration. Choose love instead of fear. Release what no longer serves you. Don’t give your energy to negativity. Detach from the old world. Focus on the timeline you want to create. Move out of separation and into unity.

Again, there is truth in some of this. Of course there is. I believe consciousness matters. I believe our internal state changes what we perceive and what becomes possible for us. I believe human beings can become trapped inside fear, anger, grief, and trauma, and I have devoted an enormous portion of my work to helping people move through exactly those states.

But I also recognize the architecture, because I have lived inside it before. It is the architecture of a spiritual worldview that begins with an ideal state and then quietly teaches people to distrust and disavow any part of themselves that does not conform to it. Or worse: It takes the harm the system does and directs the blame to the individual instead of putting it squarely where it belongs.

This is the problem with all systems of power that cause harm and blame the individual. And spirituality is not exempt. In fact, it wears the exact same clothes as organized religion, only instead of teachings about righteousness and sin, we have high vibration and low vibration:

Love is high vibration. Gratitude is high vibration. Peace, joy, abundance, surrender, unity: high vibration.

Fear is low. Anger is low. Despair is low. Grief is something to move through. Attachment is something to release. Negativity is something we are warned not to feed with our attention.

It sounds liberating until you consider what happens to the person whose reality is actually terrifying.

What happens when the fear is telling the truth? What happens when the anger is appropriate? What happens when the grief cannot be neatly alchemized into gratitude because something irreplaceable has actually been lost?

What happens when a person’s nervous system is responding to years of trauma, or their body is sick, or their family is unsafe, or their rights are being stripped away, or the political system governing their life is becoming genuinely dangerous?

At what point does “choose love over fear” stop being spiritual wisdom and become another way of telling a suffering person that the problem is their response to what is happening rather than what is happening itself?

This is where I part ways with a great deal of modern ascension teaching. Not because I don’t believe in ascension, but I believe spiritual teachings should be able to withstand reality.

The Bypass Hidden Inside Righteousness

I have been angry for as long as I can remember. Not theoretically angry. Not the clean, righteous kind of anger that becomes an inspiring story once enough years have passed. I mean screaming-until-I-couldn’t-breathe angry. Desperate-to-be-heard angry. The kind of anger that comes from knowing, somewhere deep in your body, that something is wrong and discovering that no amount of pointing at it will make the people around you see what you see.

I think, in some ways, I have spent my entire life trying to tell people the house is on fire. But so often, the response has been some version of not looking down at the fire, but looking up: Toward God. Toward faith. Toward the eternal perspective. Toward forgiveness and obedience and gratitude and whatever beautiful spiritual principle might allow us to remain comfortably above the unbearable thing happening right here on the ground.

Meanwhile, I was still pointing at the fucking fire.

That anger has followed me through my life, and I understand it differently now than I did when I was younger. There were certainly times when it overwhelmed me, times when it came out sideways, times when old wounds made a present injury feel ten times its actual size. Anger is not infallible simply because it is powerful. Neither is fear. Trauma can distort the signal, and a dysregulated nervous system can detect danger where none exists. Part of healing is learning to distinguish between the alarm and the fire.

But what I refuse to do anymore is assume the alarm itself is evidence that something has gone wrong inside me. Because sometimes there is a fire. And anger is the part of us that noticed it first.

Anger notices the boundary being crossed before we have language for the boundary. It notices the contradiction between what someone says and what they are doing. It notices when the story we are being told requires us to deny what we can plainly see. It notices cruelty and coercion and injustice. It notices when everyone else has become so invested in maintaining the existing order that the person screaming about the smoke becomes more disruptive than the smoke itself.

And this is one of the reasons I become so uneasy with spiritual teachings that treat anger primarily as something to transcend. I know what it’s like to live inside a spiritual culture where maintaining the higher perspective becomes more important than acknowledging what’s happening below.

Sometimes the person who appears angry, negative, difficult, resistant, or insufficiently evolved is simply the person who has refused to look away.

Sometimes anger is not separating us from love; sometimes anger is what love sounds like when something we love is being harmed. 

