You Don't Heal by Sitting in a Healing Tomb. You Live It
There's a particular kind of membership in the spiritual wellness world that I have a real problem with.
You know the ones. The daily challenge, the monthly challenge, the yearly challenge. The tools inside the container that you're supposed to use every single day, or else. It's traditional marketing dressed up in spiritual language — do this together, stay in the cycle, keep coming back. And it's not that people aren't benefiting. It's not that people aren't getting real results. It's not even that the approach is wrong for everyone. But here's what I keep watching happen: people become addicted to the healing. Addicted to the tools. And then afraid that if they ever stop — if they don't have the tools, if they're not in the community, if they lose access to the leader — they're not going to keep growing. They're not going to heal. They won't come back to who they are.
I have a real problem with this.
A couple of years ago, I came up with this concept of lived-in spirituality because I was tired of it. I had this feeling I couldn't shake: I never want to create something, in any capacity, where people feel reliant on me. Reliant on my tools to get through the day, get through their life. I never want someone believing that without access to me, they won't be okay.
And I say this as someone who's been on the inside of it. I've been a member of these communities. I'm still in some of them. I've watched the way people come to desperately rely on the leader — when the whole point, the actual point of nearly all of this, is to learn to talk to your own inner voice. To read your own energy. To translate your own dreams and inclinations. To be present enough with what life is throwing at you that you can let life itself be the teacher.
A lot of these communities create a distortion of that. The tools are meant to be a hack — meant to help you move easier and faster. But the core of it never changes, no matter which community you're in or which tools you're using or who the leader is. You have to be willing to sit with yourself. You have to be willing to feel your emotions, to actually process them, to be wrong, to go looking for a perspective that isn't yours. To be a fully curious, open, willing participant in your own life.
And I think the people who get really stuck — the ones who end up in something close to a cult mindset — are the ones who are still afraid to do exactly that. Afraid to feel what they feel. Afraid to be honest about their own experience. Afraid to be honest about where they were wronged, and, more importantly, where they wronged someone else. But if you have the tools, you always have something to fall back on instead. You feel triggered, you do a meditation. You're not manifesting, so you must be blocked. There's always a tool to reach for, so you never have to reach inward.
Everybody's looking for fast, instant gratification. Nobody really wants to spend the time doing the slow work of stripping away old hurts, fears, beliefs, and patterns — and our own personal patterns are the hardest ones to break. At a certain point, it doesn't even matter where the pattern came from. You just have to find the real, underlying reason you want it to change. It has to genuinely mean something to you. And sometimes even that isn't enough.
I'm not saying people shouldn't have tools, communities, or someone they look to for guidance. I think that belief is just as misguided. But when I think about how a person will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime — in programs and containers and following teachers whose own methods worked beautifully for them but were maybe never the right fit for everybody — it gets to me. And you find it everywhere. It's not just the spiritual wellness space. It's business, it's healthcare, it's everywhere.
Here's the thing about your spirituality, your growth, your own unfolding: life is always handing you the curriculum. You don't need to go find it. You don't need a roadmap. You don't need to be in a container that announces this month we're working on money when life is very clearly pointing you at something else entirely.
I've lived this one. People love to devote whole months to money — money beliefs, money blocks, manifesting money, the energy of money, on and on. And I've had it happen where money simply isn't the thing I need to be looking at. What I actually need is inner child work. The program's content and my own energetic cycle just aren't lined up. So I've had to learn to take a step back and ask which communities, which programs, which methodologies actually make sense for where I am — instead of abandoning myself to keep pace with the group.
I never again want to be in any community where I'm instructed that I have to do something every single day.
And I say that as someone whose own membership includes a daily meditation. I don't think everybody needs to do it every day. Some people will want to, and that's beautiful. I do it most days because it genuinely helps me. But everybody's different, and that difference is the whole point.
What I don't like is dogma tied to profit.
Because the tools you actually need to do your own healing — to build your own way of creating what you want — are so much simpler than you've been led to believe. You need a way to get your thoughts out of your head. You need a safe place to feel your feelings, and to actually feel them while they're happening instead of filing them away for later. I love documentation, so for me that's voice notes and journaling. And then you need one more thing, the hardest one: you need to be willing to not have the answer right away.
There was a stretch where I was doing so much subconscious work that it became almost automatic. I could be having a genuinely hard time with something and just ask myself: when was the last time I felt this way? And if I gave it a couple of minutes, went and washed the dishes, did something that switched my active mind off, my subconscious would come right through. It would show me the last time. And then the time before that. And the time before that. Because that's all it is, really. It's reading the patterns.
You're feeling something, and odds are it isn't the first time you've felt it. Not in adulthood. That's the actual work. Becoming so present, so self-aware, so in tune with yourself that you can feel when something is off. That you can notice something sticky surfacing and go, I know this is a different situation, but this feels familiar. And then turning inward about it instead of away from it. Maybe closing your eyes and breathing works for you. Maybe it's talking into a voice note until the truth falls out. Maybe it's automatic writing. And maybe you're someone who genuinely benefits from tapping, or hypnosis — no shade, those can be perfect tools. Use what works. But the point is you don't rely on the tool. You rely on yourself.
