What if leaving religion behind didn't actually free you — it just made your spiritual life thinner?
I say I'm spiritual but not religious. I've said it for years. It felt like the honest answer, the evolved answer. I left the parts of Christianity that didn't make sense to me, did my research into what Jesus actually taught versus what Paul taught, went deep into Gnostic texts, and built something that felt true. That phrase — spiritual but not religious — was my way of saying: I kept what matters and left what didn't.
But talking to Liz Bucar made me wonder how much I actually left on the table when I walked out.
Liz is a religious studies scholar who spent years as a skeptic of religion herself. Her book Beyond Wellness looks at the wellness practices most of us are doing — meditation, breathwork, sound baths, clean eating, fitness as spirituality — and traces them back to their religious roots. What she found wasn't an argument for going back to church. It was something more uncomfortable: that when we strip practices out of their original container, we often strip out the parts that make them actually work.
What “Spiritual But Not Religious” Really Means (And What It Costs You)
The phrase spiritual but not religious has a PR problem built into it. What most people mean when they say it is: I'm interested in the real thing, not the institution. I want the experience, not the dogma. I've been hurt by organized religion, or I just think it's intellectually indefensible, and I've moved on.
That's a fair position. I held it. I still hold most of it.
But Liz's point is that “religious container” doesn't mean institution. It means community, ethics, history, and accountability. It means knowing what a practice was designed to do to you before you started doing it. It means having other people in the room when you do it.
When we talk about “spiritual but not religious,” we're often describing a solo project. We find practices that feel good, we do them alone, we measure them against our own internal experience, and we move on when they stop working or something new comes along. Liz's research kept surfacing the same pattern: the same practices, embedded in community with ethical grounding and historical context, worked better. They created more lasting change. They pointed people outward, not just inward.
That's not a small thing to lose.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
Liz gets into something most people in the spiritual community don't want to hear — that some of our practices have adverse side effects when we do them wrong. Meditation sickness is real. Certain breathwork isn't for everyone. And doing deep ego dissolution work in isolation is, as Liz puts it, a contradiction in terms. You can't dissolve into oneness by yourself.
She also talks about manifestation in a way that actually makes sense — not the Instagram version where you visualize a car and wait, but the deeper version where you get honest about your core values, understand what you actually want and why, and do real alignment work. The religious traditions that practiced manifestation understood it as values clarification first, action second. The influencer version skips both.
One part that hit me personally: she talks about devotion. And how the spiritual but not religious identity, in trying to stay unattached and fluid, sometimes ends up with no real devotion to anything. I recognized that. I went through a long phase of collecting practices — breathwork, somatic work, cold plunging, this meditation, that teacher — and none of it stuck until I let myself actually commit to something. Devotion felt like the thing I'd been allergic to because it sounded too much like religion. But it's what made everything else work.
Why Spiritual Bypassing Gets Worse When You're Doing It Alone
Liz brought up something that I've been thinking about since we recorded: a lot of what we call spiritual practice is optimized for individual self-improvement and individual calm. The problem is that the world is not calm right now, and meditating yourself into a state where you can tolerate what's happening around you isn't the same as flourishing.
She mentioned a critique of the mindfulness-as-political-bypass problem — the idea that when meditation becomes about quieting yourself down enough to not engage, it's doing the opposite of what most of these traditions actually intended. Buddhist practice, Sufi practice, indigenous worldviews — they're almost always oriented toward collective responsibility. Seven generations out. Accountability to people you'll never meet.
That's very different from the wellness version, which is usually just: feel better, be more productive, live longer.
I think about the people who've told me they've been meditating for years and still feel disconnected. Still feel like something is missing. And I wonder how much of that is the solo container. How much of it is that they're doing real work, genuinely, but they're doing it without the friction and accountability of other people. Without being asked to apply it to something beyond themselves.
The religious traditions understood that the self-work and the world-work are the same project. That's the piece we tend to drop.
The Uncomfortable Truth About “Spiritual But Not Religious”
I'm not going to tell you to go back to church. That's not what Liz is saying either.
But I do think there's something worth sitting with here. A lot of us left institutional religion because we saw the corruption, the hypocrisy, the ways power gets concentrated and then abused. That's real and worth paying attention to. But in leaving, some of us also left behind the communal practice, the historical grounding, and the ethical accountability — and we called all of it “religion” when really those things are something different.
The wellness industry stepped in to fill that gap. And it's not doing a great job. It gave us practices stripped of context, teachers who sell us what we want to hear because that's what keeps us subscribed, and a version of spirituality that's almost entirely about individual optimization. Bryan Johnson as the logical endpoint — optimizing every variable of the body so you can live as long as possible, with nothing to say about what you'd live that time for.
Liz's daughter applied to Cornell while Liz was finishing this book. She was “manifesting Cornell.” And Liz's whole intervention was: what do you actually want? What is it about Cornell? What are your values? What kind of person do you want to be after college? Real manifestation, she says, is values work. It's alignment work. It's figuring out what you actually want so you can stop chasing whatever you've been told to want.
That's also just… religion. Done well.
How to Go Deeper in Your Spiritual Practices
Liz's challenge to listeners is simple and it's the one I'm actually going to try. If you're spiritual but not religious, pick one practice you're already drawn to. Something you come back to. Then learn more about where it came from.
Not to convert. Not to join an institution. Just to understand what the practice was designed to do, what community originally held it, and what the ethics around it looked like. Read a book about it. Find a Dharma talk online. Look for a teacher you actually trust.
The point isn't to find the “authentic” original version and do that instead. It's that understanding context tends to deepen practice. It gives you something to orient toward beyond your own internal feedback loop.
I've felt this with meditation, with prayer, with the time I've spent understanding Gnostic Christianity. Knowing where something comes from and why it exists changes how you show up to it. You get more out of it. And you're less likely to abandon it the next time something shinier comes along.
About Liz Bucar
Liz Bucar is a professor of religious studies whose research focuses on the intersection of wellness practices and their religious roots. Her book Beyond Wellness investigates practices like meditation, sound baths, clean eating, and fitness culture — tracing what they lose when they get extracted from their original context. She writes the Substack Religion Reimagined, which extends these conversations for free.
Resources and Links from This Episode
- Liz Bucar's book Beyond Wellness — available wherever you buy books or through your local library
- Liz's Substack Religion Reimagined at libucar.com
- All links from this episode at mindlove.com/458
Take This Work Deeper
This is exactly the kind of conversation we sit with in the Mind Love Collective. One call a month, one theme, real people doing this work alongside you — not alone. If something in this episode stirred something up, that's a good sign you shouldn't process it by yourself. Join us at mindlove.com/collective.
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