From Spiritual Baddie to Burnt Out Mystic: When You Stop ‘Doing’ and Just Start ‘Being’

When spirituality becomes another thing to complete, optimise and perform, maybe the problem isn’t that you’ve lost your connection… Maybe you’re exhausted from trying to earn it.

There was a version of me who could turn spirituality into a full-time extracurricular activity without even realising I had done it. Journal every day, check the stars, cleanse on schedule, work with the Moon, pull cards, track patterns, make content, reflect, heal, integrate, evolve, repeat… and because I genuinely loved spirituality, a lot of it felt good for a long time, which is probably why I didn’t notice when it slowly stopped feeling nourishing and started feeling like another job I had created for myself.

That was the part that eventually threw me, because spirituality was supposed to make me feel freer, more connected, more curious about myself and the world around me, yet somehow I had managed to turn it into another list of things I should be doing properly. I should journal, I should meditate, I should cleanse, I should understand why that person irritated me, I should know what transit was affecting me, I should be working through whatever trigger had resurfaced, I should be evolving at all times because apparently being a person wasn’t enough anymore. Eventually I had to ask myself, when exactly did my relationship with spirituality acquire performance targets?

Because I already have a job.

I accidentally turned healing into a performance review

Toward the end of every year, and particularly around my birthday, I tend to become more reflective. My birthday has its own emotional baggage for me anyway, so that time of year already has a way of pulling things to the surface, but there were years where I would notice myself becoming irritated by something I thought I had already healed and immediately judge myself for it. I had journalled about this, cried about it, understood where it came from, probably written enough notes about it to qualify for a dissertation, so why the fuck was it still bothering me?

Eventually it dawned on me that I was treating healing like an exam I should have passed by now. Somewhere along the way, I had absorbed this idea that once I understood something intellectually, I should no longer react to it emotionally, and if it came back around then clearly I hadn’t done enough work.

That is a very efficient way to think if you are a machine.

I, unfortunately, remain a human being.

Knowing why something hurts doesn’t mean it will never hurt again. Understanding a pattern doesn’t erase the history attached to it, and growth doesn’t necessarily mean you become completely immune to every version of yourself you once were. A trigger resurfacing can simply mean you encountered it under different circumstances, with different information, at a different stage of your life. The real question became less about why I was feeling it again and more about what I was doing with it now.

Once I understood that, I stopped treating every recurring emotion as evidence that I had somehow failed healing.

That alone gave me a ridiculous amount of peace.

My spirituality became incredibly rigid for something that was supposed to make me freer

For a long time I had standards around my spiritual practice, and on paper none of them sounded particularly unreasonable. Journal regularly, cleanse, keep up with the astrology, pay attention to the Moon, continue evolving and reflecting on myself. The problem wasn’t really the practices. It was how I spoke to myself when I didn’t do them.

I felt guilty.

I would genuinely feel like I wasn’t respecting my own standards if I skipped things, which eventually made me stop and ask why I had become so rigid in the first place. Why did missing a journal entry make me feel like I had neglected myself? Why did not cleansing on schedule suddenly feel like I was falling behind? Why had something I willingly chose because it helped me feel more connected begun sounding suspiciously like another authority figure telling me what I should be doing?

That question became even more interesting when I looked at my own Saturn in Aquarius in the sixth house and the way I’ve had to relearn what routine and discipline actually mean in my life. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with routine because too much structure starts feeling like control, and once something feels controlling I instinctively want to rebel against it. So naturally, at some point, even spiritual routine became something I wanted to escape from.

What I eventually learned is that discipline does not have to mean forcing yourself into the exact same shape every day. For me, discipline works much better when I think of it as maintaining a relationship with what matters rather than rigidly completing tasks. Routine needs enough structure to support me but enough flexibility that I don’t feel like I’m serving it.

That distinction changed everything.

Spiritual burnout didn’t make me less spiritual. It made me tired of analysing everything

My burnout wasn’t particularly dramatic. I didn’t wake up one morning, renounce spirituality and throw all my tarot decks in the bin. It happened gradually. I started questioning my intuition, then second-guessing it, then wondering whether I was even good at what I did anymore. I thought about quitting tarot altogether. I stopped caring about signs and synchronicities because instead of feeling interesting, everything started feeling like more information I was responsible for decoding.

