The Greatest Spiritual Glow-Up Scam (And How to Survive It)
Because that "higher consciousness" package comes with an unexpected side of divine humbling
Picture this: You’re sitting in your carefully curated meditation corner, surrounded by crystals that cost more than your therapy sessions, convinced you’re one green juice away from enlightenment. Your altar looks like Goop and a shaman had a baby and that baby got a Pinterest account. Then life comes in like a stand-up comedian with a plot twist that makes M. Night Shyamalan look predictable.
Your body knew this moment was coming. Your fascia has been holding the punchline for months, waiting for your mind to catch up to what your tissue already understood: you can’t aesthetic your way to regulation.
You know that quote floating around social media: “Just spread love and light, and everything will be fine”? Adorable. Almost as adorable as those retreat ads showing enlightened beings in flowing white linens sipping matcha on a Balinese beach, looking like they’ve never had a thought about their ex at 2am or stress-eaten an entire sleeve of cookies while questioning their life choices. But reality? Oh honey, she’s got a different script entirely. And she didn’t run it by your vision board first.
Your nervous system doesn’t care about your aesthetic. It cares about safety. It cares about completion. It cares about whether you’re actually present in your body or just performing presence for an audience of houseplants and healing stones.
One of the biggest spiritual pyramid schemes out there is the idea that once you “get there” (wherever “there” is... nobody’s provided GPS coordinates, but surely more workshops will help), you’ll transform into this floating embodiment of zen. Nothing can touch you. No emotions except those approved by the spiritual positivity police. Just love, high vibes, and maybe some casual levitation between your morning journaling and moon water preparation.
Here’s what actually happens: Real transformation looks suspiciously like your life serving you exactly what you’ve been desperately avoiding. With a side of “this is for your nervous system’s own good” biological sauce. It’s your amygdala screaming bloody murder while your vagus nerve sits back with popcorn, watching your carefully constructed spiritual identity crumble like that manifestation cookie you tried to bake during the wrong moon phase.
Your bones hold the difference between spiritual performance and actual presence. They’ve been keeping score. Every vertebra knows which retreats changed you and which ones just gave you new vocabulary for the same patterns.
Want to know what real growth looks like? It’s you, facing your stored experiences instead of trying to sage them away. It’s embracing your actual nervous system responses, not just your “evolved being” highlight reel. It’s that part of you that wants to throw your rose quartz at the wall when someone suggests you’re “just not vibrating high enough.”
Because here’s the thing about “vibrating high enough”: your nervous system doesn’t have a spiritual credit score. It has states. Regulated. Dysregulated. Somewhere in between trying to figure out if that email was passive-aggressive or if you’re projecting. These states aren’t moral achievements. They’re physiological realities. And you can’t affirmation your way out of a nervous system that learned hypervigilance before you learned to read.
Your breath has been trying to teach you this. Every exhale is a completion. Every inhale is a beginning. No mantras required. Just presence. Just the radical act of actually being in your body instead of curating a spiritual identity FROM your body.
How to Actually Survive the Glow-Up Scam:
1. Follow the Activation Like a Somatic Breadcrumb Trail
If something triggers you harder than Mercury retrograde triggers tech issues, congratulations: you’ve just located stored material in your tissue. Not a spiritual failing. Not evidence you haven’t “done enough work.” Just your nervous system going “HEY, THERE’S SOMETHING HERE THAT NEVER GOT TO COMPLETE.”
Your body has been highlighting these spots for years. That tightness when your mother calls. That jaw clench when someone talks over you. That weird thing your stomach does when you’re about to say something true.
These sensations are your actual curriculum. Not the workshop. Not the certification. The felt sense in your own tissue that’s been patiently waiting for your attention to arrive.
2. Let All Nervous System States Attend the Party
Anger, grief, terror... they’re not blocking your enlightenment. They’re not “low vibration” party crashers you need to bounce at the door. They’re VIP guests carrying important information about incomplete stress cycles your body has been holding, some of them since before you had language for what was happening.
The spiritual positivity police want you to believe certain emotions are evidence you’re “not there yet.” Your nervous system knows that FEELING those emotions, letting them actually move through your tissue, is the only way anything actually integrates.
Your chest knows the difference between performed peace and actual regulation. Performed peace is tight. Held. Effortful. Real regulation is soft. Spacious. Costs nothing to maintain because it’s not maintenance... it’s just your natural state when stored material finally completes.
3. Drop the Spiritual Aesthetic Olympics
You don’t need 108 crystals, sanskrit tattoos that you can’t actually pronounce, or a facade of perpetual peace that requires more energy than your actual job. Real transformation looks more “human having an honest experience” than “ethereal being who’s transcended the need for snacks.”
Your nervous system doesn’t regulate through accessories. It regulates through safety, through completion, through the actual experience of being met in your distress instead of being told to transcend it.
Your skin has been waiting for permission to just BE skin. Not a container for your spiritual evolution. Not evidence of your vibrational status. Just skin. Sensation. Boundary between you and not-you. Enough.
4. Embrace the Biological Comedy
Some days you’re present, grounded, connected to your body’s wisdom like you’ve finally figured out this whole human thing. Some days you’re a dysregulated gremlin who just ate feelings for dinner and is about to start an argument with a parking meter.
Both are data. Both are your nervous system doing something. Both deserve curiosity instead of judgment. And honestly? Both probably deserve snacks.
Your pulse doesn’t judge your fluctuations. It just keeps pulsing. Strong when you need strength. Soft when you can afford softness. This is the template. Not constant elevation. Not permanent transcendence. Rhythm.
The Plot Twist: Transformation Is What’s Already Happening
Actual growth isn’t escaping into toxic positivity. It’s having the nervous system capacity to feel everything: activation and calm, expansion and contraction, the part of you that wants to evolve and the part that wants to flip off the entire self-help industry and watch reality TV.
Because only when you can be WITH all your states, only when your nervous system has enough range to hold the full spectrum without needing to bypass half of it, do you actually become free. Not free from your humanity. Free to BE human. Which, plot twist, was the assignment the whole time.
Your whole body exhales reading that. Because somewhere in your cells there’s recognition that you’ve been trying to graduate from being human when the curriculum was always about being human MORE FULLY. More presently. More completely.
And then? Then you can actually feel. Not just the “spiritual” emotions that look good on Instagram. All of it. The mess. The beauty. The part of you that still uses oracle cards as coffee coasters and forgets to charge your crystals and sometimes thinks “namaste” is just a fancy way of saying “I have no idea what I’m doing but this outfit cost $200.”
Your body has been holding space for this recognition. Your tissue has been waiting. Not for you to become someone else. For you to finally arrive HERE. In this body. With this nervous system. Exactly as it is. Already whole. Already enough. Already the transformation you’ve been seeking.
✨ Your performed spiritual identity might not survive this message. But your actual body? She just exhaled and said “finally.” 🔥
I lOVE this! Your sass shines through. Made me laugh out loud! Thank you for your wit and wisdom.✨
Well said, well written! :-) I've more often felt like a sewage worker than a light one.