Toxic Spirituality

Angela Marshall
Oct 26, 2021
3 min read

Increasing the consciousness of every reader is one of the most important goals of mine. So with that in mind some things just need to be said. Hopefully people will in turn help to raise the consciousness of the people around them.

Lets look at what spirituality is first.

What is Spirituality??

Its in my opinion the quality of being concerned with the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.

In other words, spirituality is looking at our lives beyond our physical senses.

You can be both spiritual and religious OR you can be one or the other.

Religion focuses more on the beliefs, traditions, doctrines, etc., spirituality focuses on the individual transcending our three dimensional world.

Spirituality and religion actually share some of the same practices though.

Spiritual and Religious Practices

Practicing spirituality looks different for everyone. Below are some of the examples of spiritual practices. Some of them are used in both religious and spirituality while others pertain only to spirituality or religion.

Prayer
Meditation
Ceremonies/Rituals
Dreams
Visulizations
Connecting with Spirit Guides
Angel Numbers
Affirmations
Meeting with a community(church, mosque, temple)

None of these practices are toxic to be clear. What makes spirituality toxic is the attitude that these practices can "cure" you of any and all negativity or feelings that aren't deemed "good" or "pure".

So the question becomes, "What is toxic spirituality and how do you recognize it?"

The answer is much simpler than you think, if you have the belief that you must always be positive and anything negative is bad, then you are practicing toxic spirituality.

What makes this belief so toxic is that we prevent our own learning and growing by suppressing emotions that actually benefit us. Each one of our emotions carry information to our own healing. This information is not good or bad it just IS.

Emotions inform us

For example, when you are experiencing anxiety, you are not a bad person or doing something wrong. Your anxiety is telling you something.

Sit with yourself and ask yourself what you need in this moment. Maybe step outside and ground yourself on mother earth or anything you can do to bring yourself into the now moment. Gathering information from the emotion is key. No amount of meditation or prayer will just take it away, its a gift to help you get closer to your spirit.

When you neglect or fail to gather the information from your emotions, because you have suppressed them, for the sake of being "positive" you remain stuck in those emotions.

This belief that you must always be positive is detrimental to the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical body.

Being able to express these stuck emotions is liberating!

Practicing toxic spirituality can look like this:

*"Just be happy"

This is toxic because it doesn't leave space or grace for any other emotion to be felt.

*"Focus on the good" First of all who's to say whats good or bad. What's good for one person may not be good for anther. Life isn't black and white, there is a huge area of grey. In my opinion the grey is where I have done the most growing and evolving consciously. Looking for gratitude in a situation has helped to to not self sabotage. But by all means no situation is perfect.

*"You'll get over it" Of course you will but the only way to get over something and heal is to actually go through it and feel it. And everyone's timeline for healing is different.