Blessings, beautiful souls —
“Spirit/God invites you in without asking you to take your shoes and coat off.”
This is the line I wrote my sister-from-another-mister, Amanda, about spiritual practice, and it’s what has inspired my blog post today.
You don’t have to make yourself presentable before approaching God. You don’t have to cleanse your energy, raise your vibration, meditate for thirty minutes, arrange your crystals, recite an invocation, or perform some elaborate ritual to be worthy of connection. You are worthy as you are.
Performance holds so many people back from the spiritual path, or keeps them trapped within the confines of titles and rules they no longer resonate with but cannot find themselves able to abandon. An abandonment of these dated ideals feels, to them, an abandonment of the identity others associate with them. But true spirituality is not meant to restrict you within the chains of non-growth.
With performance comes the fear of doing it wrong, missing a step, not having the right tools, not worshipping the right god/goddess. But all of that is just noise. We have become so preoccupied with preparing ourselves to enter the sacred that we’ve forgotten we were never standing outside of it.
The Divine does not have a dress code! You don’t need to light a candle before pulling a card. You don’t need to meditate away your anger before you ask a question. You don’t need to appease the goddess with gifts and sacrifices before you ask her for abundance. You don’t need to rearrange your family altar to not make your grandma vengeful. You don’t need to sage the room before you pray.
All you have to do is be. Your presence is enough. Spiritual practices can deepen our experience of the Divine, but they are not prerequisites for accessing it. If you’ve ever been told otherwise, that’s just nonsense. That’s fear-based thinking that binds you, with chains, to performative religion rather than a spirituality of the heart. There is no fear in my spiritual practice; not a single drop of it.
Haven’t meditated in a month? Meh. Didn’t pull a card to communicate with Spirit in the last week? Oh well. Haven’t saged your house after hosting that family gathering? Life goes on. Didn’t dust your crystals? You’re not going to be cursed.
Living a life that is rooted in love and positive intentions? Enough — that’s exactly enough.
True spirituality – with a capital T – is about spiritual belonging. Source/God doesn’t care, so long as you are living a life rooted in the Divine frequency of Love. I swear to you (I communicate with higher aspects of Source, after all) — God doesn’t care.
Good person? Check.
Practice forgiveness daily? Check.
Make choices with Love as the foundation of those choices? Check.
Aim to be a Light in the world that allows others to also see their own Light? Check.
The rest? Noise. Just NOISE.
Spirituality is not a meritocracy. The Divine is not a reward reserved for those who have completed the appropriate steps. And this raises an interesting question: When did human beings appoint themselves gatekeepers of something they believe to be infinite? And: Why are these people encouraging others to also live their spiritual life within the confines of their own fear they’ve trapped themselves in?
We’ve confused expressions of spirituality with evidence of spirituality. The former, if it makes you feel closer to the Divine (and not fearful or guilty or overwhelmed, etc), does no harm and only good. But the evidence aspect is merely for validation – and as I’ve already written, the Divine gives it to you the moment the door of your heart is opened.
The performance of spirituality is not the same as the experience of spirituality. I genuinely love oracle pulls, tarot, meditation (sometimes – lol), and sacred objects like Orthodox icons or crystals. I’m not writing from a place of rejecting those things; I am merely challenging the idea that others present implying that they’re compulsory.
To partake in performance is to yearn for a spiritual experience, but true spiritual moments tend to happen when we aren’t deliberately seeking them. Your child calling out your name for the first time. Seeing a hot air balloon rise into the sky. Watching the sun set behind the mountains. Laughing with a best friend until your sides hurt. None of these require preperation, and yet they are more aligned with the vibrational frequency of God than ever. Because God doesn’t ask you to take your shoes off. God doesn’t ask you to hang up your coat, wash your hands, or leave your troubles at the door. You are invited inside with the mud on your boots, the weight on your shoulders, and the entirety of your imperfect human experience.
Social media floods us with images and videos of how a spiritual life is meant to look, and it’s pretty scary how spiritual practice can become another form of self-improvement culture. There’s always one more step, one more ritual, one more thing to buy before we just are and just do. And in this endless pursuit of becoming spiritually better, we risk treating our present selves as perpetually insufficient. To Spirit, that is absolutely false.
Perform your rituals because they bring you joy. Light your candles because you love the warmth of their glow. Meditate because you cherish the silence. Pray because your heart longs to speak. But never mistake these expressions of devotion for the price of admission. Spirit has already opened the door.
In the words of the late Kurt Cobain, COME AS YOU ARE.
If you wish to support my work further, have a look at all my books, journals, and decks, available here. If you want to work with me as a spiritual healer or wish to have a tarot reading with me, check out my services through Seeking Celestial Grace and Awakened Little Souls.
xx C