And sometimes the most spiritually consequential thing we can do is stop asking the person sounding the alarm to calm down long enough to finally ask:

What are they seeing that the rest of us have agreed not to see?

Pain is Not a Spiritual Failure

One of the most insidious things about spiritual hierarchies is that eventually we learn to police ourselves:

Nobody has to tell us our grief is too heavy; we begin wondering why we haven’t moved through it yet.

Nobody has to shame us for being afraid; we shame ourselves for failing to trust.

Nobody has to accuse us of being negative; we hear ourselves talking about what hurts and wonder whether we’re attracting more of it.

Nobody has to tell us that our anger makes us less evolved; we have already absorbed the message.

This is how spiritual bypassing becomes self-sustaining. The belief moves inside the person, where it becomes another mechanism of self-abandonment disguised as spiritual growth.

That’s why I have no interest in building another spiritual system that teaches people to abandon themselves. I am invested in what happens when we do the opposite.

What if, when grief arrives, we don’t immediately ask how to transcend it? What if we let grief tell us what mattered?

What if anger is not automatically an obstacle to love but sometimes evidence of love — love for ourselves, love for another person, love for justice, love for something precious enough that its violation produces fury?

What if fear is neither master nor enemy but information we can learn to interrogate?

What if healing is not the progressive elimination of uncomfortable human states, but an expansion of our capacity to experience them without becoming entirely governed by them?

That is a very different definition of spiritual maturity. It’s also much closer to what I have actually observed in people who heal: They do not become less human, they become more — more deeply able to inhabit the human experience without collapsing underneath it. And that capacity is what finally allows them to have the kind of faith, hope, courage, trust, and divine love that all those other spiritual teachers and systems are reaching for. We don’t arrive there by transcending the human experience; we develop the capacity to be completely human by going inside the experience and working with what we find.

Spirituality Does Not Exist Outside of Power

This becomes even more important when we move beyond individual healing, because one of the strangest features of modern spirituality is its tendency to speak about human consciousness as though human beings developed it in a vacuum.

We didn’t. Every one of us emerged inside systems that were already here.

We inherited religions, gender roles, racial categories, economic structures, beauty standards, family systems, political institutions, educational systems, medical systems, stories about whose bodies are desirable and whose are defective, stories about who should lead and who should submit, stories about productivity and worthiness and success and goodness. We inherited the residue of colonization, patriarchy, racism, ableism, capitalism, nationalism and countless other forces that were shaping our understanding of reality long before we were old enough to realize we had an understanding of reality.

Those systems do not disappear because we become spiritual. In fact, if we never examine them, we often drag them straight into our spirituality and call them universal truth.

This is one of the reasons I have become increasingly interested in the architecture beneath spiritual beliefs. I want to know where an idea came from. I want to know whose worldview it reflects. I want to know who benefits from it and who gets crushed by it. I want to know what happens when the teaching encounters a disabled body, an abused woman, a traumatized child, a person living in poverty, someone whose rights are materially threatened by the government governing them.

If the answer is always that they need to raise their vibration, I don’t think we have discovered an advanced spiritual truth; I think we have discovered a theology incapable of accounting for power.

And I have lived inside one of those already. I know where it leads. And I will never lead anyone else back inside it.

Embracing the Darkness and the Light

For years I have described my work as helping people move through darkness, but lately I have realized there is something more fundamental underneath that description: I trust darkness enough to work with it.

I don’t mean that I glorify suffering. I don’t believe pain makes us inherently better or that trauma is secretly a gift we should be grateful to receive. I would erase enormous amounts of human suffering from this world without hesitation if I could.

What I mean is that I do not believe that working with darkness contaminates us. I believe refusing to look at it gives it power and keeps us enslaved by it.

This is true in the psyche: The wound we cannot name organizes our behavior from underground. The shame we refuse to examine becomes a cage. The belief we inherited but never questioned becomes an invisible law governing our choices.

It is true in families: The thing everyone knows but nobody is allowed to say becomes the gravitational center of the entire system.

