Going Deeper: The Spiritual Practice That Actually Changes You | Aligned & Abundant Ep. 61

Can I ask you something kind of uncomfortable? When was the last time your spiritual practice actually challenged you — not just soothed you, but cracked something open? In this episode, Christine gets real about the moment she realized her own practice had become another item on the checklist, and what she did to bring it back to life.

This one will shift how you think about ritual, structure, and what it actually means to go deeper — not harder, not longer, just more present.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Why your spiritual practice can quietly become autopilot — and how to tell if yours has
• The difference between a practice that soothes you and one that actually transforms you
• Three real shifts that took Christine's own practice from routine to genuinely deep
• Why sitting with discomfort (instead of redirecting from it) is where the real growth happens
• How to bring a real question into meditation or journaling — and actually let it change you
• Why structure isn't a cage when it's built to serve your soul, not control it
• A personal story about the season everything was shifting, and what stayed steady

Mentioned in this episode:

• Reiki, breathwork, and EFT as examples of evolving practice forms
• Christine's The Soul Shine Collective (Aligned & Abundant tiers)

If you've been circling the same practice for a while and it's stopped lighting you up, this episode is your permission to let it evolve. Soul alignment isn't static — it grows exactly the way you do.

✨ Join Christine's newsletter for first access to retreats, workshops, and soulful tools: Join here

Let's walk this path together. Whether you're just beginning or deep into your journey, I'd be honored to walk alongside you.

Transcript

Before we dive in, I want to take just a second to tell you about something that is so close to my heart, the Soul Shine Collective. This is my community housed on Skool, and that's Skool with a K, and it's where women just like you come to do the deeper work. We have two tiers, Aligned and Abundant. The Abundant tier is where I pour the most of myself.

Live coaching, direct access to me, exclusive workshops, including the Summer of Play, and a community of women who are done playing small. If you've been circling around the idea of going deeper, this is your sign. Head to the link in the show notes, and if you are hearing this before Tuesday night at seven thirty PM Eastern, come join me for a guided meditation and workshop in honor of the Strawberry Full Moon.

Can I ask you something kind of uncomfortable? When was the last time your spiritual practice actually challenged you? Not just made you feel good, not just gave you a moment of peace or a pretty affirmation to write in your journal, but actually, genuinely unsettled something inside you, cracked something open, asked more of you than you expected to give. Because here's what I've noticed in myself and in the people I work with. At a certain point, our spiritual practice can become comfortable, safe, predictable even. And comfort is beautiful, don't get me wrong. But if comfort is the only thing we're seeking, we stop growing.

Growth grows in discomfort. There is a difference between a spiritual practice that soothes you and a spiritual practice that transforms you. And today, week four of The Return, we are talking about just that.

Welcome back to Aligned and Abundant. I'm your host, Christine Marcario, intuitive teacher and Reiki master teacher. And if you've been here with me for the last few weeks, first of all, thank you. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. We have been on this journey together called The Return, six episodes all about coming home to your most authentic self.

We started by slowing down and letting that be the highest frequency move you could make. Then we went into your body, into the somatic wisdom that's been living in you all along. Last week, we talked about your lineage, your ancestors, and how your healing doesn't just heal you, it heals them too. And this week, we go deeper still.

We're talking about the depth of your spiritual practice, not the routine of it, not the ritual checklist, the actual depth. Because I think a lot of us have the practice. We've got the crystals, the journals, the morning pages, the meditation app. But somewhere along the way, we stopped asking the practice to do more for us. We stopped letting it push us. We stopped asking it to make us feel uncomfortable. Today, we're going to change that.

So let's start here, the comfort trap. I want to be real with you about something I went through because I think a lot of you will recognize it. There was a period in my spiritual journey where I felt like I was doing everything right. I was meditating every morning, I was journaling, I was pulling oracle cards, I was lighting my candles, I was setting my intentions at the new moon. It was beautiful. It felt good, and I also wasn't really growing. The practices had become automatic, comfortable, so much so that I was going through the motions without actually being present in them.

I was rushing through my meditations, mentally checked out. I was journaling, but not really fully expressing myself. And I was kind of just going through the routine. Until one day, like anything else, the epiphany hit. I realized I had turned my spiritual practice into just another thing to check off. And I realized it was time to shake things up.

