The Thin Line Between Escapism and Spiritual Practice
I’ve been having this come up in conversations a lot lately…
There’s a fine, whisper-thin line between spiritual practice as a portal to healing… and spiritual practice as a form of escape.
It’s a humbling realization. That sometimes, even the most beautiful rituals (ie. meditation, breathwork, sound baths, plant medicine journeys, ceremony) can become ways we avoid feeling what’s actually alive in us.
And yet, these same practices can also be our most profound medicine. So how do we tell the difference?
Here’s what I’ve been noticing in myself and in those I guide:
When Spiritual Practice is actually Healing:
It brings us into the body, not away from it.
It helps us meet discomfort with compassion, rather than trying to numb it.
It reminds us that even grief, rage, and doubt are sacred visitors, messengers, not mistakes.
It leaves us feeling more present, more whole, even if it stirs big emotions.
This is the medicine path.
The integration path.
The return-home-to-self path.
When Spiritual Practice becomes Escapism:
It’s a constant chase for the next “high,” with no space to digest what’s been revealed.
It focuses only on love & light while burying the very real pain, grief, or trauma that longs to be witnessed.
It’s a spiritualized avoidance of our human messiness.
It becomes compulsive - something we do not from love, but from fear of what will surface if we don’t.
This is where even sacred tools can become a numbing agent.
Where we seek transcendence instead of transformation.
🌀 A Living Inquiry
It’s not about judging ourselves… it’s about noticing:
Am I doing this practice to come home to myself, or to run from myself?
Do I leave the experience more embodied and real, or more dissociated and ungrounded?
Is this helping me face truth and take aligned action, or simply offering temporary relief?
Sometimes, we need temporary relief. That’s okay, too.
But the invitation is to return. To remember. To root.
Healing isn’t about constant elevation, it’s about deeper presence.
My hope is that we all embrace the deeper presence, face the uncomfortable parts of us that long to be witnessed, and move forward with grace towards it all.
May your path be one of remembrance, not escape.
With reverence,
April
P.S.
If this stirred something in you… if you’ve felt the ache to walk this path of healing with depth and devotion…
this is the exact work we explore inside the Sacred Healing Arts Practitioner Pathway.
This isn’t just a course. It’s a reclamation.
A return to the body. To the Earth. To ancestral ways of knowing.
A remembering of how to truly hold space, for yourself and for others.
We weave somatics, breathwork, energy work, sacred ceremony, and ancestral reverence —
not as an escape, but as a way to root more fully into life.
→ [Applications are open now. Learn more here.]
