Dear Lovebug,
There is a point where a spiritual journey becomes less about self-care and quietly becomes a self-image. The insights are still real. The experiences still happen. But somewhere along the way, the inner work stops being something we do for our own wholeness and becomes a reference point we build a personality around — a new and far more sophisticated place for the ego to live. This is what the traditions have long called spiritual materialism.
The signature of spiritual materialism is that it turns living things into objects. Our journey becomes a collection — retreats attended, teachers studied, higher states accessed, awakenings ranked as milestones of accomplishment. We begin to objectify ourselves, curating an identity rather than inhabiting a new life.
And we begin to objectify others, reading people as energies, densities, and levels rather than meeting them as human beings. Slipping alongside this is a subtle drift into superstition and magical thinking, where every delayed email is the universe protecting us, every difficult person is a karmic contract, every inconvenience is a sign, and no ordinary explanation is ever allowed to be sufficient. It feels like heightened perception. It functions as a way to avoid the ordinary aspects of reality and the responsibility that an ordinary experience would ask of us.
From there, judgment arrives wearing the language of compassion. We start to assume that someone who is not spiritual lacks depth — that the pragmatic sibling, the skeptical colleague, the friend with no vocabulary for any of this must be less conscious, less evolved, less awake. It rarely sounds like contempt. It sounds like "they are just not there yet," which is one of the more elegant ways human beings have found to feel superior while sounding kind.
But depth is not a vocabulary. Some of the most profoundly integrated people we have met have never used a single word from our field, and some of the most fluent speakers of spiritual language are still unable to sit through an honest conversation without needing to be right.
This is where a spiritual identity becomes a hiding place. It becomes the explanation for why we did not follow through, why we ghosted someone rather than attempted to communicate our needs, why we windowshop new ideas, but cannot commit to the structure of implementing it, why the question of money is either beneath us, or the notion that making plans and maintaining a schedule of commitments is somehow being less present.
Worst of all, believing that saying the right or wrong words or having a negative thought versus a positive thought are the differences between attracting what you want and more time spent in the mundane spell of existential pergatory. The devastating part is that none of this brings freedom.
It keeps us entrenched in scarcity, running a spiritual version of survival mode — still anxious, still protecting, still bracing, only now the fear has been dressed in language beautiful enough that we no longer recognize it as fear. Compulsive practice, endless processing, and constant seeking can be nervous system survival strategies with a candle lit next to them.
The way through is not to abandon spirituality. It is to let it become embodied rather than performed — to move beyond spiritual identity into something quieter and far more useful, where our depth shows up in how we treat people, keep our word, hold our values under pressure, and meet ordinary life without needing it to be a sign or symbol. The most hopeful part is, once you see through this pattern, you begin moving directly into the beauty, fulfillment and wonder of a brand-new life. The very outcome your entire spiritual journey intended for you.
Tomorrow we are gathering live in our community to see through this pattern together. Please join us for a free Healer's Room call. It's a liberating invitation and one you do not have to answer alone.
Join us live in the free Healer's Room
With love,
Matt and Joy Kahn
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