Are You Cultivating Gratitude or Toxic Spirituality?
Have you written in your Gratitude Journal today? No? Well, that explains why your soulmate still hasn’t shown up, your dream life remains lost in the underworld, and you’re stuck at that job where your soul slowly bleeds out of your body. Because — as every soft-lit, ring-light-swinging, algorithm-blessed influencer will tell you — everything begins with gratitude (and their Bali retreat, with early bird pricing ending soon, obviously).
I mean seriously, no journaling this morning? Every glowing wellness account has been chanting this for years. Why are you resisting their collective wisdom? Honestly, it's people like you who are the reason the world is burning — no one listens to spiritual influencers anymore.
Because once you're truly grateful (read: high vibe, divinely aligned), the universe transforms into a cosmic smoothie of oat milk, stevia, and serotonin. All you have to do is radiate thankfulness and boom — like a cosmic thunderstorm of AI curated vision boards — it rains beachfront property, a soulmate with a six-pack and conveniently pre-healed attachment issues, and passive income directly wired from “source” energy. You just have to believe. And journal daily. Ideally in a €108 velvet-bound notebook, sustainably sourced and available exclusively in my webshop. Hand-blessed by Lemurian angels and lightly misted with palo santo hydrosol. Or better yet, come to my “Manifest Your Dream Life” retreat in Bali. Only €4,444. Includes a free Spotify meditation playlist. Flights, vegan meals, and a sense of reality not included.
Now, let’s be clear: gratitude itself isn’t the problem here. But the way it’s packaged and sold is where things get sticky.
I used to take advice from people who called themselves “spiritual teachers.” Many of them preached the concept of Gratitude, in alignment with Abundance, with more enthusiasm than a tech bro discovering trad wives. The rule was simple: if you weren’t grateful, you were blocking your blessings. Spiritually out of sync. Low vibe. Possibly cursed by your own negative energy. But unquestionably — you were the problem.
If you couldn’t feel grateful, the issue wasn’t the system, or trauma, or oppression, or war and multiple genocides, or climate collapse, or hearing your neighbor beating up his wife — it was you. You just needed to “shift your perspective.”
Years ago, a friend — a Black woman, also a yoga teacher, also maneuvering through a very white spiritual and material world — told me she struggled with gratitude. At the time, I was still under the trance of the spiritually enlightened feedback loop. Part of me silently thought: “Well, no wonder she’s stuck. She’s always negative.”
Yes, I cringed writing that. But I want to be honest about it.
I’d already started to question New Age dogma, but I was still high on toxic spirituality and didn’t realize the BS. Stay in these spaces long enough, and even the most skeptical mind starts to bend. You find yourself believing all sorts of beautifully packaged nonsense — like people once believed you could bribe God with parchment, or like someone today genuinely believes their karma was cleared after a cacao ceremony with Luna Azteca Sol (formerly Steffi) and a cold plunge.
So when she said she found the concept of gratitude difficult, I couldn’t understand right away. I saw her resistance as “unspiritual.” As a block. As her deficit, something she should be working on. Thankfully, I kept my mouth shut.
Let’s talk bodies.
If your body is holding trauma, if your nervous system is locked in survival, if your lived experience is marked by marginalization, instability, or systemic violence — then writing “I’m grateful for this” in a leather-bound journal with a tiny gold Buddha on it isn’t just ineffective. It can be disorienting and even harmful. Because gratitude, when forced, isn’t healing. Forced gratitude is a form of erasure.
Bodies don’t lie. They don’t respond well to being ignored. We finally got back to understanding that trauma lives in the body. And yet we still try to spiritually bypass it with spiritual blah blah. This is how you end up at an ecstatic dance session led by a man named Alejandro Estrella (formerly Stefan) wearing a feather necklace, a man bun, and a deep belief that pelvic thrusts and tantra workshops will dismantle capitalism.
Anyway. The whole spiritual-performance-industrial-complex teaches us that if we just say the right words, perform the right rituals, and write the perfect list of blessings in the perfect notebook at the perfect retreat, our bodies will eventually fall in line. The trauma will evaporate. The money will flow. The algorithm will bless us.
But healing doesn’t work like that. Psychologically, forced gratitude is suppression. It’s the mind trying to override what the body knows. And suppression, like all unresolved things, doesn’t vanish — it mutates. Into anxiety and disconnection. Into inexplicable rage at someone who just asked if you’ve already been to Tulum.
Gratitude doesn’t grow in denial. It grows in presence. And presence is often messy. It’s often uncomfortable. Frequently inconvenient. Presence is also suffering.
Sometimes being present means admitting it’s hard to feel grateful right now — and not trying to fix it. Just being with it. That discomfort is the doorway. That’s where the real work begins.
Also, maybe we should ask: who actually finds it helpful or even easy to be grateful? The woman sipping her second avocado smoothie in an ocean-view suite on day six of a yoga and sound retreat? Or the single mother of three, walking home in the rain with grocery bags cutting into her hands, calculating whether this month’s rent or her kid’s asthma medication takes priority?
Gratitude journals don’t change systemic imbalance. And yet we still hand them out like spiritual duct tape — as if a well-written list of blessings will magically realign a broken world. As if the problem is always internal, never structural.
This is where New Age spirituality turns toxic. When it sells coping mechanisms as cosmic law, mistakes bypassing for wisdom, and rebrands privilege as enlightenment.
To be crystal clear: I’m not anti-gratitude. I’ve had real moments — gut-level, heart-cracking, breath-catching gratitude. But they never came from journaling prompts. They showed up uninvited. They usually arrived unannounced, unpolished, and when I didn’t expect them. That’s the kind of gratitude I trust — not the kind forced out of a spiritual concept.
If this resonated with you, moved you, or made you pause and reflect – consider this your cue. I’ve set up a virtual tip jar via Buy Me a Coffee. No monthly commitments, no strings, no memberships required.
Your sweet kindness helps keep the thoughts flowing, the energy exchange intact, and the glow of my inner goddess alive. It won’t fix capitalism, but it might buy me five minutes of joy (or at least a cortado).
Gracias. Thank you. Jërëjëf. Merci. Obrigada. Danke. Arigatō. Medaase. Grazie. Hvala. Tack. Asante. Shukran. Teşekkürler. Dziękuję.
