On Weaponizing Spiritual Practice

If we weaponize spiritual practice—that is, if we use spiritual practice as a shield to protect ourselves against the thoughts and feelings and people and situations that create discomfort and anxiety—we're only ever reinforcing the very problem we were attempting to solve with our spiritual practice.

COMMENTARY

• Spiritual practice is not inherently liberating merely by virtue of being spiritual practice; our practice(s) may be used in order to (attempt to) push away negative feelings/thoughts.

• And this exacerbates our suffering. The more desperately we want our practice to protect us from some form of discomfort, the more sensitive we become to the evidence that we are not yet protected. The person who can’t stand a particular thought/feeling becomes hypersensitive to this very thought/feeling. We train ourselves to detect the very thing we are trying to eliminate; our lives become organized around this threat continued presence. We become particularly skilled at preventing it, managing it, hiding it, etc. And every time it returns, we judge ourselves to have failed: spiritually, emotionally, personally. The practice becomes one more way of fleeing ourselves.

• To be sure, the technique itself isn’t the weapon. The weapon is the approach to discomfort—and it precedes whatever technique we use to (attempt to) destroy it. We do not first encounter a neutral thought or feeling and then decide that it should be eliminated. By the time we reach for the practice (e.g., mantra), the thought/feeling has already shown up as threatening, distracting, shameful, unbearable, or incompatible with who we want/need to be. Our attention, in other words, was already organized around the need to get away from it.

• Of course, these practices offer effective methods for seeking calm, healing, steadiness, etc., but the more desperately we crave relief from some discomfort, the more the craving organizes our attention around its own absence, around the very thing we’re trying to escape—just as the more desperately we want to be rich, the more we notice how poor we feel. Eventually, our practice becomes tethered to the discomfort it was meant to relieve, and even begins to (co-)arise with it. Our discomfort then begins to dictate when/what we practice.

• The ‘solution’ isn’t to adopt a new/purer practice that necessarily bypasses weaponization. Any practice can be recruited by the desire it was meant to expose. Rather, what yoga asks of is to cultivate the capacity to become aware of discomfort before being possessed by it, to notice it as it haunts you, and to notice how it dictates not just your thinking/feeling/actions, but your very perceiving. In particular, one should notice the underlying desire for invulnerability that you’ve inscribed in your spiritual practice—the expectation that it should protect you from ever feeling discomfort ever again.

FURTHER READING

• What is Vairāgya?

• The Indisposible Problem of Desire in Yoga

• Principles of Yoga Practice