The Quiet Pressure to Earn Enlightenment

A few years ago, I was taking an online course and was asked to complete a devotional exercise meant to foster connection with the Divine. I followed the general framework, but partway through the practice I felt called to do something different. That deviation brought the experience to life. In stepping off-script, I had one of the most profound spiritual encounters I’d ever known.

I was excited to share it.

Instead, I was told to return to the exercise as designed.

The moment deflated me. Here I was, an experienced practitioner, deliberately approaching simple practices with openness rather than superiority, finding something genuinely alive in the personalization of the work, only to be told it was wrong. That intuition, that responsiveness, had to be abandoned in favour of the prescribed form. I was expected to fit myself back into a mould that had failed to inspire connection in the first place.

What was the point of the work if it didn’t do what it claimed to do?

As a teacher, I understand the other side. Sometimes an exercise exists to scaffold a skill. Sometimes wandering too far too fast undermines what’s being taught. I swallowed my frustration and continued, but the well had been poisoned. Within a few months, I left the program entirely. The spark was gone. The work felt empty.

That experience reshaped how I teach. I try now to offer frameworks and explicit permission to personalize practices once those frameworks are understood. Too much of the occult world clings to rigid adherence without curiosity or creativity. The irony? Many of the traditions we now treat as fixed were born from experimentation, not codification.

Here’s the catch: everything I’ve written so far exposes my own unresolved tension between rest and work. My teaching is rooted in structure, scaffolding, and work. And yet my philosophy leans toward a more prodigal approach: go out, try things, follow what calls to you, and decide what actually matters. I believe structure can be useful, especially in a landscape saturated with information. But I also know that once a particular format is taught, it becomes the measuring stick by which everything else is judged.

Instead of slowing down and listening, I prescribe practices.

Would I be a better teacher if I told my students to sit under a tree and see what arises? Would they discover their own paths that way? And does it matter if those paths diverge from mine?

Shared practice requires shared language. This is something I’ve come to appreciate in the Gardnerian Wicca I was taught: while ritual is shared, personal practice ultimately belongs to the individual. There is something deeply unorthodox in that arrangement. It’s also deeply unsettling when you’re trying to define what “we do” together.

I don't have a clean answer to that. Maybe the tension is the practice.