Spiritual Fatigue – Why Healing Feels So Tiring

In the early days of my spiritual journey, I remember feeling all over the place! Some days, I would be healing and releasing very intensely, and then, I would crash from exhaustion and sleep long hours for days to come. It turns out that spiritual fatigue is a thing. And I’m here to share how to overcome the tiredness from spiritual healing.

Let’s first address the elephant(s) in the room.

Elephant #1: Healing Causes Overwhelm, Causes Spiritual Fatigue

When I had just started learning about what “healing” is, I would feel so overwhelmed half the time because it was like:
Heal your inner child,
Balance your chakras,
Meditate, pray and chant,
Connect with your soul guides,
Heal your past lives,
On and on and on… the list went.

Not only did I feel like a hamster on a wheel, but I also made others feel that way (I’m so sorry). In my first year running My Spiritual Shenanigans, I launched 4-5 new workshops, published over 65 articles on different topics, and constantly pumped new “healing materials”.

Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE that there are as many avenues for growth as there are people in the world, AND… a big, BIG disclaimer: spiritual window-shopping rarely gets us far.

This whole start-and-stop process takes a toll on our mental health. The overwhelm isn’t just mental, it also tires the body that has been dealing with overwhelm as though a real threat: the fight/flight hormones flooding your body slowly eat away its vitality.

So it makes sense that you’re not truly feeling “healed” – your body is living outside its window of tolerance half the time. I’ll be sharing tips to overcome the overwhelm in upcoming sections.

Elephant #2: Healing Takes More Time Than The Ego-Mind Can Accept

I can’t even count how many times I’ve met frustrated clients who “tried everything and nothing works”.

One problem is that the ego-mind thrives on instant gratification and makes us expect miracles to happen overnight. There are times when we can have profound insights and epiphanies.

But most of the time, healing is about embracing the mud (and sitting in it versus trying to clean it).

It’s sitting with the discomfort of not liking yourself (or others), what you did or didn’t do, how God was unfair, etc – but somehow learning to be with yourself through all of that. Find ways to have compassion for the parts of yourself in your life that caused pain and suffering.

And that’s not gratifying – at least not at first.

Building that capacity to witness yourself spiraling down and not panicking takes time.

If you’re new to the world of self-development, healing can feel more triggering than freeing at first.

All your “shadow” comes into the light and you’re just DIY-ing your way through this mess. Without proper support and an understanding of what’s going on, you might feel like you’re just opening Pandora’s box every time you breathe, with no clue what’s going to come out and even less idea on how to handle it.

So at times, you not only have to convince yourself to try something that is taking so long, you have to somehow figure out what you’re missing (more decision-making fatigue and burnout).

Elephant #3: Healing happens at different degrees, and no one tells you that.

I always wondered why my body didn’t experience an increase in capacity for life; rather that it would feel exhausted and burned out from all the inner work. It took a few years to understand that healing isn’t just about doing the cognitive processing relentlessly in hopes of healing all your trauma in one day.

Healing takes time because the body needs time to integrate and digest this new paradigm we are ascending into. Our inner work is at an energetic level, which is a different “dimension” than the physical body. An analogy here is: think of your energy healing work as air, and your body as ice.

It takes almost nothing for us to move through the air but it’ll take a lot more effort for us to move through the ice. In the same way, what we heal takes the least time in our energy body, a little more time in the mental body, and the most time in our physical body.

Related Read: Your 3 Types of Spiritual Bodies

Let’s take a specific example to explore this some more.

Let’s say you’re working on healing your relationship with your parents. As a part of inner child healing, you notice yourself feeling lighter whenever you think of an old memory, making it seem to you that it no longer has “charge”.

In that old memory, let’s say that your thoughts became “I’m not good enough”. Now at a mental level, it can take a bit longer to rewire our vocabulary. But eventually, you get there with some conscious awareness of your thoughts and practicing positive affirmations. Eventually, even when triggered, your mind begins to say, “I am good enough”.

And now think of your physical body: let’s say that the old memory created a huge physiological impact on your body. Maybe you developed a hormonal problem. So while energetically you might feel better within a single inner child healing session, and mentally you would feel aligned within a few more, the hormones might take longer to come into balance.

Understanding this helps us see the limitations of the physical body, and invites us to be even more mindful of what we’re consuming (food, alcohol, drugs, etc). It’s not from a place of judgment, but from a place of awareness that we see how much time and care our physical body needs to catch up with the metaphysical body.

Elephant #4: There’s always something new “wrong with me”.

Have you noticed that when you’re done healing one thing, somehow miraculously you end up having to work through another thing?

This is where we get stuck in the “rat race” of healing. When we become self-development junkies, we are subconsciously living out of the belief that there’s always a better self in the future.

This means the present self is never good enough. This puts us into a very wounded, masculine-driven approach to healing that doesn’t allow us to just “be”.

My belief at this point is to not just focus on up-leveling your consciousness but to embrace yourself as you are in this moment as a whole. There’s nothing broken that needs to be fixed. We are whole and complete.

Let’s talk about how to grasp this and other ideas in this upcoming section.

