Living With Spiritual Tides: Why Your Practice Ebbs and Flows (and Why That’s Okay)

There are seasons in life when your inner world feels unusually bright and alive. Your practices come easily, moments of reflection or silence feel rich, even ordinary experiences seem touched by a quiet sense of meaning. It can feel as though something in you has opened toward the world, and the world has opened in return.

Anyone who has been through such a period knows how reassuring it can be, how grounding and clarifying. But inevitably (sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly) the tide begins to recede. Practices that once felt natural now feel stiff or distant, insights that used to arise spontaneously grow quiet, and the motivation to meditate, reflect, or read begins to thin. The world has a way of always pulling us toward the nitty gritty necessities and immediate concerns, or the profane.

Many others have noticed the way inner life rises and falls like the sea, and even defines spiritual influence in terms of “ebbs and flows, like the rising and falling of tides”. References can be found in Christianity(1), Buddhism (2), psychology(3), and more.

When the tide is low, many treat this shift as a kind of personal disappointment. They wonder what they did wrong, or why their spiritual life feels suddenly far away. Yet the more closely you look at the actual texture of a human life, the more natural these rhythms appear. In other words, this is not a failure. It is the way living minds naturally move throughout life.

When the tide is high, we often feel that we have found our “real” spiritual self – the clear, inspired version of who we hoped to be. But this is only half of the picture. A life of meaning also includes quieter seasons; stretches when something in us pulls inward or needs rest. It can be tempting to resist low tides or interpret them as losses, but if we approach them with even a little bit of curiosity, a different picture emerges. Low tide creates the stillness in which old assumptions can loosen their grip. It reveals the parts of the inner landscape we don’t always see when everything is flooded with energy and inspiration. And it allows our insights to settle, deepen, and take root rather than evaporate as passing moods.

Spiritual Naturalists have an advantage here, because we do not need to interpret these changes as supernatural signs, punishments, or gifts. They are simply what happens when attention, emotion, environment, and life circumstances shift (and they always do). Some phases of life naturally draw us outward: new relationships, creative breakthroughs, meaningful work, intellectual discovery. Other phases pull us inward: grief, uncertainty, exhaustion, doubt, or the simple fact of being overextended. The tide follows these movements the way an organism responds to weather. There is no moral story attached to the seasons of the soul.

Minimum Viable Practice
Still, many people feel uneasy when their practices weaken. A helpful way to soften that anxiety is the idea of a minimum viable practice. This is a tiny, almost effortless gesture that keeps a  small thread of connection intact even when the inner tide is low.

This might mean, for example…

• pausing for three slow breaths when you wake up, or
• noticing one thing you appreciate before bed, or
• reading a single paragraph from a favorite book of wisdom.

These are not meant to maintain some imagined standard of devotion. They are simply ways of keeping a gentle opening in place. These can be a pilot light that stays warm even when the flame itself is small.

When the tide eventually rises again (and it will when the time is right) you may feel renewed energy for deeper reading, reflection, or community. These moments of high tide can be wonderful times to shape small routines or explore insights that will support you later.

But none of this is mandatory. In a naturalistic understanding of spiritual life, high tide and low tide are equally real and equally part of the path. You do not become more spiritual when you are inspired, nor less spiritual when you are tired. You are simply in a different season.

Seasons Pass
Many thinkers across cultures have tried to name these quieter phases. Christian mystics spoke of a “dark night,” not as a punishment but as the stripping away of earlier certainties, a period in which the familiar forms of meaning fall silent so that new ones can emerge (4) .

Zen practitioners sometimes describe stretches of dullness or dryness as entirely ordinary, a sign not of failure but of progress through the terrain every meditator eventually encounters. Secular psychology likewise finds that periods of spiritual dryness often precedes deeper integration or renewed clarity. If people with wildly different worldviews all describe something similar, it may simply be a universal feature of contemplative human life.

What matters for us is that none of these low-tide experiences separate us from the path. You don’t need to feel illuminated to be living meaningfully. You don’t need constant insight to be growing. You don’t need enthusiasm to be on course. You can be distracted, discouraged, overwhelmed, numb, grieving, or simply tired, and still living in wisdom. The very purpose of our practice, after all, is for the daily challenges of living life.

If you are in a low tide now, there is nothing you need to fix. Nothing you need to prove. You have not lost anything essential. You are simply in a different rhythm, a different contour of the same ongoing process. When the tide turns, you will find that your practice has not disappeared; it has been resting, settling, reshaping itself in ways you might not yet see. And if  you offer yourself even a little gentleness during this time, that gentleness itself becomes the practice. And when the tide turns, it will meet you exactly where you are, not where you think you should have been.

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Learn about Membership in the Spiritual Naturalist Society

The Spiritual Naturalist Society works to spread awareness of spiritual naturalism as a way of life, develop its thought and practice, and help bring together like-minded practitioners in fellowship.

SNS strives to include diverse voices within the spectrum of naturalistic spirituality. Authors will vary in their opinions, terms, and outlook. The views of no single author therefore necessarily reflect those of all Spiritual Naturalists or of SNS.
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References:

1. https://www.wisdomlib.org/christianity/concept/ebbs-and-flows
2. https://zenstudiespodcast.com/buddhist-practice-ebb-and-flow/
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7997817/
4.  https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/dark-night-soul-saint-
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