It seems that my last few posts have touched a nerve.

A good one, I guess.

After talking about seeing how I’ve been deluding myself for a long time, betting on hardcore spirituality and an obsession with positivity, many people commented either in public or privately.

I say ‘deluding’, but it’s with the utmost appreciation and love I speak about this.

There’s no judgment: there’s simply relief.

There’s no sense of having wasted my time: there’s a notion of gratitude for the unfolding, and a lot of excitement about the possible depth and honesty that’s waiting for me.

Until six weeks ago I mocked things like ‘spiritual bypassing’, and of course I did so because I was fully engaged with it.

When we’re lost in specific behavior and floating around in our pet ideas, it’s very hard to see what we’re doing and believing, let alone to start exploring other ways of being.

This is what happened to me.

Both the floating and the obsession with being enlightened, AND the unmistakable nudge I received to start dropping it.

It feels like I’ve been saved from a beautiful nightmare.

Like something pulled me out of an endless amount of cotton candy, where I was slowly suffocating without knowing it.

It seems to me that many people suffer from the apparent duality of being either human or fully spiritual.

Like we have to choose and stick to that choice.

Like we can only have one of those two.

And I totally see how much sense it makes to fall for the promises of enlightenment after a lot of suffering and trying to fix yourself.

I feel blessed to realize the trap I’d fallen in, and there’s no remorse or shame about that, whatsoever.

Of course we do that, of course we hope that stepping into the divine light will magically take away all the shit we’ve been secretly dragging around with us.

Of course we want to be there, transcended in bliss, not bothered by mundane shit, smiling our way into eternity.

But it’s a false promise, not a bad one, it’s just quite naïve and one-sided.

I see that now, and I obviously didn’t want to see it before, when looking at it with fresh eyes could have actually meant having a second opinion about my new career as a spiritual knight (or maybe even a very humble guru), and where would it leave me if this new gamble didn’t work out?

I’ve invested years in the spiritual journey and it has been extremely valuable, and still is.

It feels like looking for this elusive thing called ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’ and meeting it more and more in the back of everything I do, has provided me with the safety and stability to start looking for the many filters I used and lived by without knowing it, and the many things I avoided in the process.

Like I said in the beginning: there’s nothing but appreciation.

It’s a perfect order, actually.

When I was completely lost in my role of the Eternal Victim, I couldn’t handle any therapeutic conversations about that, because whenever a shrink mentioned this to me I just saw it as evidence of the intrinsic unfairness and rudeness of the world.

When we’re 100% engaged with the psyche, that most subjective of filters, it’s incredibly difficult and painful and hard to look at our behavior and preferences and beliefs, because they seem so important and true.

It’s like our psychological demeanor prevents us from looking at our psychological demeanor, as a perfect little loop of change prevention.

Everything we believe about life and our place in it is based on and connected to a deep obsession with safety, even if our habits bring us close to insanity and death.

So it makes sense that, in our warped perception, spirituality easily takes on the form of a new safety, a new promise that’s overwhelmingly complete, and that’s why it makes sense to fall in love with it, obsessively.

But it’s not all we’d like it to be.

We still have bodies and minds and programming, and in most cases, no amount of spiritual dressing up and habituation and dogma, will get rid of what we’ve learned about ourselves when we weren’t capable of understanding what was going on, right there in the heart of our childhood.

My posts have touched people who have been, sometimes hesitantly and secretly, looking for other ways to live life more completely, instead of strictly following one of the mere spiritual paths.

They no longer want to live like perfect divine puppets that never fart or curse or have the urge to fuck up somebody really good, but as whole and ever more complete beings with dark sides that are welcome back into the light, whatever that entails.

If that’s you: hooray!

And if that isn’t you: just as much hooray.

I know what it’s like to deem everything that’s not Namaste-flavored and Happiness-infused, bullshit and old news and going back in time.

And that was good until it wasn’t.

In the last week, I have felt waves of sadness and anger gently approaching the shore of my awareness.

I have cried a lot and felt a lot, and I know that this is only the beginning.

Spirituality gave me the excuse to feel nothing and hide from my emotions for a long time.

Now it allows me to do the opposite.