When “Spirituality” Becomes an Escape: Returning to Embodied, Earth-Based Wisdom

by Angela Kyllo

Spirituality is meant to bring us home to ourselves — not pull us further away. But in the last decade, a new trend has emerged in the wellness world, where spiritual practices are being used not for healing, but for avoiding, escaping, or disconnecting from the very experiences that need tending.

It’s the rise of spiritual ego, toxic positivity, and bypassing — and it’s quietly harming people who are genuinely searching for healing.

This isn’t about shaming anyone.

This is about bringing truth back into a conversation that desperately needs grounding.

The Shadow Side of the “New Age” Movement

Many of us have witnessed — or participated in patterns such as:

• Using “high vibes only” to avoid grief, anger, or conflict

• Blaming people’s hardships on past lives, karma, or vibration

• Over-identifying with cosmic labels instead of the human experience

• Chasing activation after activation without ever integrating

• Claiming spiritual superiority for being “more awake”

• Escaping the 3D world and rejecting money, structure, or responsibility

These patterns can look enlightened. They can sound profound. They can even feel like growth. But in reality? They’re often the nervous system in freeze, wrapped in spiritual language. And they keep people disconnected from the very thing healing depends on: being in your body. 

Why Embodiment Is the Missing Piece

Anodea Judith — author of Western Body, Eastern Mind — speaks powerfully about this.

She teaches that true spiritual awakening is not about transcending the body; it’s about integrating the body, the psyche, and the spirit.

Her work reminds us:

• Shakti rises from the root up

• Kundalini awakening requires emotional, physical, and psychological readiness

• Higher consciousness cannot stabilize without grounding

• Growth happens through the chakras as a system, not through bypassing the lower ones

We are not meant to “escape” the 3D.

We are meant to master it — through presence, embodiment, and responsibility.

Why We Must Come Back Down to Earth

When spirituality becomes an escape from humanness, we lose access to:

• intuition

• discernment

• boundaries

• emotional intelligence

• personal agency

• connection

• healing

The more we reject the body, the more we reinforce the belief that our human experience is the problem. But the body is not the barrier — it is the bridge.

Everything is connected:

• the nervous system

• the subconscious mind

• ancestral patterns

• past experiences

• spirit and intuition

• community and relationship

• root, heart, crown, and breath

Healing is not “just” spiritual. It is also physical, emotional, relational, and earth-based. Spirituality without embodiment becomes dissociation. Embodiment without spirituality becomes stagnation. Integration is where true evolution happens.

Real Awakening Is Humble, Grounded, and Responsible

When spiritual growth is real, it looks like:

• owning your patterns instead of outsourcing them to karma

• feeling your feelings instead of meditating them away

• grounding before channeling

• allowing your body to speak

• doing shadow work

• taking care of the earth body you live in

• balancing intuition with action

• healing in community, not isolation

This is not the glamorous part of the journey. This is the human part. And this is where transformation becomes possible. A Call Back to the Body, the Earth, and the Truth. This blog is not written to call people out — it’s written to call us back in.

Back into integrity.

Back into embodiment.

Back into presence.

Back into the grounded wisdom that lives in the spine, the breath, the bones, the belly, the earth.

Not bypassing.

Not escaping.

Not ascending away from ourselves.

But returning.

Arriving.

Rooting.

Integrating.

This is how we heal.

This is how we grow.

This is how we become whole.

From my Heart to your Heart

-A.