Honestly? I don’t blame them. I left academia myself, traded lecture halls for stainless steel and the quiet rhythm of a Nashville kitchen, but I still keep a stack of papers on my counter. I read what researchers say about spiritual deconversion. It’s not a collapse. It’s a shedding. Jung wrote extensively about how the psyche needs to burn away the constructed persona before the real work of individuation can even begin. We call it The Tower in the deck. Not destruction for its own sake, but the crack that finally lets the air in.

I’ve watched so many of us treat spirituality like a costume closet. We grab the chakras, the crystals, the ancient rituals, and we wear them until the seams split. And then, when the weight gets too heavy, we don’t unpack gently. We just log off. I get it. The algorithm doesn’t reward slow composting. It rewards constant harvest. But deconstruction isn’t the end of the road. It’s just the winter fallow. The soil needs to rest before it can hold anything again.

I miss the days when we could talk about letting go without treating it like a scandal. If you’re watching your own practice turn to dust right now, don’t panic. Stir the pot. Let it cool. The moon doesn’t stop cycling just because you stop tracking it. And neither do you. What’s sitting in your sink after the feast? I’m listening.