You’re Not Trying to Reach God—You’re Flowing From God
The upside-down truth that changes everything about spiritual practice
This reflection is inspired by Through Holy Week with Mary Magdalene, guided by the teachings of Cynthia Bourgeault. In this series, Holy Week is not treated as a courtroom drama about guilt and acquittal, but as an initiation into conscious love. And one of the strangest things conscious love reveals is that most of our spiritual effort begins from the wrong place. We keep acting as if God is somewhere else and the spiritual life is our heroic attempt to get there. But what if that whole picture is upside down?
The Exhaustion of Trying To Get There
Most spiritual effort is exhausting because it begins with the assumption that we are late.
Late to holiness. Late to healing. Late to union. Late to whatever imaginary level of spiritual adulthood everyone else seems to have reached while we were still in the kitchen losing an argument with our own nervous system. So we get busy. We read another book. Try another practice. Fix another flaw. Track another mood. Add another sacred thing to the pile and hope that eventually the pile becomes a ladder.
This is how the spiritual life turns into a religious steeplechase. There is always one more obstacle to clear. Dissolve the false self. Heal the wound. Improve the relationship. Pray better. Meditate deeper. Stop reacting. Become present. Become less attached. Become more surrendered. Become the kind of person who says “just be” without secretly wanting to slap someone.
It is not that these things are bad. Many of them are necessary. But when they are driven by the belief that God is far away and we have to earn our way back, even practice becomes another form of anxiety. The soul is no longer resting in God. It is trying to impress God’s admissions committee.
No wonder we are tired.
The Upside-Down Picture
Bourgeault names the distortion with brutal simplicity. We imagine ourselves out on the periphery, trying to swim back to God. We assume we are outside trying to get inside, below trying to get above, separated trying to become reunited.
That is how it feels, of course. Nobody needs to be scolded for feeling separate. The human condition is very persuasive. Bodies feel separate. Personalities feel separate. Grief feels separate. Shame absolutely loves separation and has apparently accepted a lifetime appointment as chair of the committee.
But the feeling is not the deepest truth.
The deeper truth is that we start from the center and flow outward into form. We do not enter this world as exiles from God, scrambling to reverse the damage. We enter as expressions of divine yearning taking shape in flesh, time, limitation, relationship, weather, laundry, heartbreak, and whatever strange assignment it is to have a human body that needs both prayer and fiber.
That changes everything.
The spiritual life is not a frantic swim back to shore. It is learning to recognize the current we are already in.
The Illusion of Separation
The illusion of separation is not stupid. It is convincing because our lives constantly seem to confirm it. We bump into one another as separate bodies. We misunderstand each other with Olympic consistency. We carry wounds that make the world feel unsafe. We look at God, if we look at all, as though God were a distant authority figure waiting for us to submit the correct paperwork.
So we build spiritual systems around the problem we think we have. We try to close the gap. We try to become worthy. We try to improve ourselves into divine proximity. The ego loves this, because it gets to remain in charge of the project. It can set goals, measure progress, compare results, and occasionally announce that it is becoming very humble, which is always a dangerous moment.
But if separation is not ultimate, then the project changes. We are not trying to manufacture union. We are learning to stop obscuring it. We are not trying to drag God into our lives from somewhere else. We are learning to notice the presence already bearing us, already breathing us, already holding the whole ridiculous and luminous human operation together.
That does not make practice unnecessary.
It makes practice sane.
Why Self-Improvement Spirituality Fails
Self-improvement spirituality fails because it turns the false self into the project manager of its own disappearance.
This is a terrible idea, but it keeps the publishing industry alive.
The false self loves a spiritual program because it can turn even surrender into achievement. It can become proud of simplicity, competitive about humility, and weirdly attached to non-attachment. It can take the most beautiful teaching in the world and turn it into homework assigned by an inner schoolteacher who really needs a sabbatical.
Bourgeault’s point is not that psychological work is useless. It can help us see where we are getting blindsided. It can expose defenses, patterns, wounds, and all the little basement creatures that keep chewing through the wires. That work matters. But it is not where the deepest action is happening.
The deepest action is much simpler and much harder to trust.
Relax.
Not collapse. Not quit. Not become passive, vague, or spiritually decorative. Relax the clenched assumption that you are outside of God trying to earn your way in. Relax the project of turning yourself into someone God can finally tolerate. Relax into the fact that you and the whole world are already held in God, already flowing from source, already being carried by a love deeper than your ability to manage it.
Presence Instead of Striving
This is where presence becomes the real practice.
There is a line Bourgeault draws from the Sufi tradition: if you can make all cares into one care, the care for simply being present, you will be cared for by that presence, which is creative love. That is not a bumper sticker. That is a complete dismantling of the ego’s spiritual business plan.
Because the ego thinks it has many responsibilities. It has to fix the false self, secure enlightenment, improve the journey, manage the future, unite with God, polish the soul, supervise the emotions, and make sure everyone sees how thoughtfully it is doing all of this. Presence asks for something quieter. Be here. Yield. Be willing. Be curious. Stop spending this moment trying to improve some future moment in which you imagine you will finally be acceptable.
This is why contemplative practice matters. The Jesus Prayer, centering prayer, the simple returning to God with the breath, none of these are ladders to a distant deity. They are ways of softening the grip. The prayer is not a rope thrown up to heaven so we can climb out of being human. It is a way of letting the heart remember the source from which it is already flowing.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy.
Not because God is absent until the words summon him.
Because the words bring us back to the mercy already carrying us.
Flowing From What Already Is
The upside-down truth is that God is not the destination of the spiritual life.
God is the source.
That sounds obvious until we notice how rarely we live as if it were true. We keep trying to get somewhere we are already rooted. We keep striving for a union that is deeper than our striving. We keep treating practice as a way to become connected, when practice is really a way to notice that the connection has never been broken.
This does not mean everything is fine. It does not mean the false self is imaginary, wounds do not matter, or human beings should stop doing the hard work of growing up. Please. Virgin Monk Boy is not recommending mystical laziness with a scented candle. The work remains. But the ground of the work changes. We are not working our way toward God from exile. We are letting God’s life become more visible through the form we already are.
That is the relaxation Bourgeault is pointing toward. Not a relaxation of indifference, but a relaxation of panic. The soul stops trying to storm heaven and begins to inhabit the center from which it has always been sent.
You are not trying to reach God.
You are flowing from God.
Spiritual practice begins when you finally stop swimming long enough to feel the current.
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Your presence alone already helps.
Your support keeps the lantern lit for everyone else.
I have to keep tawhid in the room here: we are not God, and the self is not secretly divine. But we are also not abandoned things trying to crawl back into the attention of a distant Lord. We are held, sustained, breathed, and called by Allah before we know how to respond.
That is what I hear in this piece. Practice is not panic. It is remembrance. Salah, dhikr, silence, breath, all of it loosens the lie that we are outside mercy and have to earn our way back in.
The nafs turns the path into a project. The heart learns to return to the current already carrying it.
This resonates deeply. I would only add that perhaps the deepest shift is realizing there was never a distance to cross in the first place. We experience separation not because we've moved away from the Divine, but because our mode of participation has become fragmented. From my perspective, awakening is less a journey toward God than a reorganization of consciousness that allows us to participate in the same reality more coherently. The river was always flowing; what changes is our capacity to recognize that we have never truly been outside it.