Hi Reader,
I want to tell you something that might sting for about four seconds and then feel like the biggest relief of your year.
Your spiritual practices aren't working because they're not practices yet.
They're learnings. And learnings look almost exactly like practices from the outside, which is why so many of us are walking around confused, exhausted, and secretly wondering what's wrong with us.
Here's what I mean.
People come to me and they say, I've done the work. And they have. They've been to the retreats. They've done the workshops. They've sat in therapy for years. They've read the books, the good ones, the hard ones, the ones with the cracked spines and the underlining and the notes in the margins. They've paid for the container, they've flown to the place, they've cried in the circle.
From the outside, that is a person taking action. That is a person who loves herself enough to go looking.
And still: stuck. Still waiting for the thing to shift. Still saying I've tried everything.
So I ask one question, and it's never the one they're expecting.
Not what have you learned? Not who did you study with?
But, which of those teachings did you actually do this week?
Not just read, or resonated with, or saved to your phone with a little bookmark. Did. With your hands, in your body, on a day that had nothing special about it.
That's usually where people don’t answer. Because learning about the thing and not doing the thing is like signing up for the gym and not going.
That's called a charitable contribution. It is not a workout.
I say this with enormous love, because I have made this exact donation many times over. I have done all of it and then some. All of it.
The membership is not the muscle. The book is not the practice. The retreat is not the life.
If what you learned isn't integrated into your being, if you don't actually know how to live in that particular way on any random weekday, in your kitchen, when nobody's watching and nothing feels sacred, then all the teachings in the world are useless. The teachings are fine. They're just sitting there, waiting for you to do something with them.
You understood it at the level of intellect but you never practiced it at the level of the body, or felt it in your heart, or incorporated it energetically.
And sometimes, the seeking becomes the avoidance.
The search for the next thing (the next modality, the next teacher, the next silver bullet, the next shiny object) can become its own beautiful, well-funded way of not feeling what you came here to feel.
Let me give you the clearest example I have.
I can sit in a therapist's office and tell the story of the horrendous thing that happened. I can narrate it well. I can get clarity on why I became the way I became, what it did to me, how it shaped every relationship since. That is genuinely, deeply useful. I'm not knocking it.
I can also be on the floor. Wailing. Thumb in my mouth. Rocking back and forth. Actually feeling the grief of it.
And I'll tell you what I believe: if you only ever get the therapy version and never the floor version, you're not going to get a lot of healing. Because the healing isn't only in your head. It isn't only a story you tell well.
It's a feeling you have to go through.
Most spiritual searches get stranded on one aspect of yourself and stay there.
The head. You can explain your patterns better than most people can explain their own job. You know the wound, the attachment style, the placement in your chart, and the year it started. You can watch yourself doing the thing while you're doing it and narrate it accurately in real time. And you do it anyway. Understanding exactly why you're on fire is not the same as putting the fire out.
The emotions. You feel everything, all the time, at maximum volume. You cry about it, you rage about it, you process it out loud with anyone who'll sit still. And then Monday comes and you make the exact same choices you made last Monday. Feeling a thing fully is not the same as changing how you live because of it.
The body. You did the breathwork once and it cracked you open like a walnut. You did the shaking thing at the retreat and sobbed on a stranger's shoulder and drove home certain you were a different woman. You've got the one somatic practice you remember when things get bad enough. Meanwhile the mat stays rolled up in the corner, and your shoulders have been living up by your ears since sometime last spring. A thing your body did once in a room full of candles is not a thing your body knows.
The energy. You had the session. Someone's hands hovered over you, or never touched you at all, and something moved that you still don't have words for. You floated for three days. You told everyone who would listen. Then it wore off the way a good massage wears off, and you were tired again in the same specific way you were tired before. A door opening once is not the same as knowing where the door is.
These are all necessary but alone they are not sufficient. What actually makes a powerful difference in a life is when all of these parts of you get integrated, made coherent with each other, inside the same practice.
And that doesn't happen by theorizing about it. It doesn't happen by talking about it. It doesn't happen from one somatic session or one round of energy work.
It happens by DOING THE DAMN THING. And actually knowing what the thing is, because it’s all of them…but not all at once.
Say you read a book that tells you to write your intention every morning. Brilliant idea. It clarifies you. It keeps you focused. It genuinely makes the thing more likely.
If you don't pick up the pen and the actual piece of paper in the actual morning, it does not work. You only read about it.
Or say you have a serious meditation practice. Twenty minutes, an hour, two hours in silence. Breath, ground, calm. That is a huge piece of what you might need to connect to yourself, your spirit, the divine at large.
And if that is the only thing you're doing to change your life, it will not land the way it would if you meditated and took the action the change requires.
Now flip it. Say you want a new job, so you're firing off resume after resume after resume, running on pure will, getting no interviews, getting more frantic, insisting I am going to make this happen. You will burn out. One thing is commitment, another is grinding yourself to the ground.
Compare that to the version where you take the twenty minutes to meditate, you take the sixty seconds to write today I apply to fifteen jobs that are a genuine fit for me, or today I send the resume that gets the interview, and you understand what's actually going on inside you while you do it.
Same woman. Same resumes. Completely different life.
And no, this doesn't mean your life becomes perfect
Somewhere along the way we picked up the idea that a spiritual life is a frictionless one. That's a lie, and it's an expensive one.
Your life is going to be amazing and it is also going to suck steel balls. Both. Throughout. Forever.
If you are so enlightened that the 3D world doesn't touch you anymore, I'm genuinely worried about you. Go get your pulse checked.
So here's something to think about: You probably already know everything you need to know to have the life you want.
Sit with that for a second. You did the seeking. You collected the teachings. Nothing you spent was wasted, and there is nothing wrong with you.
What's missing isn't more information.
What's missing is the integration. The daily practice. The version where the head, the heart, the body, and the energy all agree with each other and you have somewhere to bring them.
That's the whole reason Bruja School exists.
Not to hand you another teaching to shelve next to the others, but to sit with you while you build the practice, in your body, on your calendar, in your ordinary week, until the thing you already know becomes the way you actually live.
Love yourself up. Have some compassion. The point of the quest is the quest. I know, I know, it's cheesy and annoying and it's also true.
And if you're tired of being a very well-read person who still feels stuck: come practice with me.
Courage, truth, and infinite love,
P.S. Reply and tell me the one teaching you've read five times and never once done. I read every reply.
P. P. S. If your magic keeps not working, you’re probably missing a step, or doing the right things in the wrong order. I'm walking through it Monday, August 24 at 8pm ET / 5pm PT. Just click here to save yourself a seat.
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I don’t believe in magic, but I know that it works!
Magic is not a belief system, it’s a practice that works. Don’t believe me? Come try it out. If it doesn’t work, you lose nothing. But if it does… your dream life is about to begin!
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