A Break From Spirituality
Or so I think.
One of my favorite bookstores in the entire city of New York is Namaste Bookstore. It’s the one with the big Buddha statue sitting outside the store, right on 14th Street.
If you couldn’t already tell by the name, it’s a metaphysical bookstore that sells everything from books on religion, yoga, and astrology to tumbled crystals and incense sticks. It’s like walking into heaven for a spiritual person.
As one, myself, and as an obsessive book collector, I always try to pick up some books from this bookstore, based on things that I’m currently interested in. The last time I went in, I was looking at books on femininity and goddess training. This time, I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for.
I traveled from one end of the store to the other end, trying very hard to find a book that called out to me. None did.
Exasperated, I tried the other metaphysical bookstore a few stores down. I found myself empty-handed again, after browsing all their books.
It’s not unusual for me to walk out empty-handed, but this time, it felt different. It was like I had blocked out all the advice and philosophies on the pages of books I thumbed through. The words were meaningless.
Self-help is an attractive niche that causes people (aka me) to shell out money on books that tell them everything that they already knew. Like, why are you sad? Probably because you’re living in the past. Why haven’t you achieved your goals? Because you haven’t actually done the work. Want a way to get more things done? Wake up at five am.
At the end of the day, self-help books are just spouting strategies and tips on how to maximize your potential — they’re not reinventing the wheel. Spiritual books on meditation and healing the body and mind have the same goal, just written over and over again. I mean, how many books on manifestation can the world come up with?
I’m not shitting on spirituality or people who write or consume spiritual self-help books — I consumed ONLY spiritual self-help for the past few years. I’m still very much into astrology, birth charts, and all of that crap, but I’m also very interested in learning more about the rest of this multi-faceted world.
Just because you’re a spiritual person, doesn’t mean you should restrict yourself to reading only spiritual self-help. The world is much bigger than that.
As for myself, I find that I am really interested in re-reading U.S. history. But how about from a point of view that is not by white America? I want to read back on the fucked up race laws and policies that had once (or still do) terrorized marginalized communities. I could give fiction another go after only consuming non-fiction self-help books for the past few years.
I marched myself over to Strand Book Store and ended up picking up a book on travel writing and another on world history from the depictions of geographical maps. I’m excited to read both.
I can be a spiritual person and still be grounded in this reality and what’s happening around the world. Maybe it’s a Pisces thing that it’s taken me this long to realize. *Shoulder shrugs*