The things I had originally turned to so I could stop performing, stop hustling, stop running through life on autopilot, I had turned those same things into another form of autopilot. Hmm. Sound familiar? Here's the truth. Your spiritual practice can become stagnant just like anything else in your life. Energy has to move. Depth has to be cultivated. You have to be willing to go somewhere new inside yourself, because we are constantly evolving. We are constantly growing and changing and shifting in our consciousness, which means our spiritual practices have to keep up with us. They have to keep expanding us, and supporting us, and supporting our spiritual growth and evolution.

So what does it actually mean to go deeper? Because I think there's a misconception that depth equals difficulty, that going deeper means you have to do harder things, more complicated things, more time-consuming things. Well, good news, it doesn't. So take a breath. Depth is about presence, not complexity. You could sit for five minutes in total presence, really be in your body, really breathing, really listening, and that five minutes will do more for you than a half hour of half-checked-out meditation.

So what does depth look like in practice? I want to give you three things that have shifted my own practice in a real, tangible way.

Number one, and this has been hard for me, sit with the discomfort instead of moving through it. So I'm recently going through an experience that is making me extremely uncomfortable, emotional, and quite unsettled. I'm not quite ready to talk about it just yet, but it is something that I am working through, and what I've realized is I could easily just push through it. I could clean like a maniac. I could keep myself distracted and busy, but instead, I am allowing myself the grace to actually feel the feelings that are coming up and allowing myself to cry when I need to.

There was a point in my life where I had cried a lot, I guess, in middle school, high school, and I remember my mom at some point telling me that I was crying too much, and the rebellious spirit in me had vowed that I would no longer cry. I would not cry. I refused.

So that went on for probably three or four years, I did not cry. So going from someone who was very emotional and expressive and would allow herself to release the emotions that she felt, and I'm not talking about like a little tear coming down my face. I was a crier. And I remember going out to the field of my house and sitting in the apple tree and just crying under the stars, just looking for comfort.

And so I felt like I didn't have an outlet. I didn't have anyone to talk to about these feelings, these big feelings that I had, and then I felt stifled. I didn't want to cry. And I want to say that it probably hardened me a little bit. And so now I'm over it. I don't cry that often, but someone that I truly, really respect told me that it's very healthy to cry, and that it releases the emotions so that they don't get stuck in our body and turn into disease or an autoimmune disease or just regular old sickness.

So it's not that I... she joked around and said, "Put it on your calendar once a week." I don't do that. But what I do do is when I feel the build-up of the emotions coming, I will clean, because cleaning, I don't know what it is about cleaning, cleaning does something for my brain. It does something for my body. I think it's because, and now I'm on a tangent, but cleaning for me is just something that, I guess, you can see the results fast, and you can control it, and you can feel a sense of like, "Oh, wow, I did something really good." Like, the kitchen looks amazing now, or the bedroom sheets have all been turned over and now they're clean and fresh and rewarding.

And so I don't know what it is about cleaning. So anyway, I went on a massive cleaning spree yesterday night and I felt so much better. And it's so crazy because even tonight I wanted to keep going. I wanted to keep finishing, and it's like, what am I finishing?

Instead of letting myself rest, which my friend said, "Today is a day you're supposed to rest before the night of the full moon." And I was like, "Ooh, I can't rest." But so I didn't finish cleaning. I cleaned my daughter's room earlier, but the stuff that still needs to be moved to the garage that was staring at me in the hallway, I was like, "You know what, it can wait till tomorrow." Because yesterday I cleaned so much that my body was literally sore.

Okay, so my point is that sometimes, here's where I'm going. Sometimes I move the energy, and then I felt it when I got into the bathtub, and I put the Epsom salts in, and I added bubble bath and just had that moment. I got out and I just started crying. And I looked at my husband and I started crying, and I had him hold me and all of that. And then I said, "Okay, I'm done." Carry on. I needed that release. It's like I needed that build-up. I needed to move the energy in my body, and then I needed the outlet to let it go.

So out of everything that I just shared, just allow yourself to work through the discomfort. Work through what's uncomfortable for you because that brings us back to ourselves. It clears out the emotions. We are moving through them. We're not avoiding them. We're letting them go, and that's healthy. That's good for our bodies. That's good for our minds. That's good for our energy. So let it be, and get curious about it. Ask, "What are you here to tell me?" This is where the real transformation lives, right? By going inside and feeling the discomfort and sensing what part of my body am I feeling this in, because that's also a clue.