And then something happened that was weirdly liberating… I stopped asking why all the time.

For somebody who spends a lot of time trying to understand things, that was a big shift, because I had always assumed that wanting to know why meant I was self-aware. Eventually I realised there are moments where why stops being curiosity and starts becoming another form of emotional self-soothing.

Why did that happen? Why did they say that? Why did I dream about this? Why did I see that number? Why did this person trigger me? What is the lesson? What is the universe trying to tell me? What does this mean about my healing? What am I supposed to integrate now?

Maybe nothing.

Maybe somebody was rude.

Maybe I had a weird dream.

Maybe I saw a number because numbers exist.

Maybe I was irritated because I was irritated.

Maybe the spiritual significance of Tuesday afternoon can remain completely undiscovered and the planet will continue rotating.

That was one of the biggest shifts for me, because I realised I didn’t need every experience to explain itself before I could move on from it.

Self-awareness and self-surveillance are not the same thing

Spiritual and therapeutic language has given us incredible tools for understanding ourselves, but I also think we can become so fluent in that language that we start interrogating ourselves into exhaustion.

You meet somebody new and instead of simply allowing yourself to enjoy their company, you are analysing whether your nervous system feels activated. You like somebody and suddenly you’re investigating attachment styles. You have an argument and now you’re examining your childhood, their childhood, karmic patterns, shadow projections, ancestral trauma and whether Mercury is doing something offensive in your seventh house.

At some point, girl - have the conversation.

Self-awareness, to me, is knowing what triggers me, recognising what I can tolerate, understanding my boundaries and having enough relationship with myself to know when something feels wrong. Self-surveillance is different. That’s when I start scanning constantly for reasons not to engage with life, and spirituality becomes the language I use to justify it.

“This doesn’t feel aligned.”

Okay, but is it actually misaligned, or are you scared because you have never done this before?

“This person makes my nervous system feel weird.” Fine, but are they dangerous, or are they unfamiliar?

“I don’t think I’m meant to do this.” According to what, exactly?

Not every uncomfortable feeling is divine redirection. Being seen can feel uncomfortable, vulnerability can feel uncomfortable, starting again can feel uncomfortable, trying something new can make your body react because you have no frame of reference for it yet. You can be afraid and still be safe.

I think that distinction matters enormously because at some point spirituality can accidentally give fear a prettier vocabulary.

And life is still for living.

I had to learn how to stop treating myself like a project

Once you become deeply invested in growth, healing and transformation, it is very easy to convince yourself that there is always another version of you somewhere in the distance who is slightly better than the one who currently exists.

There’s always another wound to work through, another childhood memory to revisit, another ancestral pattern, another limiting belief, another shadow, another course, another book, another version of yourself who apparently has better boundaries, better habits, better self-esteem, better finances, better emotional regulation and probably drinks more water.

At what point do you get to actually be the person you already are?

I don’t even know if I would call it an addiction to transformation anymore, because eventually I start wondering what exactly you are still trying to transform. If you have been healing for years and still feel like you are perpetually one breakthrough away from finally becoming acceptable, maybe the issue is not that you haven’t done enough work.

Maybe you have built an identity around being unfinished.

Perfection does not exist. There isn’t some final enlightened version of you waiting at the end of the journey who never gets triggered, never gets jealous, never makes an embarrassing decision, never gets frightened, never falls back into an old coping mechanism and never needs to be reminded of something they already know.

You are not software waiting for your final update.

Peace feels weird when you’re used to having something to fix

I think this is part of why people struggle so much with simply being.

If your inner world has spent years organised around problems, peace can feel strangely empty. There’s no urgent wound to investigate, no relationship crisis, no dramatic spiritual lesson, no karmic situation demanding your attention. You are just… okay.

And if okay is unfamiliar, your brain can immediately start searching for something.

What am I missing? Why am I bored? What am I supposed to be working on? Why do I feel so quiet? Shouldn’t I be growing somehow?

Maybe nothing is wrong.

Maybe you’re experiencing a period of your life that doesn’t require emotional triage.

