What if your path to enlightenment is just another way of avoiding your pain?
For years, I thought I was living the dream of spiritual growth. Compassion, forgiveness, kindness, and gratitude — core values I lived by, utterly convinced I was doing my share in creating a kinder world, and teaching my kids the “right” values.
I felt good. Meaningful. And yeah, maybe a tad superior (hey, don’t judge me yet).
But here’s the plot twist I didn’t see coming: all those glowing virtues? They were a brilliantly sneaky cover-up for the unmet emotional needs and buried emotions I’d been hauling around since childhood.
By being the “good” spiritual warrior and “a wounded healer,” I was unconsciously still chasing the safety and love I hadn’t felt as a kid. Cultivating all those beautiful values was partly a pretense. My practices weren’t just about growth; they were a covert attempt to plaster over buried hurt and anger with a shiny coat of love and light.
Humbling? Understatement of the century.
How’d I finally figure it out? I quit listening to my mind’s chatter and finally tuned into my body’s language through somatic inquiry. Spoiler: my body had a lot to say, and it wasn’t talking love and light.
A powerful example of a practice I enjoyed for a few years can demonstrate well what I am talking about: the Divine Light Invocation.
Divine Light or Divine Avoidance? My awkward breakup with a cosmic hug
Take the Divine Light Invocation, a beautiful ritual of surrender taught at Yasodhara Ashram. I practiced it for years. You stand and affirm:
- I am created by Divine Light.
- I am sustained by Divine Light.
- I am protected by Divine Light.
- I am surrounded by Divine Light.
- I am ever-growing into Divine Light.
You imagine every cell of your body filled with Divine Light. You share the light. You give thanks.
This practice feels like a cosmic hug. Powerful. Uplifting. Sacred.
And it was. But it was also the perfect lullaby for the inner child in me, still aching for safety, connection, and love. I kept soothing those needs instead of accessing the anger and hurt buried deep in my body —emotions I couldn’t even access, let alone express.
Instead of helping me release those buried emotions and unravel the programming that keeps them repressed, the Divine Light Invocation gave me a temporary substitute: the sense of being safe, loved, and held.
Here’s the trap—so long as I was unconsciously meeting unmet childhood needs through spirituality, I was postponing the one thing that would truly set me free: feeling and expressing my anger, hurt, and fear. I kept seeking comfort instead of reclaiming the full range of myself.
The Divine Light Invocation was a luminous Band-Aid, not a cure. I wasn’t dissolving those contractions of frozen fear; I was floating above them.
That’s the danger of even the most beautiful practices: they can cradle you in comfort, meeting emotional needs that went unmet in childhood, while quietly keeping you from what most needs to be felt and expressed — your emotional freedom.
Divine Light? Maybe. But let’s be honest… some of it was pure Divine Avoidance.
And if you think this was just a quirky side effect of one practice, hang on. Because uncovering the deeper pattern of emotional repression would shake everything I thought I knew about spirituality.
The Red Flag of Cultivated Spirituality
Here’s the hard truth: if it’s important to you to practice peace, gratitude, compassion or any other “beautiful” quality on repeat, consider it a giant neon warning sign that you’re running from something.
The need to cultivate these virtues isn’t proof that you’re broken, bad, or not good enough. That sense of deficiency or insufficiency you feel deep down — the story that says “I am bad,” “too much,” or “not good enough” — is real. But it’s not you.
What’s actually deficient are the emotions your body had to bury to stay safe since childhood— the raw anger, primal fear, gut-wrenching sadness. Those feelings were locked away in vaults of fear frozen in your body, sealed off before you even had words for them.
Your spiritual practices, as meaningful as they seem, often become the glittering, bejewelled lock that keeps those vaults sealed tight. That’s the emotional repression mechanism in action.
And here’s the paradox: when you dissolve the frozen fear in your body, that sense of deficiency evaporates. Forgiveness stops being a practice — it becomes irrelevant, because emotions can finally flow. Gratitude isn’t a journal entry — it’s your natural state of being. Compassion doesn’t require effort — it flows. Effortlessly. And when it doesn’t, we simply know we have a layer of unseen programming and repression to unravel.
The Wake-Up Call: When Light Wasn’t Enough
No matter how much light I invoked, my chest still felt like it was carrying a brick.
And triggers? They’d send me spiralling before I could even whisper “namaste.”
Meditation brought blissful peace… until I opened my eyes and the tension or numbness came crashing back.
The real game-changer? Turning toward those buried emotions. I learned to use somatic inquiry to start dissolving the contractions in my body.
And something surprising happened: I didn’t have to gaslight myself anymore—telling myself I was safe while my nervous system kept freezing. What I really needed was to excavate the hurt and anger I still carried from feeling unsafe as a child.
I didn’t need to chant my way to connection; I needed to face the grief and rage I carried from not being held as a child.
When those long-buried emotions finally start to flow, love, compassion, and kindness flow too—without a vision board, without a mantra. Effortless. Real.
Get Brutally Honest About Your Spirituality
No amount of chanting, affirming, or meditating will ever make you “enough.”
Being spiritual isn’t the same as being free.
Real freedom starts when you stop performing spirituality and start listening to your body. When you decode its whispers (or its full-on screams), dissolve contractions, and finally feel the hurt, anger, sadness, and fear you once had to bury. It begins when you expose the unconscious drive to be spiritual and reclaim the freedom to be … you.
That’s when bypassing ends and real listening begins—in the body. That’s when love, compassion, and gratitude stop being items on your spiritual checklist and start being the very essence of you.
Curious what your body is holding onto? My free Repression Test can reveal which emotions quietly shape your choices, relationships, and health. When you subscribe to my newsletter, you’ll also get a guided meditation and a booklet, “The Body’s No,” to help you start right away.
The beauty of spirituality is real. But so is the bypass.
Real freedom? It isn’t found in love and light—it’s found in what your body has been begging you to feel.
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Previously Published on Ina Backbier’s blog
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