Back to the Altar: The Season When Even the Spiritual Go Quiet and What it Means to Return

Something has been stirring. I’m back. And I brought everything I found in the quiet with me.

This is going to be a long spill here. Just sharing my personal experience that may help the next person. There are seasons where your altar just looks like a decorative piece and it starts to collect dust. Where candles sit unused, where cards stay in their cloth and boxes, and even your oils go untouched. You being the person that knows the importance of tending to your spiritual life, but you just simply…  just stop.

It’s not because you stopped believing. Not because the work stopped working or stopped mattering, but something inside of you went so quiet that even your beliefs and practices feel like it is too much to hold. Have you ever been through it?

I know that season. I just came out of one. What I had to realize about that season is sometimes it looks like and it feels like abandonment, but it isn’t. So don’t beat yourself up about it if you are going through this season. Even in root work and this practice we understand that land needs to rest. You don’t plant in the same soil season after season without giving it time to replenish. The field that looks empty isn’t dead; it’s just in a restoration period. It’s building back the nutrients that make growth possible again. It is preparing for what’s coming without showing any evidence on the surface.  We understand this about earth, but we struggle to understand it about ourselves.

When a practitioner goes quiet, when someone who has built their life around spiritual work suddenly can’t seem to show up for it like they used to, the world reads it as falling off. As losing faith. As burnout or distraction or worse. And sometimes we read it that way about ourselves too. We internalize the silence as failure, when most of the time we are just regrouping. We tell ourselves we should be stronger than this, more disciplined, more devoted. We guilt ourselves back to altars that we’re not ready to stand at yet.

But what if the withdrawal was the work? What if going quiet was exactly what the spirit required?

I was in a season for the longest where the 8 of cups followed me. I’m thinking do I need to let go completely.  But the 8 of cups shows someone walking away from cups that they themselves have carefully arranged. They are not running. They are not in crisis. They are walking, deliberately, intentionally, toward something they could not find while standing where they were. The cups are not broken; they are just not enough in this season.

 Some seasons call you away from everything you’ve built so you can find the part of yourself that the building was covering up and just like the 8 of cups, you leave them standing and they are still there, if and/or when you decide to return. They just may be a little dusty lol.

Even the most rooted among us need seasons of not knowing.

I think we don’t talk about this enough in spiritual spaces. The seasons where the practice just doesn’t feel like medicine anymore. Where you pull cards and feel nothing. Where you light a candle and wonder why. Where the rituals that used to anchor you start to feel performative and like you are just putting on a show. Like you are just going through the motions, but for what?

And that is the experience and the feeling that can disorient you when your entire identity is wrapped in the work. Even for me, I had a season where I had to figure out who Sade was outside of TGC. You know when you are the one people come to for clarity and support; where do you go when you start to run dry? When the reader needs a reading herself. When the hands that make the condition oils can’t find the energy to light a match?

In that season, you go inward, you go quiet. You stop performing your spirituality and you let yourself just be a person for a while. A person who is tired, who is uncertain, and who is carrying more than you let on. Who needs the same rest that you prescribe to everyone else.

The silence was not an absence of spirit. It was spirit asking me to stop producing and start listening.

There is a difference between spiritual dryness and spiritual depth. Dryness is panic. It’s desperately seeking a feeling, forcing a practice, performing devotion you don’t feel because you’re afraid of what it means if you stop. Depth is patience. It is trusting that the roots are still there even when nothing is flowering. It is understanding that the most profound spiritual growth often happens in seasons that look, from the outside, like nothing at all.

I didn’t lose the practice. I lost a version of myself that was running on empty.

What I found in the fallow season, eventually was that I had been building from a place of depletion for longer than I’d admitted. Not to anyone else, to myself and I had been pouring into the work, the brand, the people, the content, the obligations quietly and the well started running low. Not empty, but low enough that what I was offering wasn’t coming from overflow anymore. It was coming from scraping.

This withdrawal period forced me to stop scraping. To sit with the discomfort of stillness until the stillness stopped being uncomfortable. To let things that need to fall away, fall away. To stop holding a version of the work that was no longer true to what I am now.

And somewhere in that, in all the stillness and quiet, in the dust on the altar, in candles I didn’t light. I found myself again. Not the me that shows up to be useful. The me that exists underneath all of that. The one who was doing this work before it had a name, before there was an audience, before there was anything to protect or maintain or grow. That version of me had been waiting patiently in silence.

 

Coming back to the altar is not the same as never having left.

 

When you return after a real fallow season, you return differently. You don’t pick up where you left off because who you were when you left is not who you are now. The practice shifts. The focus sharpens. Things that once felt essential reveal themselves as noise and things you’d been avoiding reveal themselves as exactly what you needed to be doing all along.

My altar looks different now. What I’m building looks different now. What I want to offer looks different now. I also must be okay if those traveling on this new journey look different.  This season, I am moving with more intention and less performance. The past season stripped away everything that I was doing out of habit or obligation or fear of falling behind and I see now that what is left, is what actually matters.

The Magician doesn’t wonder if his tools still work after they’ve been resting. He simply returns to the table and begins.

If you are in your own quiet season right now, if the altar is collecting dust, if the cards are in their cloth, if you can’t remember the last time the practice felt like it used to, I want you to hear this:

You have not lost it. You are not failing your practice, your ancestors, or yourself. You are just in what I call fallow ground. And fallow ground is not the end of the story; it is preparation for the next chapter of it.

The roots go deeper in the season when nothing is growing above ground. Trust that. Rest in that. And when you are ready… not when you think you should be, not when guilt gets too loud, but when you genuinely feel like it… come back to the altar.

It will be there. The work will be there. And so will you; more of you than you left with.

Welcome back to Third Generation Conjure.

-Sade