You Were Never Meant to Carry This Alone

There is a quiet moment many spiritually serious people eventually reach.

It usually comes after years of sincere effort—reading, praying, seeking, experimenting, trying to live well. Nothing is necessarily “wrong.” You feel grateful for what you’ve learned. That is normal and natural. And yet, somewhere beneath the surface, something begins to ache.

Not for more insight.
Not for another method.
But for something that can actually hold the life you’re trying to live.

Many of us have learned to carry our spiritual lives privately. We assemble them from books, podcasts, conversations, solitary prayer, occasional retreats. We take responsibility for our own growth, our own healing, our own discernment. This can look mature and independent. It can even feel empowering—at first.

But over time, a subtle fatigue sets in.

Because the soul was never meant to bear the full weight of its formation alone.

The quiet loneliness of modern spirituality

One of the unspoken costs of modern spirituality is the isolation that some people come to feel over time.

Even in groups or communities that are warm, welcoming, and intellectually rich, spiritual life is often treated as something internal—a private relationship with meaning, truth, or the Divine that happens largely inside one’s own head and heart. We may share experiences, insights, or language, but the actual work of formation is still assumed to be individual.

You practice.
You integrate.
You figure out what resonates.
You decide what to keep and what to discard.

And slowly, without realizing it, the entire spiritual life becomes something you must manage.

You have not failed. The issue is that the structure itself quietly assumes that wisdom is accumulated rather than received, and that growth is primarily a matter of insight rather than participation.

Eventually, this becomes exhausting.

Formation is not self-assembly

There is an older understanding of the spiritual life that begins from a very different place.

It assumes that human beings are not primarily shaped by ideas, but by patterns. We learn and grow through repetition, not by effort alone, but by shared life. We are, at our core community based. We learn best amongst others.

In this view, formation is not something you engineer for yourself. It is something you enter into—something that slowly works on you, often beneath your awareness, through rhythm, presence, and practice held in common.

This doesn’t remove agency or discernment. But it does remove the burden of having to constantly curate your own spiritual architecture. Today especially there are so many avenues to spiritual growth. Online websites offering classes, teachers and gurus offering courses, books, lessons, emails, quick bites of knowledge for you to eat quickly and swallow and then they (and you) move on. You do all of the heavy lifting over and over again with each new encounter, and in the end you are left on your own to hold the ever growing, exploding bag of “stuff” that was supposed to lighten your load, not overwhelm you.

You are not asked to carry everything.
You are invited to belong to something that carries you.

Why this matters more than we admit

Many people today are spiritually insightful but inwardly unstable—not because they lack sincerity, but because they lack a container strong enough to support the depth they’re either reaching for, or already touching.

Insight without formation can fragment us.
Experience without rhythm can unground us.
Seeking without belonging can quietly hollow us out.

When there is no shared structure to receive what we encounter—no communal memory, no embodied rhythm, no way of practicing together—everything must be processed alone. Over time, this creates anxiety, self-doubt, and a subtle pressure to keep reinventing oneself spiritually.

What often looks like “freedom” is actually loneliness.

And what many are longing for—without yet having language for it—is not authority, answers, or certainty, but stability. A way of life that is strong enough to hold both faith and doubt, devotion and dryness, joy and grief, without requiring constant reinvention.

A different kind of invitation

This series is slowly circling a different imagination of the spiritual life—one that does not begin with belief systems or institutions, but with the simple recognition that human beings are formed together.

Not coerced.
Not rushed.
Not forced into identity.

But shaped—gently, patiently, communally—through shared practices that are older than our current spiritual marketplace and wiser than our habit of constant self-curation.

If something in you recognizes this longing—if you’ve felt the quiet exhaustion of carrying everything yourself—know that you’re not alone, and you’re not imagining it.

There are ways of living the spiritual life that do not depend on constant effort, constant discernment, or constant self-definition.

And in the reflections to come, we’ll begin exploring what it means to step into a form of spiritual life that is received rather than assembled—lived together rather than managed alone.

For now, it’s enough to name the truth gently:

You were never meant to carry this by yourself.

And there is more possible than you may have been told.

Living the Questions is an ongoing reflection on the spiritual life as something lived rather than solved.

These writings are not meant to rush answers or demand conclusions, but to create space for formation to unfold over time—through patience, presence, and shared practice.

If something here resonates, you are welcome to remain with the conversation as it continues.

If what you’ve read here resonates with you and you’d like to talk, I’d love to connect. Reach out any time.