Could you be using your spirituality to escape from life, just like people use alcohol and drugs? It’s definitely possible to abuse spirituality and this article will help you to diagnose it.

Can you relate to any of the following?

You don’t like paying attention to real-world matters (like finances) – you’d rather be working on your personal or spiritual development.

You sometimes use your spirituality as a form of escapism. For example, you learn about the law of attraction and feel great about all the possibilities and the potential. But you fail to create anything tangible from it (so you exist perpetually in the realm of ideas rather than action.)

You are not comfortable here on Earth and the world seems very harsh to you.

You prefer to hang around with people who are very spiritual, like you and you avoid having friends who don’t share your world view.

If you could, you’d happily erase from your existence some aspects of physical life – like having to eat, wash and support yourself.

You spend a lot of time thinking about how to create your utopian vision for life here on Earth and you find it difficult accept the state of things here on Earth.

You have a strong tendency to be reclusive and you spend a lot of time in introspection.

You like meditating for hours on end.

You get frustrated at how slow everything moves in the physical plane and the effort it takes to make things happen.

Your sense of purpose and spiritual mission is at the forefront of your life and you think you’re a lightworker.

You are very empathic/intuitive and pick up negative ‘stuff’ from other people all the time (one more good reason for being reclusive!)

How did you do? If you could relate to more than six or seven statements (most importantly – the first five), I’d venture to say that your strong sense of spirituality may be stopping you from living your life fully.

What does it mean when you’re out of balance with your spirituality?

It means that you live for (and enjoy) spiritual experiences more than you enjoy human experiences. In terms of your auric field/energy body, your upper chakras will be very open, with a lot of energy running through them while your lower chakras are neglected and small.

In case you don’t know what I mean by over-developed upper chakras and under-developed lower chakras, here’s a quick guide to the chakra system:

Chakras are energy centres in the human energy body. (The energy body is a reflection of the physical body and our life here on Earth.) Much of the information in your energy body is organized and centred at these chakras, which are located in certain places in your body. Here is some information on each chakra:

Human Chakra

Root chakra (red) – governs survival, safety, home, money, family, connection to reality. (Located at the perineum.)

Sacral chakra (orange) – governs sexuality, emotions, sensuality, vitality, creativity. (Located just below the belly button.)

Solar plexus chakra (yellow) – governs personal power, self-control, getting things done. (Located just above the belly button.)

Heart chakra (green) – governs self-love, self-care, self-acceptance, self-worth. (Located over the breastbone.)

Throat chakra (blue) – governs self-expression and communication; speaking and listening. (Located at the throat.)

Third eye chakra (lilac) – Intuition and truth. (Located between the eyebrows.)

Crown chakra (white) – Connection to Spirit and your Higher Self. (Located just above the head.)

Note that those aspects of life which are down-to-earth, human, basic, and grounded are all governed by the lower chakras (the root, sacral, and solar plexus chakras):

Money (root/sacral chakra) Connection to (sometimes) cold and harsh reality (root chakra) Sensuality/sexuality (sacral chakra) Sense of belonging, family and community (root chakra) Enjoyment, laughter and fun (sacral chakra) Making things happen in the real world (solar plexus) Nutrition and physical nourishment (root chakra) Routines and habits (root chakra)

On the other hand, the upper chakras (crown, third-eye and throat chakras) govern aspects of life such as:

Daydreaming (third eye chakra) Mental activity and intellectualizing Connecting with God, Spirit, the Angels, Spirit Guides (crown chakra/third eye) Psychic experiences such as clairvoyance or clairaudience Giving to, caring for and serving others (heart chakra) Spiritual teaching (throat chakra) Writing and speaking (throat chakra) Introspection and solitude Healing

When you focus a great deal (for a prolonged period) on the activities which are governed by the upper chakras (like psychic development and introspection), it will shift your focus and energy away from the lower chakras (which govern your connection to reality and the real world).

When you focus a great deal (for a prolonged period) on the activities which are governed by the upper chakras (like psychic development and introspection), it will shift your focus and energy away from the lower chakras (which govern your connection to reality and the real world). This can result in the symptoms mentioned at the beginning of this article.

What kind of person gets out of balance with their spirituality?

