The Dark Side of Spirituality No One Talks About

Not many people talk about it, but spirituality has its shadow side, too.

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

Escapism

One aspect of that shadow is when we’re using spirituality to hide out. We create a bubble for ourselves, a bubble of positivity where it’s all about focusing on what’s good and shoving whatever we don’t want to confront under the carpet. We try to cultivate positive thoughts and emotions and every time a negative emotion comes up; we shut it out because it might affect our vibration.

This is escapism. This is calling ourselves spiritual, but not understanding what spirituality really is, which is about evolution and growth by shedding light on our darkness.

When the hippie counterculture happened, it was used by a lot of people to escape a reality that felt out of control. Parts of that movement did work for radical change by setting up a different way of living, however fleeting that might have been, while other parts just got lost in a bubble of positivity and fantasy.

Personal development control freak

And then the opposite end of the shadow spectrum is all about being obsessed with personal development, or shadow work. It’s about constantly wanting to snuff out our dark side so we can ‘understand’ it and heal. But the healing might not actually occur for several reasons, namely because:

• We’re analysing our shadows more from an intellectual perspective than anything else. It’s not translating into deep transmutation work; it’s just mental masturbation where the brain is conjuring all sorts of stories to force an understanding of why we’re experiencing negative emotions
• We’re doing shadow work from a place of emotional immaturity. We might not be ready yet to face our pain and trauma, and yet we’re forcing ourselves to go there when we’re not ready to immerse ourselves in the pain. So then we just keep recreating the pain rather than heal it.

This is the opposite of escapism. Control. We control freaking our way into our spiritual growth, thinking that by imposing our schedule on our growth work, we can somehow accelerate our evolution, not realizing that we might be causing more…