Numbness
Perhaps what we call a Spiritual Crisis is actually a different kind of crisis
I find myself wondering lately whether we have misdiagnosed the ache at the centre of modern life.
I hear more and more people speaking about a spiritual crisis, a crisis of meaning, or a lack of purpose. My social media feeds are full of beautiful offerings promising to bring us back to ourselves. Ceremonies, initiations, transmissions, activations, healings, teachings, retreats and pathways into deeper consciousness.
And I understand the hunger, that longing to find something larger than ourselves. The desire to feel chosen by life somehow. To be spoken to by the land, by spirit, by the unseen. To receive the message, find the teacher, discover the practice that finally unlocks the door.
Yet beneath all of these conversations, I keep returning to a quieter question.
What if what we call a spiritual crisis is actually a crisis of numbness?
Not because people have become less spiritual or because the sacred has disappeared. But because somewhere along the way many of us have become disconnected from our capacity to be touched by life itself.
And perhaps this is not entirely accidental. There are many benefits to keeping a culture numb. A numb person consumes more than they participate, they seek solutions rather than relationships and become perpetual seekers of the next thing that promises relief.
The next purchase, the next course, the next identity, the next spiritual experience, the next version of themselves. All the while the ordinary miracle of being alive waits patiently outside the door.
I do not mean numbness as an insult. I mean the subtle hardening that occurs when a body has spent years protecting itself from grief, heartbreak, uncertainty, disappointment, overwhelm and loss.
The way we learn to keep life at arm’s length and so we stop fully tasting, fully feeling, fully entering. We become spectators of existence rather than participants within it.
I notice this in myself sometimes. The moments when I reach for my phone to scroll through the endless chatter, rather than the feeling beneath the feeling or when I seek another explanation rather than allowing myself to encounter the rawness of not knowing.
Those moments when life feels distant, as though I am standing behind glass watching it happen somewhere else. And my curiosity is how much of modern life quietly encourages this condition.
Take your instagram feed for example - We consume stories rather than living them. We watch other people cook, dance, travel, make, love, grieve, and create. We are surrounded by representations of life whilst often feeling increasingly separated from direct experience itself.
Here’s the thing, Our ancestors did not watch life, they entered it. They carried water from wells, made the objects they prayed with, buried their dead with their own hand, gathered food, tended fires. They watched the seasons not as aesthetic backdrops but as forces upon which survival depended.
Life was not observed. It was inhabited.
Perhaps this is why so many people feel a hunger they struggle to name. That kind of hunger that no amount of information seems able to satisfy and then often gets interpreted as a need for more healing, more spirituality, more self-development, more answers.
Yet I am increasingly unconvinced that answers are what most people are seeking rather if what we all searching for is contact.
The scent of rain arriving on dry earth, the sound of a blackbird singing before dawn, cold river water against the skin. The roughness of bark beneath the hand, the smell of deer hide drying in the workshop.
The moment a stag steps quietly from the treeline and for a second the world feels impossibly alive.
Not because these moments are teaching us anything but because they are signs that interrupt numbness. They return us to participation and perhaps this is where Eros enters the conversation.
Not the modern understanding of Eros, which has become almost entirely synonymous with sexuality, but the older understanding.
The ancient Greeks knew Eros as a primordial force, one of the first powers to emerge from Chaos itself. Before there were lovers, there was Eros. Before romance, before seduction, before intimacy between humans, there was the force that drew creation into relationship.
Life was reaching towards life, that impulse that moves seeds towards sunlight and roots towards water.
The impulse that draws birds into song and forests into spring, that impulse that causes us to create, to love, to grieve, to belong.
Somewhere along the way we reduced Eros to sexuality. And in doing so, perhaps we lost sight of the fact that the erotic was never simply about sex. The erotic is our capacity to be moved, to be reached and be touched, consumed by existence.
This is why I find myself returning again and again to the myth of Persephone. When Persephone descends into the underworld, the earth becomes barren. Demeter’s grief spreads through the land. The world withdraws from itself and when Persephone returns, spring returns with her.
Life begins moving towards life again.
The story is often told as a myth of seasons, but perhaps it is also a myth about relationship. It’s about what happens when connection is severed and what happens when aliveness retreats. I am curious if this is what so many of us are experiencing now. Not the complete absence of life, but a partial withdrawal from it, like a subtle exile from participation.
Perhaps the opposite of the erotic is not celibacy. Perhaps the opposite of the erotic is numbness. And perhaps what so many people are longing for is not more spirituality at all. Perhaps what they are long for is aliveness.
A deeper intimacy with being here, With this body, or the fleeting moment. With this astonishing, heartbreaking, beautiful experience of being alive.
Perhaps the sacred has never left us.
Perhaps it is waiting patiently in the rain on a fern, in birdsong, in grief, in wonder, in deer tracks, in river water, in touch, in breath, in beauty.
Waiting for us to become reachable again