Some people who are very drawn to spirituality can find it difficult to embrace the human experience fully. In fact, some spiritual people don’t like being human and the human condition is frustrating to them.

Being human can feel pretty bad at first to a huge, expansive spirit who is used to whizzing around in the ether. (Maybe that is why babies scream so much when they are born!) It feels very confining to suddenly find yourself in a physical body. Unlike being in the ether (where things manifest as quickly as you think of them), things don’t happen as quickly as you want, and you have to make an effort here. You are encumbered by a body which is your vessel for experiencing human life. And your body needs fuel otherwise you can’t function, so you are slowed down by the demands of your body from birth. In addition, you are slowed down by that pesky issue of money and physical resources.

Modern-Day Renunciates

If you were incarnated five hundred years ago and mostly concerned with the activities listed above which stimulate the upper chakras (like connecting with spirit, healing and spiritual service) you would probably have chosen a religious or spiritual path of service in that lifetime. You’d be a monk or a nun of some description. You’d be able to deliberately forget about the physical aspects of your life – like money and feeding yourself – because your religious order would take care of them for you. In fact, there would be no negative, real-world consequences to neglecting your physical life because the support system would be in place to pick up the slack from you neglecting it.

I believe that if you identify as a lightworker and feel a strong sense of spiritual mission in this lifetime, you are among those souls who HAVE incarnated countless times in a lifetime of spiritual service – such as a nun, monk, oracle, druid or spiritual teacher (to give a few examples).

In the end, what we are all working towards is a balance between the spiritual and the physical. We came here to be incarnated and to enjoy the physical plane as fully as we can, while keeping a connection to spirit.

Conclusions

Spirituality should not consume your life to the detriment of the human aspects, unless you choose the life of a renunciate, where your physical needs are taken care of by others. You can have a strong calling for spiritual service and live a full, rich life which honours all of the facets of being human. That means accepting and enjoying all the human, physical functions too.

How I realized that I was out of balance

The first time I had my palm read a few years ago, the reader told me I was ‘barely here’. I didn’t know what he meant straight away. To clarify, he told me that I didn’t like earthly life very much. I was here reluctantly, and wasn’t willing to engage with all aspects of life.

I would have made a really great nun because I started going to church around the age of ten/eleven on my own – (I felt called to go.) Since the age of 13, I was having (and seeking) spiritual and psychic experiences. (You can read more about my early experiences here.)

In my late teens, I was able to tap into my spirit (or higher self) to such an extent that I’d feel amazingly expansive, high and able to take on the world. Connecting to spirit brought feelings of bliss, ecstasy and connection with everything. I had the ability to see the beauty and spirit in everything. When I wasn’t happy in my life, I’d escape into this world. It was like putting on a pair of tinted, rose-coloured spectacles.

This was an enchanting but also very isolating path for a teenage girl to take. I didn’t know anyone besides my Grandmother who knew about connecting to spirit and getting high on that (and we’re not talking the liquor kind either!) It felt like no-one really could relate to me.

In addition, at the time, life got a little bit harsher. Some traumatic things happened in my family that I wanted to escape from, and I escaped them by sleeping for up to 16 hours at a time when I could. When I turned 17, I escaped them by running away and travelling and that is a pattern that I was still in, eight years later. When I was 19, my family moved to New Zealand (without me) and as weird as it may sound, I was glad. There was no more drama in my family, plus I had my spirit guides and my connection to spirit and whatever bad stuff happened to me, I felt I would be OK because of that.

But on the negative side, I was SO spiritually focused and needed the spiritual support so much, that I became dizzy, impractical, absent. I was away with the fairies and in another realm, with my upper chakras wide open and my lower chakras (my emotional and human life) completely neglected. I did the bare minimum to keep my human, physical life ticking along.

Losing my Roots

To make matters worse, when my parents moved away, it removed a solid foundation from my life because I lost my family overnight and I didn’t see them for a long time. That further weakened my connection to the Earth plane, and sense of belonging somewhere. A couple of years later, I became involved in healing and psychic work, worked from home and bam – some time last year I realized I had become a nun, but without the support of a religious order. I must have seemed reclusive, fragile and a bit otherworldly because I was so ungrounded.