Tips To Overcome These Spiritual Fatigue Causing Elephants

First of all, elephants are adorable. I have nothing against them. But if they’re taking up all the metaphorical room in your life, we’ve got a problem. And here are my thoughts for you:

#1 – Stick to 1 or 2 tools until they bore you.

If you’re tired of having too many spiritual modalities in your toolkit, it’s time to purge them.

Stop being overly ritualistic with your spiritual routine if meditating every day, followed by yoga, followed by sage, and followed by crystal baths isn’t working for you!

Healing is not about drowning ourselves with positivity. In fact, we call that toxic positivity if all we do is focus on feeling good. So let’s take the opposite approach instead.

The opposite of feeling overwhelmed is underwhelmed. And how I created that for myself was putting a hard stop on buying any courses or books at all. As 5 months went by and I genuinely started finding material interesting, I noticed that I was no longer on autopilot just jumping to purchase the resource. I’d mindfully evaluate whether it was truly helpful and would almost always end up not buying it.

There are as many tools out there as are our problems. So don’t worry about trying to learn it all – you can’t. But try mastering one or two things. For instance, there are so many types of meditations out there, find one that works for you, versus jumping from one Youtube guide to the next. Be willing to delay gratification, and allow yourself to ground in the idea of “being“, and not needing to “do” more.

If the problem persists after 3-6 months, you can really evaluate the gap and explore a tool that can bridge that gap.

#2 – Stop DIY-ing your healing.

While I don’t believe you need to become dependent on your Care Team (healers, therapists, coaches, doctors, mentors, etc), their support is imperative. You can’t do this all alone because you’re not supposed to. This belief that you’re “alone” comes from, again, wounded masculine energy. It’s a type of hyper-independence that takes a toll on you.

Begin opening yourself up to receiving support. As I write this, know that in the first 1.5 years of “doing it alone”, I was absolutely terrified and self-ostracized because of the belief that nobody will get me. But today, in having 6 people in my core Care Team, I can tell you this: the healing doesn’t stop and intensity doesn’t reduce. Instead, my capacity to heal the bigger stuff increases because now, I know I’m held and being carried through!

Pssst… Would you like me to be on your care team? Drop an application here to explore 1:1 coaching with me.

You can also think about the support you get from your soul guides – your angels, ancestors, spirit animal guides, and more that are supporting you from the “beyond”. Lean into their wisdom by tuning into the synchronicities and signs they send your way in daily life.

Read more: 7 Signs of Divine Intervention

#3 – Understand that rest is a part of healing.

I often say this to those who feel overwhelmed from trying to be so spiritual all the time: stop being so spiritual and go be more human! It’s not about being perfect every second on one day and then collapsing into self-sabotaging behavior the next.

Now that you know healing integrates differently at different levels of your existence, work with that knowledge.

For your physical body: take breaks from stillness. Move – go outdoors and play in the way you feel is aligned. Eat comfort foods that remind you of simpler times. All the while remaining mindful, not wasting food, and not getting carried away in reckless play.

For your mind: put the pen down and take a break from your journal. Let your mind wander as you engage in a kitchen chore. Take naps. Learn to relax in ways that aren’t just sleeping.

For your ego: befriend it, stop trying to fight it. It’s not your enemy – it’s just an overprotective brother that can’t tell when something is good for you, just because new always feels unsafe to him. Learn to embrace the ego. This is my favorite area of focus right now, and I have put together this super accessible, 30-day course to give you the same tools that I use to heal my relationship with my ego-mind.

#4 – Let the past self tell you that you’re enough.

One of my favorite tips: practice writing a letter from your past self to your present self, acknowledging the progress you’ve made.

What would your younger self say, if they could talk to you right now?
Would they be proud of you? Would they give you a hug?
How can bringing your younger self’s awareness into this situation help you let go of over-responsibility?

I’ve often discovered that I blow my own mind away when I see myself from a different lens – it is easier to offer compassion to my imperfections when I can see how hard I’ve been trying. And in that, I begin to cut myself some slack.

You can also reverse this letter-writing concept to forgive your younger self for the misunderstandings they had about what being “enough” means. For instance, maybe a caregiver was really tough about school and only appreciated you when you got good grades. How can you forgive your younger self for holding onto that unhelpful idea that may still be impacting your adult life? Can you tell your younger self that they were good enough regardless of their grades?

#5 – Understand that there’s really nothing to heal.

The fact that we think something is incomplete about us is simply the effect of Soul Amnesia. But the soul doesn’t need to heal anything because it isn’t limited to the body, breath, or mind. Our souls are eternal, infinite, and beyond any constructs of space and time.

It can be really hard to grasp at first which is why I put together a super detailed workshop about this, here. It blends science, spirituality, and psychology to help drive this point home.

By practicing tuning into your wholeness, you may feel lifted from the endless burden of self-development.

Concluding Thoughts

As the saying goes, when you want to heal fast, slow down!

Spiritual fatigue is often a sign that we are disconnected from the body’s needs and are operating from a head-heavy perspective. So my invitation through all of the insights above is to ask you to slow down and find what your body really needs. You might be amazed how little our bodies need when we can silence the noise.

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