Number two, let your practice evolve. If you've been doing the same practice for years and it no longer lights you up, it might be time to let it change. That isn't failure, that's growth. Your soul is not the same soul it was two years ago. I mean, yes, it is the same soul, but you have a different consciousness. Your practice gets to evolve with you. Maybe that means trying Reiki. Side note, I attuned my husband to level one on Saturday, and I'm so excited to see where this brings him. So shout out to Anthony for being a good client and allowing me to attune him. Now, you better start practicing, young man. All right.

Maybe it means walking in nature as your meditation. Maybe it means breathwork or EFT tapping or a new kind of journaling. The form of the practice matters less than the quality of your presence within it.

Number three, bring a question. One of the most powerful things I have ever done in my own practice is bring a real question. Not a surface-level question, a real one that actually matters to you. So something like, "What am I most afraid of right now?" Or, "What am I still not willing to see?" Or, "Where am I holding myself back, and why?" When you bring a real question to your practice, and then you actually sit still and listen for the answer, you activate a whole other level of your intuition. This is where the inner knowing starts to speak to you.

And here's the thing, doing this kind of deep inner work is so much easier when you're not doing it alone. That is exactly why I created the Soul Shine Collective. It's my private community where there are two tiers, you guessed it, Aligned and Abundant, and it's a place where people come together to go deeper. If you've been craving that kind of community, that kind of container, the link is in the show notes. Come check it out. I would love to have you.

I want to talk about structure for a second because I think it gets a bad reputation in spiritual spaces. There's this idea that being spiritual means being free, fluid, unscheduled, going where the energy takes you, and while I love that energy, I also want to offer a different perspective. Structure done right is an act of love toward yourself. I've always said discipline as devotion. That's committing to yourself.

So think of it like a garden. You can't just throw seeds anywhere and hope they grow. I mean, you can, and sometimes I've seen some really beautiful wildflower gardens, but unless you have a mix of seeds, you're usually going to prepare the soil, create the conditions for growth. Structure becomes the soil of your spiritual practice.

Now, there's a difference between structure that serves your soul and structure that enslaves you. Soul-serving structure feels like a container, not a cage. It creates a time and space that says, "This is sacred. This is mine. I show up here for myself."

It doesn't have to be rigid. It doesn't have to be perfect. You don't have to meditate for forty-five minutes at five AM every single day if it doesn't feel good for you. Maybe it does. Kudos to you. My point being is that maybe your structure is ten minutes of quiet before you open your phone. Maybe it's a monthly date with yourself for a longer practice. Maybe it's committing to one question a week in your journal where you really unravel it. Whatever it is, what matters is that it's consistent enough to trust, that you know I have a place where I meet myself, I have a practice that knows how to hold and support me.

Because when life gets hard and starts life-ing, you want to have something that's already there, that's already in place, that's already practiced, that's already a part of you. Your spiritual practice is not a luxury for your good days. It is a foundation for all of your days, especially your bad days.

Now, I want to share something personal with you here. There was a season of my life not that long ago where everything felt like it was shifting at once. My work was changing, my sense of self was changing. Even relationships were in this kind of tender in-between place.

I had met a lot of amazing and cool people at my job, and suddenly I wasn't there anymore. So my spiritual practice was the only thing that held still.

Now, it wasn't because it was flashy or impressive. I wasn't doing seven days in a dark cave. It was there for me because I had been consistent enough that it had become a real anchor for me, and it wasn't anything crazy either. It was usually five to ten-minute guided meditations that I found on YouTube, but they were my go-to. And I have this one song that I really, truly love. I usually actually play it in the background of my workshops. It's a specially tuned frequency, I think it's five hundred and twenty-eight hertz, and there's just something about it that literally speaks to my soul. So another practice is I would go to sleep with that, especially on my hard days, with that playing in my ears, and it would usually put me in a better state of mind. I believed it was working, so therefore it worked.

So my spiritual practice, thank goodness, was there for me when things got real. Let's be honest. I remember sitting one morning, just sitting, not doing anything particularly profound, and having this quiet, beautiful realization that I trust myself. Not because I have all the answers, because I most certainly do not. And not because I knew what was coming next, because as hard as I wanted to know, I had no clue. But because I had built a relationship with my inner world that was deep enough to hold me, I knew I was going to be okay.

That's what a real practice gives you. It's not magic. It's not a shortcut. It's not an easy fix. It's not a magic wish. It's a real relationship with yourself. You come into this world by yourself, and you leave by yourself. Yes, we have loved ones with us. We have our spirit guides. We have the archangels. We have God, source, universe. But let's be real, this is a solo flight.