Since then I have been working on opening up my lower chakras and agreeing to fully engage with life – all aspects of it. But I had to suffer a lot emotionally before I realized that was necessary. The suffering I went through was perhaps necessary for me to be sufficiently motivated to finally break an old vow of spiritual service to the exclusion of everything else.

Symptom of Imbalance #1: You feel lightheaded and spacey in your body.

Suggestion: Check in with your eating habits.

Your eating habits can either help tether you to the earth plane or they can destabilize and unground you.

Both veganism and raw veganism I find to be ungrounding for me, personally. Often people ask during spirit guide coaching if a raw or high raw vegan diet is right for them at this time and the answer is usually something along the lines of ‘no, not unless you are willing to suffer some imbalance.’ Being on that kind of diet as a psychic or very spiritual person requires a very strong foundation and a good connection to reality. If you don’t have that, it will unbalance you.

I bring this issue up because many people do become drawn to a really pure and light diet when they begin to get interested in spirituality or psychic development. When you open your upper chakras, you might be drawn to giving up meat (the meat-eating students on my spirit guides coaching course often tell me that they notice an aversion to meat as the weeks go by).

Then as people become even more sensitive, they may be drawn to giving up fish. Then some people take it one step further and give up animal products. Some then feel drawn to giving up cooked food and become raw vegans. This is a natural (but rather extreme) progression and one I went through about 18 months ago. First, I was vegetarian, then vegan for a while, then I tried raw veganism for 2-3 weeks, twice. Now I have come full circle and I’m eating fish and chicken again. Some people have arguments against eating meat but this is the most grounding diet for me personally.

Other ways to unground yourself with your diet include…

Not eating enough and not eating regularly. Eating three good meals daily and at regular intervals is more grounding than eating small snacks here and there because it sends your energy out of your head and into your digestive system on a regular basis. If you miss meals regularly or if you fast, it isn’t good for the lower chakras – or put in a non-jargon way, it’s bad for you as a human being who is trying to stay tethered to the Earth plane. Regular eating connects us to the earth.

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Symptom of Imbalance #2: You neglect your body habitually and you don’t care about your personal appearance

Another Suggestion: Pay more attention to your body

A great way to take your focus away from your upper chakras and put it on your lower chakras is to pamper your body (on an ongoing basis) and really pay it some attention.

Ways to do this include: spending more time and money on grooming – getting a new haircut, painting your nails; getting a pedicure or manicure; updating your wardrobe (throwing out all your old clothes that you no longer wear and getting some new ones that you love wearing and which make you feel great). Investing money and energy on your appearance and the way you feel in your body (instead of investing it in psychic development, spiritual growth or some such thing) will help to move energy out of your upper chakras. If you’re very out of balance, it might be a good idea to set aside some of your budget each month especially to celebrate and take care of your physicality and beauty.

I know that this may seem not a very appealing task, especially if it’s the middle of winter and you have no money but those are the times when you really need to go shopping (even if it’s to the thrift/charity shop). I myself have been guilty of wearing jogging bottoms to work and brown and black all the time (especially in the winter and seeing as I work from home). But it’s great for your sacral chakra if you can dress up in something beautiful and colourful more often, and allow yourself to wear nice things even if you’re not leaving the house.

You have probably seen those TV shows where they take a drab, unhappy-looking person and turn them into someone who looks and feels ten times better because of their haircut and the way they dress. That’s the power of spending time and money on your appearance – it gives yourself and others the message ‘I honour, love and celebrate my physical aspect.’ And that’s important if you are out of balance with spirituality.

Another way to honour your physicality is to exercise regularly – walking is OK but something that raises your heart rate on a regular basis is even better. I walk a couple of miles per day but presently I don’t have activities such as cardio which raise my heart rate. I have done in the past, though and I have noticed the difference it makes to feeling physically present.

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Symptom of Imbalance #3: you spend loads of time working on your beliefs, goals and plans but you rarely create real change in your life or accomplish anything

Suggestion: Get out of your head and just take the next obvious step in front of you.

