Are you using your spirituality as an escape? Your meditation, your journaling, even your yoga practice could be nothing more than a high vibration coping mechanism that keeps you from unleashing your full potential.
This used to be me. For several years after leaving my job at Google, I was living in my truck top camper, desperately seeking something that felt like spiritual freedom. I was meditating for two plus hours a day but always feeling like I was not living up to my potential.
The Bliss Bubble
I was using meditation as a mental exercise and had lost touch with the ability to feel and use my emotions as guidance. I could experience my emotions mentally and see them mentally, but I was not able to feel or connect with them in my body.
A bliss bubble is when you feel great while doing your practice but the second you enter real life again, you are frustrated. You have separated the two things. You are not integrating your process into your actual life.
When you just use meditation to get into a bliss bubble, it distances you from the real energetic and emotional work that can be done in a meditative state.
This is where escapism becomes integration.
Explore the shadow work practices for doing the real emotional work.
Why We Build Walls
The reason I wanted to escape from the world and live on a large piece of land by myself was because I had so much discomfort in my body that I had not felt through. I did not want anybody to trigger that discomfort.
I had basically built a walled garden where nothing could get in, where there were no people. I had created a safe space that kept me safe from ever actually feeling my feelings.
That is escapism disguised as spiritual seeking. The appearance of going deep while actually avoiding depth.
Integration Over Isolation
The real work is not meditating in isolation where nothing can trigger you. The real work is being triggered in life and then processing that energy rather than bypassing it.
Spiritual practice should make you more capable of engaging with life, not less. If your practice makes you want to retreat from the world, that is a sign something is off.
The goal is not to feel great only during meditation. The goal is to carry that presence into every interaction, every challenge, every trigger. That is integration. That is where the real growth happens.
The Test
Ask yourself: does my spiritual practice make me more capable of handling life, or does it make me want to hide from life? If it is the latter, you may be using spirituality as escapism.
The practice is not the end. The practice prepares you for life. If you are spending hours in meditation but cannot handle a difficult conversation, something has gone sideways. Feel through the discomfort that life brings. That is the real practice.