Your brain focuses on whatever you tell it to focus on. Tell it you’re in a healing era, that everything right now is about fixing yourself, and it will go looking for things to fix. That’s the whole premise of healing work, something is broken, something needs mending, and your brain takes that instruction seriously.
At first, that’s genuinely good. It surfaces the real things, the big stuff you actually needed to deal with. I think everyone has some obligation to do that kind of internal work, to look honestly at yourself and heal the things that are actually holding you back. That part of spirituality is not the problem.
The problem is what happens next. Healing feels good. You fix something big and you feel like a different person, lighter, clearer. So your brain chases that feeling again. And again. It becomes its own kind of loop, a dopamine hit tied to fixing, so you keep hunting for more to fix. Eventually you’re examining every part of your life in forensic detail. You’re journaling constantly, meditating daily, narrating your own inner world so precisely that you stop being allowed to just feel things. You don’t get angry anymore, you get “triggered” or “activated.” You don’t get upset, you’re “holding discomfort in the body.” Everything gets examined, interrogated, diagnosed, and then, only then, healed.
Sometimes things just piss you off. Sometimes sad shit just happens. It doesn’t always need a diagnosis.
I used to be part of a pretty intense spiritual container, a breathwork group, and I’ll probably write more about it at some point because there was a lot wrong with it but one moment from that time has stuck with me.
There was a silent disco I’d bought tickets to. Non-refundable tickets, mind you.
About a week before the disco, my cat passed away. She was sixteen, I’d had her since I was a kid, she’d flown on planes with me, lived in two countries with me, and I’d spent the last two years caring for her during renal failure. She was my soul cat and that week, I’d had to make the horrible call no pet owner ever wants to make.
The whole week after her passing, my world was ending. I kept thinking I could hear the pitter-patter of her paws in the house, but she was not there. When I happened to get the email reminder for the silent disco later that week, I forced myself to go. I’d spent that whole week barely able to get out of bed, and I thought going to the disco, being around people who loved and held space for me, might help.
But I was carrying real grief into a room that was meant to be about raising the vibe together, so I made the decision to wear my own headphones instead of the shared ones. I didn’t make a fuss, I genuinely did not expect that anyone would have an issue with it. I simply wanted to exist in parallel, not in the same exact space as everyone else but adjacent. Where I could hear the roar of the ocean, where people could come and give me a hug but without having my grief set to the soundtrack of early 2010’s motivational pop music.
I was in my little bubble when I noticed the organizers would keep staring at me. Little whispers and side-eyes were thrown at me until finally, the pair of them approached me and told me that I was ‘letting the group down’ and ‘not participating’ by not wearing the shared headphones. Regardless of the fact that I was present, I was dancing, and had paid full price for my ticket, I was deemed as ‘difficult’ by people who were determined to subject my poor ears to Katy Perry.
Platitudes followed, when they learned of the reason why I had made the decision to withdraw. ‘Death is a part of life’, ‘she’s in a better place’, they said.
The organizers had created an environment dedicated to raising the vibe of attendants and I had identified that I would not be able to contribute to this mission. I simply wanted to sit beside this container of love and warm my hands on it for a while.
The organizers didn’t have a problem with me not wearing their headphones. The organizers had a problem with the fact that even with community, and ‘good vibes’, and hugs, and love, and talking, and cacao, and Rachel Platten’s fight song, that I was still grieving.
Grieving, just like anger or sadness is considered such a yucky emotion. It doesn’t feel nice, so clearly there’s no room for it in our lives, right? We try to numb them with alcohol or compulsions or pain, and if you’re in that particular area of spirituality, you try to breathe through it and process it and feel it in your body.
But grieving, just like healing a broken bone takes time and even years later, it might still twinge and remind you of the injury. It’s human. It’s a messy, yucky, horrible human emotion and yet it’s also beautiful. How beautiful it is to have loved something or someone so much that their departure wrenches your heart out of their chest as if they’d taken it with them.
Perhaps I should have stayed home and not gone to the disco.
Instead, I learnt a really valuable lesson about some of these communities and the doctrines they teach.
Any person that preaches they hold space, yet rejects anger, sadness, grief, or pain, isn’t practicing a form of human wellbeing. They’re avoidant and running from themselves, burying themselves in wellness practices as opposed to good old fashioned alcoholism.
The goal of life is not to feel nothing at all, nor is it to ultimately reject everything that makes us uncomfortable or causes us displeasure. If we lived life like that, we would be entirely alone. A life spent seeking the avoidance of pain is a life spent pushing other people away.
This avoidance isn’t spirituality, it’s insecurity. Instead of understanding and allowing people to feel their feelings the feelings must be examined and dissected and labelled before they can be ‘breathed through’.
Anger isn’t an emotion you can always breathe through. Sometimes, sure. Other times you need to scream into a pillow. Sadness needs a good cry and bargaining with a god you don’t believe in. Human life is messy and dare I say the spiritual avoidance to feel is starting to become almost conservative?
Because when you combine the fundamental misunderstanding that messy feelings are something to be processed with a culture that’s already becoming more individualistic by the year, spirituality starts collapsing into a single-minded hunt for the perfectly healed self, one that’s supposedly already inside you, you just need the right course, the right $1,111 program, to access it. Then, once you’ve “arrived,” you go looking for the next thing to fix, because there’s always a next thing.
And that’s the part I think about most. That silent disco moment wasn’t about a group of bad people, it was a snapshot of what this culture teaches: that unresolved pain is something to be managed and moved past quickly, even someone else’s. Nobody there was equipped to just let something hard exist in the room, unfixed, because that’s not what the container had trained them to do. That’s what happens when healing becomes a solitary, individual project instead of something people are allowed to hold for each other. You end up with rooms full of people who’ve done a huge amount of inner work and still flinch at being near pain that isn’t theirs to resolve. We’ve gotten so good at fixing ourselves that presence, just being near something unfinished without needing to change it, has started to feel foreign.
I think the whole “everything is here for you to heal” framing is itself a symptom of how individualistic we’ve become. Not every hard feeling is a wound. Not every bad week is an assignment. Sometimes you just live through something.
It’s not that deep.
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