When you have a lot of energy in your upper chakras, you may need to get something done, but you can be stuck in planning, visualizing, dreaming, theorizing, tying yourself up in knots and going nowhere fast with that. At those times, you will need to turn your brain and mind’s eye off and just ask yourself – what is the next step that I could take now to move towards what I want (even if it is really a baby step). And take it. That takes you straight out of the realm of ideas and into the realm of action.

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Symptom of Imbalance #4: The world seems like a very harsh and tragic place all the time

Suggestion: Stop taking everything so seriously and go and have some fun (stimulates the sacral chakra)

Spiritual, empathic people can feel people’s plight and are often thinking about how to save the world. From there it’s not an easy transition to having fun and seeing the light side of life, yet you need that too as a human being. Remember that life is not just a school and your purpose isn’t to save the world from itself. Life is also a fun playground, so switch off from your spiritual mission and make sure you do something that really tickles you regularly. This isn’t about going for a walk on your own or something dull like that. I mean real fun. Go and see a stand-up comedy act, see a friend who makes you laugh really hard, go dancing, etc. Connect with the fun and playful you. Find something that you can do regularly in your week to fill this need for fun and playing.

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Symptom of Imbalance #5: You are neglecting the practical side of your life

Suggestion: Focus attention on your finances and physical survival (stimulates the root chakra)

Paperwork Overload Checking your bank balance every day is good because it connects you to your financial reality. Making a budget is very grounding because it reins your energy in and makes you aware of your present limitations.

Cleaning, organizing and tidying is especially good for grounding, as is attending to errands and all those little jobs you have been meaning to do for a while. Preparing food, cooking and baking are all very grounding too. All those aspects of physical life are what you need to attend to, in order to stay grounded.

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FINALLY…

All this talk of cooking, baking and budgeting is all helpful stuff to some degree, but let’s get to the heart of the issue.

If you are out of balance with your spirituality, you might be running away from something or someone. Imbalanced spirituality can become a form of escapism.

What are you trying to escape from?

It could be a past situation that is too difficult to address and process in a normal, human, emotional way, so you spiritualize it. It could be someone who hurt you.

Here’s a good way of knowing what you could be escaping from:

What is the thing you still cry about for seemingly no reason? (especially when you’re ill or feeling down)

What do you dislike about your life that you want to change?

At some point, we all have wounds that make us want to stay in bed and hide away from the world. There are very few people who reach a certain age and have no wounds at all. Find out what yours are and address them in an emotional way. We can resolve things on the level of spirit, but we must bring the healing down into the emotional and physical plane for anything to change. Sometimes action needs to be taken to put them to bed.

If you feel your spiritual addiction is connected to something traumatic that happened in the past (or to someone else), you might want to think about booking a cord cutting session. I am passionate about this technique because it is the one that has helped me most with becoming more grounded.

What about you? What keeps you from engaging fully with life?

Spiritual love is the awareness that we are all ONE and that the nature of Source is love. Therefore we can love anyone and everyone as they are a reflection of us and the ONE/Source/God. This is a love characterized by detachment (stories, drama) and the absence of lower emotions. This is where we can surrender and love what IS and see the perfection in everything including the so called atrocities of humanity. Spiritual love comes from our connection with Source through the embodiment of our Higher Self.Human love (for intimate relationships) on the other hand is characterized by the attraction of polar opposites, a magnetism. It is based on separation with the underlying desire to become ONE through the act of love. This energy dynamic is what spawns feelings of passion, sensuality and the desire for connection. This love is largely based on emotions and attachment. We can experience anger and strong reactions of defense and protection if someone threatens the safety of our beloved, loving what is can sometimes become a challenge.

When we are in a relationship we must balance how we experience and express these two types of love. If we are always in a state of spiritual love we would fail to emotionally connect with our partners and enjoy a healthy attachment. We would appear to distant, too holy and inhuman, often avoiding feelings of pain and sadness. On the other hand if we are full-on in a state of human love then we can get too emotional and over experience pain, drama, suffering and attachment. People who are constantly having strong emotional and mental re-actions have not cultivated enough the skill of detachment that comes with spiritual love and self-mastery.

Balance these aspects of yourself and you will enjoy a very fulfilling, rich and empowering relationship. And if you are constantly struggling when it comes to relationships then it might be very wise to cut all cords of attachments between you and other people.