Feel the feeling. Notice where it lives in your body. Let yourself decide when you're done — and you'll know, because there's usually this big exhale and then the tears just dry up. And then you sit there, and you write. What did you feel? Where did you feel it? What memories came up? What were you saying to yourself the whole time it was happening?
Be a documentarian of yourself in your own life. It's so much easier than you think.
The minute you plant a stake in the ground, life is going to start bringing you things to move you along the path. Some of it will feel really good. Some of it will feel less good. Most of it isn't bad — most of it is just being a human. But people are so afraid of being a human. And especially of being a human alone. It's a real comfort to have people around you who share your beliefs and feel the way you do. That's not wrong. It's only when it tips into dependency that it becomes a problem — and that is the thing that has always terrified me. I never wanted to build something that creates dependency. I love a point-in-time tool. I never want anyone feeling like they have to be doing my work every day, because my work isn't the point.
Your work is the point.
When I finally pulled myself out of one community specifically — one that had started to feel genuinely cult-y, like the whole design was to make you so dependent you'd never leave — it wasn't because it wasn't helping. It was. I just didn't like the energy of it. I didn't like who I was becoming inside it. And it wasn't as if I didn't have my own tools. I've been journaling since I could hold a pencil. I understand how the subconscious works, how energetics work. But I was getting dependent anyway, and I didn't like it.
So I took the step back. I started journaling inside Notion, where I could actually be free. I'm a technical witch through and through — my Book of Shadows is in Notion, my journal is in Notion — because it's so easy for me to go back and reflect. I tag everything: the moon phase, the astrological season, the topic, whether it's morning pages or a channeled message. I love being able to filter and draw the connective lines, because that's the whole game. You felt this way — well, when did you feel it last? And before that? And before that? Until you reach the very first time. Eventually, all of it surfaces. And life will keep serving it up, too.
Another tool I love, precisely because it doesn't feel like a crutch, is the Chani astrology app. When I'm feeling a certain way, and I've done my journaling, I can look at the transits and understand why something is coming up right now. That's what I mean about every season of our lives being so different from one another. Yes, the same rising sign shares a similar energetic weather. But we all have so much unique astrology, such unique designs, that the same transit lands completely differently from person to person. It just gives you a framework for what your season is asking you to look at — what life is serving you so you can go deeper, understand yourself better, and do some healing. I hope, even more than that: so you can create.
Because you don't heal by sitting in a healing tomb.
You heal by living your life. By being in relationship. By making new things. By being in your art practice, by listening to music, by dancing, by moving your body, by being out in the world with the people you're actually in community with — physically. A lot of my own community is online; most of my closest friends don't live anywhere near me, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But there's something real about being out in the world with people who have different experiences, different beliefs, different viewpoints than you. They'll open you up if you let yourself stay curious. If you stop worrying so much that someone else's energy is going to knock you out of your own alignment.
Because that's the fear that gets perpetuated in these spaces, especially the spiritual wellness ones. Yes, be thoughtful about who you spend the most time with — that matters. But you can sit in a coffee shop and have a real conversation with someone whose politics are nothing like yours, and it does not have to derail your alignment. Your alignment comes from how you feel about yourself in your own truth, and what you know to be right for you. It was never your job to pull everyone else into your alignment. Let them stay in theirs.
It really comes down to being observant. Noticing how you feel. Noticing where you might be shifting, and getting curious about it instead of alarmed. Huh. I feel a certain way after I talk to that person. I wonder what that's about. And then letting it reveal itself.
Humans make everything so hard. And a lot of the time, we make it hard on purpose, for profit. That's the part that gets me — and I say it as someone who genuinely wants to support herself by helping other people on their journeys. But I want to do it in a way that makes them completely unreliant on me. My honest hope is that people use the tools I give them only until they figure out their own. I never want anyone in there every day unless it's truly feeling right. I never want anyone thinking if I don't do this, I won't manifest it, or the leap will be harder.
No.
I want the tools to be like exercise machines that build your self-trust muscle. That strengthens your connection to your inner voice until you know you can trust wherever your instinct comes from. So that yes — you'll feel anxiety after you make a big decision. But you'll also know the anxiety is going to pass. You can choose to sit with it, journal it, voice note it, look for the lesson — and then not get stuck in it. Because you don't want to live in it. The more time you spend creating, moving forward, doing the actual thing, the more you heal. And that is the part that gets lost in every single one of these conversations.
So, yeah. You can stay in the healing tomb, or you can go live your healing.
The choice is really yours.
Be Your Own Oracle
Clear what isn't yours and hear what is with The Daily Meditation. It guides you through your Human Design energy centers — clearing the absorbed energies, shielding your energy field, and getting you quiet enough to hear what your inner voice has to say.