So it's so, so important for you to cultivate the relationship with yourself and to trust yourself. This is the return. This is exactly what this whole series has been leading to.

So if you're listening to this and feeling called to do this work more intentionally, to have a real container for your growth with accountability and community and access to deeper tools, I want you to look into my Soul Shine Collective or one-on-one coaching with me. Because honestly, yes, I had the spiritual practice to fall back on, but another crucial piece of my healing journey over this past year was hiring a coach, was getting into a community where I was coached. And then I dove into a second coaching container, and a third, and a fourth. I went a little crazy, you know. It was a mixed bag of nuts. I got a little bit of everybody. But I continued on this journey, and I can honestly say I am such... and I can't say I'm a different person. It's almost like layers were stripped away, layers of gunk were stripped away by choosing myself and allowing myself to grow in containers that not only nurtured me, inspired me, but allowed me to grow and heal and to become my most authentic version of myself.

And so I cannot recommend coming into a community or working one-on-one with a coach highly enough. It's honestly made such a difference in my life, and I know everything happens for a reason, but I kind of wish I didn't wait till I was forty-two years old to get started rediscovering who I was, reconnecting to my inner knowing. So I'd be honored to support you on your journey. The link is in the show notes, and you can always connect with me on Instagram, Facebook, email, et cetera. Where there's a will, there's a way. If you want to connect with me, you will find a way. It's meant to happen.

All right, here is your action step. Here is your week four invitation, and I want you to really sit with this one. This week, drum roll please, bring your practice a real question. Not a surface question, a real one. Something you've been circling around but haven't quite been willing to ask. Write it at the top of a fresh, clean page of your journal. Set a timer for ten minutes. You are worth ten minutes. And then just go. Just listen. Just scribe. Just write whatever comes up. Do not edit it, don't judge it, just let it come through you.

It's funny because I was stuck the other day, stuck in my head, and I had the consciousness that I was holding myself back, and I kind of had an idea of what it was I needed to do, but I was avoiding it. Until I seen, like the universe does, a random thing on the TV caught my attention. I was not listening to it. I had it playing in the background. But the one line that caught my attention, and my ears perked up, and my attention went to the TV, was, "The only way is through." The only way is through. And I said, all right, I have to stop avoiding these feelings. I have to stop avoiding. Just stop avoiding. That's a period. And work through it, and move through it, and feel through it, and just do it. Take the aligned, messy steps even if it's uncomfortable.

So let's do this. Let's feel into things. Let's explore. And if you want to go even deeper, try sitting with the question in meditation first before you even write a word. Let it live in your body before it becomes words on the page. Your inner knowing has so much to say. Your only real job is to create the space to actually hear it.

And so let's do it. Let's connect with ourselves because we're all looking for the meaning of life, of this relationship, of this scenario, of this situation, of all the things. So let's actually take the time to slow down enough to hear our inner knowing. It is here for a reason, and we have to respect it. We have to slow down enough to listen. We have to give ourselves the space to truly feel and hear and listen. And so this week, that is your assignment.

Okay, beautiful soul. Week four wrapped up. We are four episodes deep into this series, The Return, and I just want to take a second to honor you for showing up for this, for slowing down, for listening to your body, for healing your lineage, for going deeper in your practice. This is not passive work, and not everybody chooses to do this. This is the real thing, and you, my friend, are doing it.

Next week, week five, we are talking about inner authority. How to trust yourself so completely that you stop looking outside yourself for permission, for validation, and for direction. It's going to be a powerful one. I cannot wait. I mean, I'm always excited. Before I let you go, I would absolutely love it if you would follow me on Instagram @christine.marcario.coach. That's where I share energy updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and all the things that don't make it into the episodes. Come say hi. I genuinely love connecting with you there.

And if today's episode landed for you, if something opened up or shifted or you just felt seen, because I do see you, please share this with someone who needs it. Leave a review if you feel called. It means the absolute world to me, and it helps more people find this work. And if you are ready to stop doing this work alone, if you're ready for community, for deeper tools, for a coach in your corner, the Soul Shine Collective is where you want to be. All of the details are in the show notes. The Abundant tier has my deepest involvement, and I would love to walk this path with you. Come find your people. You deserve that. Sending you so much love, and until next episode, I'm Christine Marcario, and this is Aligned and Abundant. Bye for now.