YogiWrites

A poetic confession of losing faith to find truth — one breakdown at a time.

When Your Prayer List Becomes a Customer Complaint Form

Picture this: It’s 3 AM, and I’m sitting cross-legged on my apartment floor in Bangalore, staring at a small brass Ganesha that my grandmother gifted me. The incense has burned out, leaving behind that familiar smoky residue that somehow always makes everything feel more sacred—or maybe just more suffocated.

I’ve just finished what felt like the world’s longest complaint letter to the Almighty. You know, the usual stuff: “Dear God, my startup isn’t taking off, my love life is drier than yesterday’s chapati, and my mother keeps asking when I’ll get married while I’m still figuring out how to keep a plant alive.”

That’s when it hit me like a Mumbai local train during rush hour: I wasn’t praying anymore. I was demanding. I had turned the divine into my personal customer service department, and frankly, I was getting tired of the poor response time.

The Great Spiritual Unsubscribe

The Breaking Point

It started three months earlier. I was religiously (pun intended) following every spiritual guru on Instagram, YouTube, and whatever new platform promised enlightenment in 10 easy steps. My phone was buzzing with notifications about “5 Mantras to Manifest Your Dream Life” and “Why Your Chakras Are Blocking Your WiFi Connection” (okay, I made that last one up, but you get the point).

I had morning rituals, evening rituals, and rituals for my rituals. I was doing pranayama while meal-prepping, chanting mantras during my morning runs, and analyzing my dreams like I was preparing for a PhD in Subconscious Studies.

My friend Arjun visited one evening and found me surrounded by crystals, essential oils, and three different meditation apps running simultaneously.

“Bro,” he said, settling into my couch with the casual confidence of someone who’d known me since we were stealing mangoes from the neighbor’s tree, “you look more stressed than my uncle during tax season. What happened to just… being?”

“I am being,” I snapped back, adjusting my meditation cushion. “I’m being very spiritual.”

He laughed—that deep, belly laugh that only comes from years of friendship and shared stupidity. “You’re being very busy, yaar. There’s a difference.”

The Moment Everything Shifted

That night, after Arjun left, I sat with his words. And for the first time in months, I didn’t reach for my phone to check if there were any new spiritual insights waiting in my feed. I just sat.

No incense. No background mantras. No app tracking my meditation minutes.

Just me, the silence, and the uncomfortable realization that somewhere between seeking God and seeking content about God, I had lost the plot entirely.

That’s when I whispered the words that would change everything: “God, I think I need to unfollow You for a while. Not because I don’t believe, but because I’ve forgotten how to listen.”

When Silence Becomes the Loudest Teacher

The Uncomfortable Truth About Spiritual Materialism

Here’s what nobody tells you about the modern spiritual journey: it’s incredibly easy to become addicted to seeking instead of finding. We collect spiritual practices like our mothers collect WhatsApp forwards—with enthusiasm but without much discernment.

I had been treating spirituality like a fitness program. More reps, more results. More practices, more enlightenment. But the soul doesn’t work like a bicep. It doesn’t grow stronger from being constantly worked out.

The Bhagavad Gita talks about nishkama karma—action without attachment to results. But I had turned even my spiritual practice into a results-oriented business plan. I was attached to becoming detached, which is perhaps the most delicious irony the universe can serve.

The Art of Unlearning

For the next few weeks, I did something radical: nothing.

No morning prayers beyond a simple “Thank you” when I woke up. No evening rituals beyond appreciating that I’d made it through another day without accidentally insulting my boss or burning dinner.

I stopped posting spiritual quotes on social media. I unfollowed the gurus whose wisdom had started sounding like marketing copy. I put away the books that promised to decode the mysteries of existence in 200 pages or less.

Instead, I started paying attention to the small things: how my grandmother hummed old bhajans while cooking, not because she was trying to raise her vibration, but because it made her happy. How the watchman in my building always said “Namaste” with a genuine smile, not because he’d read about the divine in everyone, but because he actually seemed to see it.

The God Who Doesn’t Need Followers

Rediscovering the Sacred in the Mundane

The funny thing about asking God to unfollow you is that you realize God never needed your subscription in the first place. The divine doesn’t trend on social media. It doesn’t require your engagement metrics to validate its existence.

I found God again in the most unexpected places: in the perfectly imperfect way my mother still cut my hair when I visited home, even though I’m 28 and perfectly capable of finding a barber. In the way my elderly neighbor waters the plants on our building’s terrace every morning, not because he owns them, but because they need water.

In the way the local chai wala remembers exactly how much sugar I like, not because I’m a regular customer, but because attention to small details is its own form of prayer.

The Practice of Presence

I learned that spirituality isn’t about adding more to your life; it’s about subtracting the noise until you can hear what was always there. It’s not about following the right teachers; it’s about becoming your own student.

The most profound spiritual practice I discovered during my “divine detox” was simply showing up fully to whatever was in front of me. Washing dishes with complete attention. Listening to my mother’s stories about her day without checking my phone. Sitting with my own thoughts without immediately reaching for a distraction.

Coming Back to Faith, Not Following

These days, my spiritual practice looks different. Less complicated, more authentic. I still pray, but it feels more like having a conversation with an old friend rather than pitching a business proposal to a venture capitalist.

I still meditate, but I’ve stopped timing it. Some days it’s five minutes, some days it’s an hour. The meditation happens when it needs to happen, not when my app tells me it should.

I’ve learned that faith isn’t about having all the answers; it’s about being comfortable with the questions. It’s not about following someone else’s path to enlightenment; it’s about walking your own path with honesty and curiosity.

The truth is, we live in a world that has turned everything—including spirituality—into content. But the divine can’t be consumed, packaged, or optimized. It can only be experienced, one honest moment at a time.

A New Kind of Following

I’ve started following God again, but this time it’s different. It’s not the desperate following of someone trying to hack their way to happiness. It’s the gentle following of someone who has learned that the divine doesn’t speak in notifications or trending hashtags.

It speaks in the quiet moments between breaths. In the pause before you respond to someone who’s hurt you. In the choice to be kind when nobody’s watching. In the decision to be present when your mind wants to be anywhere else.

The Wisdom of Unsubscribing

Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is to question your spirituality. To examine whether your practices are bringing you closer to truth or just making you feel superior to your former, less-enlightened self.

If you find yourself feeling more anxious about your spiritual progress than peaceful in your spiritual practice, it might be time for your own divine detox. Unfollow the noise. Unsubscribe from the spiritual comparison trap. Give yourself permission to not know, to not have it all figured out, to be beautifully, messily human.

Because here’s what I learned during my time in the spiritual wilderness: God doesn’t need you to be perfect. The universe doesn’t require your constant improvement. The divine loves you not for your morning rituals or your meditation streak, but for the simple, radical act of being yourself.

The most authentic prayer I know these days is just this: “Help me show up as I am, not as I think I should be.”

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