I genuinely think some people struggle with peace because their nervous system still associates intensity with being alive, so once the chaos disappears, peace gets mistaken for stagnation. Then instead of learning how to exist inside stability, they start looking for the next thing to analyse.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re addicted to transformation. It may mean their system still has no idea what safety feels like when it isn’t accompanied by a problem to solve.

I know what happens when healing becomes somewhere to hide

When I wrote Fragments of a Dying Dream — yes, shameless plug, go and check it out — I was in one of the darkest periods of my life, and writing became one of the ways I tried to understand what I had allowed that relationship to do to me.

I wanted to understand everything. Why I stayed, what I ignored, what I tolerated, which version of myself existed inside that relationship and what exactly I needed to heal so I would never repeat it again.

That work was necessary. It helped me enormously.

But there was also a point where healing from love started turning into fear of experiencing love again, and that’s when I had to confront something I didn’t particularly want to admit. If healing from something makes you so afraid of experiencing anything remotely similar that you stop participating in life altogether, healing has quietly turned into avoidance.

Eventually I had to circle back toward people, relationships, possibility and openness. Not because I had perfectly resolved every single thing I needed to integrate, but because continuing to obsessively examine the wreckage was no longer helping me build anything new.

At some point you have to leave the archaeological site. You have to live.

And I don’t give myself enough credit for how far I have actually come, because I can still look at the things I need to work on and completely forget that I am no longer the person who entered that chapter in the first place.

Modern spirituality has also become ridiculously easy to monetise

This deserves its own conversation because the spiritual wellness industry has become incredibly good at convincing people that the next product is the missing ingredient in their spiritual development.

You need the journal, then you need the manifestation journal, then the Moon journal, the shadow-work journal, the crystal, the deck, the retreat, the course, the candle, the oil, the workbook, the certification and probably some limited-edition water bottle that says aligned as fuck on the side.

And listen, I love beautiful things.

I have absolutely fallen into that trap too, particularly much earlier in my journey when I thought having more tools somehow meant I was becoming more spiritual.

Now when I’m working, there are days where the only physical tool I use is a deck of cards. If I’m doing astrological work, I might have the client’s natal chart in front of me. Everything else is my own ability to channel, interpret and connect with what I’m receiving.

And comfy clothes.

Obviously.

The tool can support your practice, but the tool is not the practice. A more expensive crystal doesn’t automatically deepen your intuition. Owning forty tarot decks does not mean you can read them well. Another healing course cannot integrate the things you have already learned for you.

At some point, buying spiritual tools can become another way of buying the feeling of progress without actually living differently.

I also had to stop turning the Moon into homework

I used to be much more structured with lunar work. New Moon, Full Moon, intentions, releases, rituals, content, reflections. I still love astrology and still pay attention to what is happening in the sky, but one of the things I eventually released was the idea that I had to do something every time the Moon changed signs or entered a new phase.

I am allowed to experience a Full Moon without turning it into an assignment. I do not need to manufacture an intention because it is a New Moon.

If something genuinely feels relevant and I want to work with it, I will. If not, the Moon will be fine.

I promise.

She has survived a lot.

Content creation made me notice another kind of performance

When spirituality is also part of your work, another layer appears because now you’re not only experiencing your life, you’re thinking about whether the experience should become content.

A lesson becomes a caption. A realisation becomes a video. A difficult experience becomes something you could teach other people about. You can start narrating your life before you have actually finished living it.

And I don’t think everything needs to become wisdom immediately. Some experiences deserve privacy while they are still unfolding. Some lessons need time before they become teachable.

Some things do not need a moral.

And a quiet season does not mean you have run out of things to say. It might simply mean you are living instead of documenting yourself living.

I had to relearn that too.

My spirituality now looks suspiciously like ordinary life

This is probably the version of my spirituality I trust the most.

It looks like driving somewhere because I felt like going out. Singing loudly in the car. Dancing because a song came on and my body wanted to move. Gaming. Walking outside for no profound reason. Having healthy conversations about important things and then immediately talking absolute nonsense. Laughing with clients. Paying these damn bills. Rediscovering hobbies I had forgotten I enjoyed. Becoming playful again and slowly falling back in love with things that made me happy before I turned my entire existence into a self-development assignment.

