Written by There comes a point in almost every sustained spiritual practice when it stops working.
Not because you have done anything wrong. Not because the path has turned out to be false. Not because you were never really on it in the first place. It stops working in the specific sense that the practices which once reliably produced something – a feeling of contact, a quality of presence, a sense of meaning or connection or the subtle rightness that let you know you were doing something real – now produce nothing in particular.
You sit at the altar and feel nothing. You light the candle and it is just a candle. You open the grimoire and the words are words and the symbols are ink on paper and the whole thing has the quality of going through motions that used to mean something and now, inexplicably, do not.
This is the dry spell. And if you have not experienced it yet, you will.
What the Dry Spell Is Not
It is not evidence that you were wrong.
The most damaging interpretation of the dry spell, the one that ends practices that should not end, is the conclusion that the absence of felt experience proves the thing was never real. That the aliveness of the early practice was beginner’s luck, or self-deception, or the honeymoon period of a new interest, and that what you are experiencing now is simply the truth: that there is nothing here.
This conclusion feels compelling inside the dry spell. It has the quality of clear-eyed realism, of finally seeing without the distortion of wishful thinking.
But consider: every long-term practitioner who has written honestly about their experience describes periods of this kind. Teresa of Ávila, one of the most significant Christian mystics of the sixteenth century, wrote at length about the periods in her practice when God seemed completely absent. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose journals are among the most honest accounts of sustained spiritual practice in the modern period, described extended phases of aridity (his word), in which the practice continued without any felt response. The contemplative traditions in particular have developed sophisticated accounts of the dry spell precisely because it is so universal and so consistently misread as failure.
The dry spell is not failure. It is a phase. And like all phases, it has something in it.
What the Dry Spell Is For
The early stages of a spiritual practice tend to be characterised by felt experience. By the excitement of new territory, by the responsiveness of a practice that is still novel, by what the contemplative tradition sometimes calls consolations: the positive inner experiences that accompany and encourage the beginner.
The dry spell comes, in many accounts, when the consolations are deliberately withdrawn. Not as punishment, but as the next stage of development. When the felt experience is present and reliable, the practitioner is, in a sense, still practicing for the experience. The experience is the reward, and the reward keeps coming. The dry spell removes the reward and asks whether the practice continues without it.
This is not a test in the punitive sense. It is a deepening. The practice that continues through the dry spell, without the support of positive feeling, without the confirmation of felt contact, on the basis of commitment alone. This practice becomes something different from what it was when it felt good. It becomes a practice rather than an experience.
There is also something that can only be learned in the dry spell. The difference between spiritual practice and spiritual feeling. They are not the same thing. Spiritual feeling – the aliveness, the sense of contact, the quality of presence – is real and valuable and not to be dismissed. But it is not the practice. The practice is what you do when the feeling is absent. The dry spell is where you discover what your practice actually is, because it is what remains when everything else is stripped away.
Sitting with the Absence
The most useful thing to do in a dry spell, which is also the most counterintuitive, is to stop trying to produce the feeling that has gone.
The effortful attempt to recreate the lost aliveness – the adding of more practices, the seeking of more powerful tools, the frantic rearranging of the altar in hopes that a different configuration will produce what used to come easily – tends to make the aridity worse. It is the spiritual equivalent of trying harder to fall asleep.
What tends to work is simpler and harder. Continue the practice in its most basic form, without expectation of result. Light the candle. Sit. Breathe. Do the thing you have always done, without requiring it to produce anything, for as long as the dry spell lasts.
And write. The dry spell is some of the most important material you can put in your grimoire, precisely because it records what practice looks like when it is not supported by feeling. The honest record of a difficult period is more valuable in the long run than any record of the highs.
The dry spell ends. It always ends. And what you are when it ends is a practitioner who has continued without the support of felt experience. Which is a different and considerably more durable thing than a practitioner who has only ever continued when it felt good.