Beyond the Temples

Spiritual Dogma, Performance, and the Return to What’s Real

We thought we were walking away from control.

When we left religion, or the systems we had grown up in, we told ourselves we were free. We found breathwork, the moon, movement, ceremony. We said we had returned to the wild.

But something old came with us.

The need to perform. To be good. To belong. To have the right language, the right body, the right spiritual hygiene. We did not burn the temple. We just changed the costume.

And for many of us, especially those of us who work with the body, the sacred, or the mythic, there has been a quiet knowing: that we’re still tangled in something we didn’t mean to carry.

I have been sitting with this. Watching how even the language of “masculine” and “feminine” can become a new doctrine. How wildness becomes another product. How sacredness becomes another mask.

At first, those words, masculine and feminine, felt like a homecoming. They gave shape to energies I’d felt but couldn’t name. They gave me a map. But over time, I began to see how quickly a map becomes a border. How naming becomes limiting. How archetypes become expectations.

I kept hearing about sacred union, as if our deepest purpose is to perfect the dance between the masculine and feminine within us. But what if that’s still a performance? Still a shape we squeeze ourselves into? What if we are not here to marry two divine polarities at all, but to remember the place that existed before we split in two?

I walk to the old oak tree near my home, and it never calls itself masculine. I do that. I bring that label to it, projecting what I’ve been taught. But the oak just stands. Rooted. Listening. Breathing. It doesn’t need a polarity to be powerful. It doesn’t need a label to be sacred.

What happens when we stop performing spirituality, stop reaching for symbols, archetypes, and curated ritual and come back to the breath, the dirt, the bone-deep truth of the land and the body?

That’s the work I find myself in now.

Not spiritual. Just honest. Just animal.

The Illusion of Spiritual Freedom

We tell ourselves we are free.

We left the church. The doctrine. The father figure in the sky. We stepped away from institutions and moved into moon circles, drum journeys, sacred rage rituals, archetype work. We changed our clothes, our language, our practices. But the deeper question is: did we actually unlearn the structures we were raised in, or just repackage them in softer tones?

Because what I have seen, and what I have done, too, is replace external rules with internal ones that are just as rigid. I have judged myself for not being “open” enough, “wild” enough, “feminine” enough. I’ve curated my spiritual self the way others curate their image on Instagram, except instead of perfection, I was chasing authenticity as an aesthetic.

And what I’m learning is this: spiritual freedom is not found in rejecting dogma; it’s found in noticing when we are recreated it.

We make performance out of everything. We turn truth into a template. And suddenly, wildness isn’t something we feel, it is something we perform. Sacredness isn’t something we experience, it’s something we signal.

We speak in certain tones. We dress the part. We invoke the archetypes. We burn the herbs. And maybe, sometimes, it’s real. But just as often, it’s a posture. A way to be seen as someone who “gets it.”

And I do not say this with judgment, I say it with love, and weariness. Because I have done it, and I have watched it happen all around me. We are aching to be whole, and in that ache, we reach for identities and rituals that promise transcendence. But too often, they pull us further from our bodies, our land, our truth.

This is not a call to abandon the sacred. It’s a call to question:

- Who are we when we stop performing sacredness?
- What does wildness feel like when it isn’t for anyone else to see?
- What happens when we stop trying to be spiritual, and just start listening?

So I want to ask you, not as a provocation, but as an invitation:

- How do you walk on the land when no one is watching?
- How do you speak to the wind when it does not need to hear anything wise?
- What do your hands do when they’re not trying to be holy?
- Can you let yourself move without it being medicine?
- Can you still feel wonder without needing it to be sacred?

Can you meet yourself, not as “the wild one,” “the mystic,” or “the conscious one”, but just as breath and bone and instinct? Can you let that be enough?

The Fire That Stripped Me Bare

A few years ago, I went on a vision quest.

Before I entered the fast, I made an effigy of myself. I built it with my hands, binding together herbs, crystals, and fragments of meaning. Each object represented something I had been told I was. Someone I had tried to become.

Inside the bundle, I tucked a slip of paper with words I had written in my own ink, everything I was willing to let go of in order to have the biggest conversation of my life.

I had worked long and deep with my mentor before this tracking sensations in my body, following threads, peeling back layers. And when the time came to step into the threshold, I walked toward it with tears stinging my eyes. I knew what I was doing.

In the opening ceremony, I offered that effigy to the fire. Not as theatre. Not as symbolism. But as a clear, bone-deep intention to burn away everything that was not truly me.

Sitting with yourself, truly sitting, hour after hour, day after day, is some of the hardest work you can do. There is no distraction from the internal voice. And it doesn’t always speak with kindness.

What surprised me was not how painful the silence was, but what I began to grieve. Not just what I had let go of because it was not real, but what I had once believed was real. Parts of me I had aspired to. Identities I had carefully crafted. Roles I had spent years performing. They were not false. They were just no longer true. And I knew they would keep falling away.

And they have.

I can move forward now because I sit in the place of trust. Because I was clear. Because I knew why I was releasing what I did. because in sat in my truth. The fire did not purify me. It revealed me.

One of the biggest truths that has emerged is this, what is performative must go. How I move through the world, how I show up, how I speak I am no longer interested in anything that is not true to my core.

Not real in appearance. Real in origin.

What the Oak Knows

Sometimes, when I do not know what is true, I go and sit by the oak.

I do not ask it to teach me anything. I do not ask for signs or insight or clarity. I just sit. And breathe. And remember how to be.

The oak does not need to perform its strength. It does not call itself masculine or feminine. It does not try to be sacred. It doesn’t explain.

It just lives. It just belongs.

When We Forget to Live

When we spend our lives performing sacredness, curating meaning, and trying to “do it right,” we forget to live.

We are still separate, from the moment, from the land, from each other.
We are chasing transcendence while missing the taste of strawberries.
We are searching for signs while the wind is singing into our skin.
We are seeking purpose while ignoring pleasure.
We forget that the body was never meant to be a symbol. It was meant to be felt.

I do not want to perform this life. I want to live it.

And when I die, I want my body to be full, not of purity or perfection or spiritual achievement, but of joy, of love, of the raw beauty of being here.

I want my bones to remember rivers.
I want my lungs to have sung.
I want my hands to have touched the earth and been held.
I want to have known the truth of connection, not the concept, but the contact.

And if I get eighty summers, I want the rest of them to be rooted in truth, love, and the ordinary holiness of this world.

No more costumes. No more codes. Just living. Just here.

Author’s Note

This piece is part of an ongoing thread in my work: a returning to what is felt, raw, and true beneath the performance of “wildness” or “spirituality.” It was written in conversation with my facilitation of Animal Body , a land-based practice rooted in the body that seeks to undo the layers between us and our instinctual knowing.

What I share here is not a critique from outside spiritual spaces, I have walked those paths. I have burned those masks. This is a homecoming, not a rejection. A remembering of the part of us that never needed to be curated, only contacted.

If you feel the pull to return to your own animal knowing, you can read more about Animal Body and upcoming offerings at https://www.weavingwonderment.com.