None of that looks particularly mystical.

That is exactly why I like it.

I don’t think spirituality is supposed to remove you from ordinary life. If anything, I think all the reflection, healing, tarot, astrology, ritual and questioning should eventually send you back into ordinary life with a deeper relationship to being alive.

Otherwise, what are we actually doing all this work for?

Life forcing me to pivot helped more than another ritual would have

There have been periods where I did not willingly choose rest or simplification. Life simply changed what I was capable of doing.

My plans changed. My capacity changed. My priorities changed. I couldn’t maintain the version of my spiritual practice I had built, and at first that felt like I was losing my connection. Eventually I realised I wasn’t losing spirituality… I was losing some of the performance around it.

What remained was less impressive and much easier to sustain, but it also felt much more like mine.

That was when I really understood what discipline meant for me too. Discipline is not doing everything every day. If I don’t journal for three weeks but I’m emotionally present in my life, I’m not failing. If I miss a lunar ritual because I’m outside laughing with somebody, the Moon is not going to revoke my membership. If I don’t pull cards because I already know the answer, maybe that’s progress.

And when I genuinely do fall out of rhythm, discipline is what helps me return without spending two weeks shaming myself for having left it in the first place.

You do not need to understand every version of yourself before you’re allowed to live

Healing matters to me. Reflection matters. Spiritual practice matters. Self-awareness matters.

I just don’t think any of those things should become prerequisites for participation.

You don’t need to become perfectly healed before you fall in love. You don’t need to eliminate every insecurity before letting yourself be seen. You don’t need to resolve your entire childhood before building an adult life. You don’t need complete alignment before trying something new, and you definitely do not need to understand every wound before allowing yourself to experience joy.

There has to be a point where improving yourself creates enough room for you to actually enjoy yourself.

Otherwise, what was all of that work for?

Being is still spiritual

There was a time when spirituality felt like something I needed to do correctly.

Now I think it is much closer to something I allow myself to be.

I can still read tarot, study astrology, cleanse, journal, pray, speak to my ancestors and reflect on myself. None of that disappeared. It simply stopped being the price of admission.

I don’t earn spiritual connection by completing enough rituals. I don’t become spiritually irresponsible because I chose to go out instead of pulling cards. I haven’t lost everything I’ve learned because an old trigger briefly irritated me again, and I do not need to turn every uncomfortable emotion into another six-month healing programme.

I’m allowed to know myself without constantly monitoring myself. I’m allowed to grow without assuming there is something fundamentally wrong with the current version of me. I’m allowed to have spiritual depth while enjoying ordinary, unserious, beautifully pointless things.

And I am absolutely allowed to stop fixing myself long enough to find out who I am when I’m not being repaired.

That might actually be the part of spiritual growth we discuss the least. Eventually, you have to stop making healing the centre of your identity and discover what all that healing created room for.

Maybe it created room for love. Maybe creativity, friendship, play, peace, curiosity, pleasure, or the ability to drive somewhere on a random afternoon without needing the journey to symbolise anything.

Maybe it created room for you to sing badly in your kitchen and pay your bills while being deeply annoyed that adulthood keeps sending invoices.

Whatever it created room for, live there for a bit because - the moment spirituality became another thing I had to do rather than something I was allowed to be, I knew I had lost the point somewhere… and strangely enough, doing less did not make me less spiritual.

It made me feel like myself again.

If you’ve turned yourself into a never-ending project

If you’re exhausted from constantly analysing, healing, improving and trying to become the most aligned version of yourself, you may not need another assignment. You may need permission to experience your life without immediately turning it into material for your next breakthrough.

And if you’re currently somewhere between who you were and whoever you’re becoming, that is also the territory I often explore with clients in my readings. Not how to “fix” you, but what you’ve already outgrown, what still deserves attention, and where you may finally be allowed to stop digging.

And if you want to see what obsessive healing, heartbreak and trying to make meaning out of the wreckage looked like for me during a very different chapter of my life, you can also find my book, Fragments of a Dying Dream.

That is my shameless plug.

I earned one ;)