Spiritual growth has a structural problem that almost no tradition admits openly: it can be mimicked perfectly by its opposite. The 13th-century Flemish mystic Mechtild of Magdeburg observed that genuine transformation tends to pass through a phase she called 'spiritual poverty' — a stage where you feel less certain, less grounded, and less capable than before you started. Modern developmental psychologists call this same territory 'disorientation before integration.' What looks like regression is often the old architecture being cleared for something larger. The practical implication is uncomfortable: if your spiritual practice is making you feel more settled about who you are rather than more honestly unsettled, it may be refining you rather than growing you. Growth, Mechtild suggested, arrives disguised as loss of self-possession — not as a crisis to solve, but as a threshold to recognize.

If you stripped away the parts of your spiritual practice that make you feel capable and composed, what would remain?

Drawing from Christian Mysticism / Developmental Psychology — Mechtild of Magdeburg