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I have a confession to make. On occasion I feel burned out with my spiritual practice. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way, but confessing that you’re feeling burned out on your spiritual/magical practice can bring up a whole host of questions and doubts that makes you wonder if you’re doing it wrong or if there is something wrong with you because you’re feeling burned out. Add in a practical magic component and you may find yourself even questioning what the point is of practicing magic, especially when you don’t really seem to be feeling it.
Up until a week ago, I have felt burned out with my magical/spiritual practice. The burnout happened during the summer, when my life blew up because of a variety of both good and bad situations that occurred. Actually, scratch that…it probably started earlier, because of something we’ve all been dealing with in the last year: namely the pandemic. I think in one form or another all of us have been dealing with some form of burnout. My burnout just happened to culminate in August, shortly after I quit my job to go full time writing.
Dealing with that feeling of burnout, amongst other things, has been hard. I’ve had to work through a lot of self-doubt about myself and I’ve had some tough internal work to do as a result. I’ve questioned my spiritual practice and the point of even doing it more than a few times. But this isn’t my first rodeo so when I recognized that I was experiencing spiritual burnout the first thing I did was to recognize that the spiritual burnout was just one issue among others and see it for what it is, which is a natural response to a situation where I'm feeling powerless.
There’s something a lot of magicians won’t admit, but I think all of us experience which is this: Sometimes despite what you know and what you’ve done with magic, you still feel powerless. That’s a hard thing to admit, especially when so much emphasis in the current occult culture seems to be on putting on an image of being an uber powerful magician who can get whatever you want. I’ve always found that image problematic, because its unrealistic. There are times where you will do a magical working and you won’t get the result you want or you’ll smack into a wall with your practice, because suddenly its not so vibrant and you’re questioning why you are doing what you are doing.
If you are dealing with that kind of experience, first please know you aren’t alone. This is a normal part of any spiritual path, though its not addressed as much as it needs to be. In my own experience, such times of burnout have indicated a need to rest, reflect, and also reinvent your spiritual practice. Yet, what I also must note is that such experiences can also be a time where you are planting the seeds of future realizations. Alchemically what we’re dealing with in burnout is an experience of putrefaction, where everything is seemingly rotting and falling apart, but underneath that destruction is the inevitable growth and realizations that come when we cross our personal abysses and discover not only who we are, but also the role our spiritual work plays in that continuing journey.
How you recover from a spiritual burnout involves a recognition that it will take time. It took me half a year to come back from this most recent spiritual burnout. There were days I woke up and questioned my purpose and everything else, because I had hit a wall. And during this half year I did a few things that really helped me get through this time in the chapel perilous.
First, I accepted the burnout and continued doing my daily rituals and practices. While doing these practices I accepted that I might not feel anything or have any results or insights. I just did the work and let go of the need for validation and results. Sometimes I did have some experiences occur and sometimes I didn’t. Regardless I kept doing the work for the sake of doing the work. On the days where I questioned doing the work, I did it and accepted the doubts I felt, while also giving myself the grace to continue doing the work.
Second, I spent a fair amount of time addressing the other issues contributing to the burnout. In my case this involved doing some work around my emotions and how I process and express those feelings. It involved owning up and taking responsibility for choices I made and doing what I could to rectify those choices, while also continuing to work on myself. Doing that work helped a lot in terms of resolving some of my feelings of burnout, because it showed me there was a path forward. It isn’t an easy path, but its the right one to walk.
And I rested, reflected, and took time to do other activities that are meaningful to me. That also helped my spiritual burnout because it gave me a way to feed my soul and take care of myself. We need to remember that our spiritual work should never happen at the expense of our own well being, but rather that we should take care of ourselves and the people important so that we can do the spiritual work in a way that is transformative and meaningful for us.
You will experience spiritual burnout at some point, if you haven’t already. It’s normal to experience. Be gentle with yourself, take care of you and be open to the realizations that will occur as you work through the burnout and doubt you feel. You may find that such experiences are some of the most powerful experiences you have, because of what they reveal to you.
