On Walking Away from the Spiritual Industry
When Insight Becomes Avoidance:
On Walking Away from the Spiritual Industry
There is a growing conversation right now about people feeling disenchanted with the spiritual space. Fatigue with the language. Fatigue with the repetition. Fatigue with the sense that something is being said but not lived.
I understand that.
But my experience of this didn’t begin recently. I walked away from it years ago. Not out of rejection. Out of recognition.
There comes a point where you begin to notice that the same phrases are being repeated in different voices, and yet the lives of the people repeating them do not always reflect the depth of what is being spoken.
Trust the universe. Raise your vibration. Shift timelines.
Words that sound meaningful, but over Time begin to feel unanchored — not because the ideas themselves are false, but because they are so often used without embodiment.
And that is where something inside you starts to withdraw.
Because truth does not need repetition to hold weight, it carries itself.
What I began to see very clearly was that much of what is called growth can function as a very refined form of avoidance.
Insight replacing action. Language replacing experience. Awareness standing in for actual change.
The spiritual industry has become extraordinarily skilled at producing the feeling of progress without requiring its cost.
I say this not from observation alone. I say this from having lived through a period when avoidance was no longer an option for me.
There are phases in life where you can explore, question, consume, and expand. And then there are phases when life strips away everything you were using to orient yourself.
For me, that meant facing the ultimate betrayal by the most trusted, leading to the loss of a home, horses I loved with a loyalty that’s hard to put into words, a professional world I spent fifteen years building, material security, and the identity I had crafted around all of it.
It meant three years inside a legal battle I never initiated, which wore me down and cost me more than just money.
It meant seeing more than I could easily accept.
It meant witnessing the agreement of words unravel against the reality of action, and recognising that deception is a motivated act — one that does not resolve itself.
It meant illness and multiple surgeries in the middle of that.
It meant confronting the particular shame of a woman who had once been recognised in her field, then, seemingly overnight, becoming invisible.
What remained after all of that was not a concept.
It was the raw experience of myself with nothing external left to hold me together.
And that space cannot be navigated through podcasts, teachings, or anyone else’s framework. It cannot be bypassed with platitudes or borrowed phrases spoken at you.
It requires Time. Grief. Stillness that is not chosen but imposed.
A willingness to sit with what is actually there rather than what you wish were there instead.
That was the passage that shaped me. And it is why I no longer look to external frameworks to define truth. Because I learned, at a cost I would never have chosen, that no amount of guidance can replace direct experience.
No insight, however precise, can substitute for the thing itself.
This is also why I chose to write Fatima’s Alchemy the way I did — not as instruction, not as influence, but as symbolic reflection.
I wrote it in silence, without an audience, without a trend to position it within, without validation from any circle of approval.
Four years of writing. A fifth of refinement. Because the work itself had to be true before it could be anything else. And from that came something I could not have arrived at any other way —
A way of seeing beneath surface narratives. A way of recognising patterns. An understanding that people do not need more direction. They need the capacity to see clearly for themselves.
This is why I have always said — You will not find yourself inside a crowd of influence. At some point, you have to step away from the noise.
Not because everything within it is false, but because sustained external input dilutes your ability to hear your own signal.
The spiritual industry is particularly dangerous in this regard because it trades in the language of interiority while functioning as another form of consumption.
It can keep you endlessly adjacent to yourself — close enough to feel like growth, far enough to avoid the encounter that would change you.
The encounter that changes you is not comfortable.
It does not arrive as an expansion. It arrives as a dismantling.
And it cannot be prepared for, packaged, or taught.
It can only be lived.
Where I sit now, I don’t feel disillusioned.
I feel clear.
Grateful, even, that I had the courage to step away when I did — not toward emptiness, but toward something far more grounded.
Direct experience. Pattern recognition. Internal orientation that does not shift with every new voice in the room.
From that place, the work I now share is not something I am trying to convince anyone of. It is something I have lived — written from inside rather than observed from a comfortable distance.
I don’t write to lead a following. I write to hold a lantern.
So that others might pause, look more closely, and begin to question what they are being told alongside what they already know. Because the moment you begin to see clearly, you realise something simple.
Nothing you are looking for is missing. It cannot be found by following someone else’s path.
There is something else I will say clearly.
I have not attended spiritual groups or followed that world for years now. There are only a small number of people — two or three at most — whom I know directly and occasionally support. But even then, it is with distance.
I can witness without being influenced. I remain anchored in what I have lived, experienced, and grown through.
Once that happens, something shifts. The search ends. And the living begins, within and without. Not because I rejected it in principle, but because every Time I returned to it, something in me recoiled.
The language felt familiar. The tone felt polished. But underneath it, I could feel something misaligned. A subtle selling. A certainty that did not quite hold under scrutiny. A performance of depth that did not quite hold.
And I realised I could no longer sit inside that frequency without it affecting me.
So I stepped away. Not in judgment. In self-respect.
Because I had already been taken through something that showed me, very clearly, what real transformation requires.
And it does not come through being told what you want to hear.
It does not come through being guided toward a feeling. It comes through living. Through experience. Through consequence.
Through seeing your own patterns clearly enough that you can no longer avoid them.
There is a saying — You can give someone a fish, or you can teach them how to fish. Most of what I see now gives people the fish.
Language. Concepts. Comfort. Direction. But it keeps them dependent.
What I care about is something else entirely. I am interested in teaching people how to see.
How to recognise pattern. How to sit with their own experience. How to decide for themselves, from what they have actually lived. I no longer anchor myself in narratives or repeated language.
What I trust now is what reveals itself through lived experience.
Patterns. Behaviour. Consequence. Nature. Energy. Intuition.
Not what is said. What is consistent?
That path is quieter. It is slower. And it will never be the most popular because it removes the need for authority outside yourself. But it builds something far more stable.
A foundation that cannot be taken, sold, or promised. A way of moving through life with clarity. Where you are not waiting to be told what is true.
You can see it.
***********
(- I will leave you with the opening poem I wrote at the start of my journey, taken from the opening pages of Fatima’s Alchemy:)
“TIME”
Time to heal long-buried pain, Time to think, to feel again.
Time to reflect, to slowly learn, Time for grief, and then return.
Time to adjust, to deeply connect, Time to really self-inspect.
Time to walk, to breathe the air, Time to meditate with care.
Time to study, to speak, to write, Time to be angry and ignite the fight.
Time to dig deep, peel every layer, Time to find peace, a silent prayer.
Time to see where blocks have grown, Time to face the pain unknown.
Time to heal the victim’s plea, Time to see the “Not Self” in me.
Time to look within, to explore, Time to find what makes me soar.
Time for the heart to finally mend, Time for love to bloom again.
Time to see with grateful eyes, The beauty in life’s quiet skies.
After writing this entire essay piece, I decided to open my book, Fatima’s Alchemy, at random, which I love to do. She speaks as an oracle literally, which is such a magical experience.
This is what I encountered: Story #78, “The Golden Thread.” (Perfectly matching everything I had just written.)
A story about what is not lost, only unseen. About calling back what was always yours, About weaving a life from lived truth, not borrowed language.
It felt precise.
Because this is what I have come to understand: You are not here to be given direction, you are here to recognise what is already in your hands.
And decide what you will weave with it.
Delahrose Roobie Myer
Confidante • Catalyst • Clarifier
Author, Fatima’s Alchemy: A Treasure to Behold
