A spiritual teacher once said:
Practice having compassion for those who irritate and annoy you — those people are your greatest spiritual teachers.
For a very long time, I believed it. I followed it. I tried hard to live it. Through psychology, Buddhism, and various spiritual practices, I journaled, wrote letters, used imagery, and again and again found ways to reduce my resentment, my disappointment, my irritation toward people and situations. Did it help? Yes. It shifted my perspective. It stretched my capacity to sit with difficulty.
But lately, I'm tired.
I'm tired of hearing people preach forgiveness. Tired of the insistence that we always find light and love in others. Because the truth is — there's darkness everywhere. Human nature includes greed, anger, ignorance, arrogance, and doubt. Different traditions have named these the five poisons, the five sins. And what I've noticed is that most of our religious and spiritual upbringing didn't teach us to reckon with them. It taught us to perform our way around them. To act kind. To look loving. To hide what we actually felt.
But the shadows don't disappear just because we stop looking.
What Happens When You Suppress Your Shadow Self
They show up in dreams. They surface during crisis. The more we suppress, pretend, and lie to ourselves, the more these neglected parts find ways to remind us they exist — through physical illness, through emotional collapse, through the kind of numbness where you can't feel anything anymore, good or bad.
When we avoid the shadow, we lose access to the light too. They move together. You can't selectively shut one down without dimming the other.
This is what Carl Jung called the shadow self — the parts of us we've been conditioned to hide, deny, or feel ashamed of. And the more we push them away, the more power they gain over us.
The Problem with Performing Compassion and Forced Forgiveness
So instead of telling someone it's sinful to feel jealousy or hate, I want to get curious about what's underneath. If there's anger — let's talk about it, move it through the body, find a safe way to let it out. If there's grief — cry like a kid, full-throated, let it actually move through you. If something irritates you, stop judging yourself for that. Life is full of things outside our control. That's genuinely, legitimately frustrating. And that's okay.
Whenever I hear a spiritual teacher talk about practicing love toward people we can't stand, I want to ask:
Are you truly capable of that all the time? Are we supposed to be?
What if I can't be loving right now — does that make me bad?
If I set a boundary, fight back, or walk away, does that mean I've failed at compassion?
I have so many questions. They always seem so peaceful, so grounded. And honestly, that used to make me feel embarrassed about myself.
What Authentic Spiritual Teaching Actually Looks Like
What I actually want to hear — what I've rarely heard — is something like:
I know how hard this is. Even I can't always follow my own teaching. There are still situations that make me twist and turn. Moments I want to punch someone in the face. But I practice not following that impulse. I pause. I breathe. I take care of myself. Sometimes, I can follow the practice as I wish, other times I can't. This is all part of the growth.
That would mean something to me. That would feel real.
Taking Off the Therapist Cloak: Therapists Are Human Too
As I write this, I realize — that's what I actually try to do. In the therapy room, I tell my clients that I go through things just like them. I don't always have the best conflict resolution. I hold black-and-white thinking sometimes. I cry when something painful comes up. I have days with no motivation, stretches of time where I feel insecure, moments where I compare myself to others. Weather affects me. The economy affects me. Relationship tension affects me. My therapist cloak doesn't protect me from any of it.
Which means it probably doesn't protect spiritual teachers from any of it either.
We are all human. We are all works in progress.
Question Everything — Including This
Do not blindly follow or believe everything you are told. Whether it comes from religious teachings, family rules, social media, or even your own therapist — question it.
If a teaching asks you to constantly perform, suppress, or ignore your own reality, hold that guidance up to the light of your own experience. Challenge your leaders. Challenge your teachers. And yes — challenge your therapist.
This isn’t cynicism. It’s discernment. There’s a difference between rejecting wisdom and refusing to outsource your inner life to someone else’s framework. You are allowed to take what resonates and leave what doesn’t. You are allowed to say: this teaching doesn’t fit my lived experience right now.
Being Your Authentic Self Means Embracing All of You
The thing that actually bothers me isn't darkness. It's the condemnation of it. It's the glorification of "positive and kind" as the only acceptable way to be — while treating reactivity, anger, and messiness as failures of character.
Authenticity isn't about always feeling loving. It's about being honest about where you actually are, and meeting yourself there — with curiosity instead of judgment.
Are you exhausted by the pressure to always be positive, forgiving, or spiritually "evolved"? You're not alone.