And it is true collectively, in every system we encounter: A culture cannot transform what it refuses to acknowledge. A country cannot heal history it insists on whitewashing. A spiritual community cannot claim to be building a New Earth while reproducing the hierarchies, exclusions, and prejudices of the old one underneath prettier language.

So yes, I look at the darkness. I look at the wound and the shadow and the nervous system. I look at the family system and the power structure. I look at the political reality and the spiritual belief. I look at the beautiful teaching and ask what happens to the person who cannot live up to it. I look at the thing happening in the world that everyone would rather declare an illusion and ask what it requires of us here, in the material world, while we still have bodies and neighbors and governments and children and responsibilities to one another.

Only then do I look for the light.

That order matters to me.

Because light that can only exist while we avert our eyes from darkness is not light; it’s avoidance dressed in white.

How Love Enters the Room

For all the fire and fury I have just spoken with, do not be mistaken: I am not only interested in the fury; I am deeply invested in learning to create and embody divine love. But in our spiritual communities and everywhere else, I think we have made our idea of love much too small.

We have confused love with pleasantness, acceptance, softness, agreement, forgiveness, serenity. We have imagined love as something that descends upon the difficult parts of human existence and makes them disappear.

But some of the most profound love I have ever experienced did not remove the pain; it came into the pain with me. That is the kind of love I trust:

Love that can sit beside someone whose heart has been broken without rushing to tell them what the heartbreak is teaching them.

Love that believes an abused person without asking them to forgive.

Love that can hear rage without recoiling from it.

Love that can stand beside a disabled person without infantilizing them or turning their body into evidence of insufficient spiritual evolution.

Love that can enter the protest, the hospital room, the divorce, the panic attack, the family rupture, the political crisis, the long night when no higher perspective makes any of it hurt less.

Love that can look at racism, bigotry, misogyny, and oppression of all kinds and say, This should not be happening, instead of explaining why everyone involved chose the experience before birth, and if they want to escape that reality they need a vision board and a manifestation plan.

That kind love is not afraid of humanity. It does not require us to become less complicated before it will touch us. It does not stand outside the burning building telling us to vibrate our way toward the exit. It comes inside.

Ascension That Withstands Reality

What I am ultimately building through my work is this: a model of ascension that does not collapse the moment actual human suffering enters the conversation.

I want an ascension spacious enough to contain psychology and mysticism, trauma and consciousness, nervous systems and energy, politics and spirit, individual healing and collective responsibility. I want one that understands that our internal reality matters enormously without pretending it is the only reality that matters.

I want an ascension that does not ask us to float above the burning world, congratulating ourselves on maintaining a sufficiently elevated frequency; I want us to become capable of walking into it.

Not recklessly. Not endlessly. Not sacrificing ourselves on the altar of everyone else’s suffering. But whole enough to remain present. Sovereign enough to know what belongs to us. Regulated enough to withstand discomfort. Discerning enough to recognize distortion. Brave enough to name what we see. Compassionate enough to remember the humanity of other people without surrendering our own. Powerful enough to participate in building something different.

Maybe ascension was never supposed to mean becoming too spiritually advanced for the mess of being human. Maybe we got the direction wrong.

Maybe the great movement of consciousness is not upward and away, leaving fear and anger and grief and bodies and politics and pain somewhere beneath us as evidence of the primitive world we have outgrown.

Maybe it is inward. Downward. Back into the body. Back into the wound. Back into relationship. Back into responsibility. Back into the places we abandoned because being fully present there once hurt too much.

Maybe we do not become more divine by becoming less human; maybe we discover the divine by becoming capable of inhabiting our humanity completely.

I have no interest in an enlightenment that requires me to look away. I have done that kind of spirituality already. I know what it costs.

This time, I want to see.

I want to see the beauty and the brutality, the shadow and the possibility, the systems that shaped us and the ones we might build in their place. I want a spirituality capable of standing in the middle of an unbearably complicated world and loving it enough to tell the truth about it.

I want an ascension that does not teach us how to escape the fire. I want one that teaches us how to walk through it without abandoning ourselves — and how, once we reach the other side, to build a world in which fewer people have to burn.

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