When Spirituality Becomes Toxic: A Return to Ancient Roots

There's a peculiar irony in the modern spiritual marketplace. We're drowning in information about enlightenment while feeling more disconnected than ever. Everyone with an Instagram account seems to be a spiritual guide. I've watched this evolution, or perhaps devolution, with growing discomfort, and I've finally admitted something that feels both liberating and necessary: I'm done with "spirituality" as we know it today.

I've returned to my shamanic practices, and the relief is profound.

Toxic Spirituality

Modern spirituality has become a product. It's been stripped, repackaged, and sold back to us with a price tag and a promise of instant transformation. The problem isn't that people are seeking meaning, that's deeply human and beautiful. The problem is that we've created an industry that profits from keeping people spiritually dependent, perpetually seeking, never quite arriving.

Scroll through any spiritual platform and you'll see it. Conflicting advice, quick-fix solutions, appropriated practices stripped of their cultural context, and an endless stream of "should"s. You should manifest abundance. You should be "timeline jumping" to a better reality. You should be "quantum leaping" into your highest self.

The underlying message is always the same: you are not enough as you are. You need to be constantly upgrading, constantly improving, seeking the next level. Your current timeline isn't good enough, jump to a better one. Your present reality is just a stepping stone

to something greater. Rest is stagnation. Contentment is settling.

It's exhausting. And honestly? It's toxic.

The Misinformation Crisis

Perhaps most damaging is the misinformation. In an age where anyone can claim expertise, spiritual teachings have become diluted, distorted, and dangerous. Ancient wisdom gets filtered through modern egos, and context gets lost in translation.

It creates spiritual bypassing, where people avoid genuine healing work by slapping a gratitude journal over deep wounds. It fosters shame when the "law of attraction" doesn't work.

But here's the thing: the deeper toxicity is in the language itself. "Timeline jumping." "Quantum leaping." "Shifting to your desired reality." These phrases all carry the same poisonous assumption: where you are right now isn't where you're meant to be. This constant pressure to upgrade your life, to ascend to higher dimensions, to shift into better timelines, it's just capitalism dressed up in spiritual language. It's the same relentless message that you need more, you need better, you need different. Instead of selling you products, it's selling you the idea that your very existence needs an upgrade.

When did being human become insufficient? When did the ordinary become something to transcend rather than something to fully inhabit?

The Return to My Shamanic Practices

My return to shamanic practices wasn't a rejection of the sacred, it was a return to it.

Shamanic work doesn't promise easy answers. It doesn't offer five-step programs to enlightenment or Instagram-worthy affirmations. It's messy, grounded, and deeply connected to the earth, to ancestors, to the unseen forces that don't care about your aesthetic or your brand.

Shamanic practice demands reciprocity, not consumption. It asks what you can give, not just what you can get. It acknowledges darkness as well as light, death as well as rebirth. It doesn't shy away from the uncomfortable or the unknown; it walks directly into it.

There's no guru to follow, no one telling me I'm doing it wrong because I'm not "high vibe" enough. There's just the work, the journeying, the communion with nature, the listening to what wants to come through. It's ancient, yes, but it's also refreshingly honest in a world of spiritual performance.

Most importantly, shamanic practice doesn't ask me to be anywhere other than here. It asks me to be fully present to what is. To this earth, this body, this moment, this life exactly as it unfolds.

What's Missing in Modern Spirituality

The oversaturation of modern spiritual content has disconnected us from what actually matters.

No amount of reading about spiritual awakening compares to the raw encounter with something greater than yourself. We've replaced genuine mystical experience with consuming content about mystical experience.

When everyone is a teacher and everything is "divinely guided," we lose the ability to distinguish wisdom from ego, healing from harm.

Real transformation isn't instant. It's slow, cyclical, and often uncomfortable. The modern spiritual marketplace sells shortcuts that don't exist, quantum leaps that promise you can skip the messy middle of actually being human.

The relentless focus on improvement, on upgrading, on becoming your "highest self" has robbed us of the simple joy of being. Of inhabiting this life fully. Of finding sacredness in the mundane.

For me, healing has meant something entirely different than what the spiritual industrial complex sells. It's about being fully content with life as it is. Yes, I have dreams and goals, I'm human. But I've found joy in folding laundry. In eating a nourishing meal, in feeling the morning sunlight warm my face as my bare feet connect with the earth.

These aren't consolation prizes while I wait to quantum leap somewhere better. This is it. This is life. This is the sacred.

There's profound healing in learning to be content with what is. Not complacent, I still have dreams, goals, things I'm working toward. But I've stopped treating my current life as a waiting room for something better. I've stopped believing that my present reality is somehow less than what I "should" have manifested by now.

Toxic spirituality would have us believe this is settling. That we should want more, be more, shift to a better timeline where we're thinner, richer, more enlightened, more healed. But I've learned that the constant seeking was keeping me from the very thing I was seeking: peace. Presence. The bone-deep knowing that I am enough, and this life is enough, exactly as it is.

Finding Your Way Back

If you're feeling spiritually exhausted, oversaturated, or disconnected despite all the "spiritual" content you consume, you're not alone. And you're not failing at spirituality, the system is failing you.

Consider stepping back. Stop consuming for a while. Stop trying to jump timelines. Stop seeking the next upgrade, the next frequency, the next level. Get quiet. Go outside. Listen to what your body, your instincts, and your ancestors might be trying to tell you.

The sacred doesn't need a hashtag. It doesn't need to be performed or perfected. It doesn't need you to be anywhere other than where you are. It just needs to be met honestly, humbly, with open hands instead of grasping ones.

For me, that's meant returning to older ways, to practices that don't promise comfort but offer something more valuable: connection. To the earth. To the unseen. To something real beneath all the noise. To the simple, profound reality of being alive in this body, in this moment, on this land.

Maybe your path looks different. Maybe it's not shamanic practices but something else entirely, something that feels true in your bones rather than trendy on your feed. Whatever it is, trust that. Trust the quiet knowing that led you away from what wasn't serving you.

The spiritual path isn't about accumulating more practices, more knowledge, more credentials, more upgrades to a better version of yourself. Sometimes it's about stripping away everything that isn't essential and discovering what remains. That you were enough all along. That this moment, this breath, this life, exactly as it is, is already sacred.

And that, I'm learning, is where the real work begins. Not in jumping to another timeline, but in finally landing fully in this one.