The Parts We Condemn Become the Demons We Fight

There’s a particular kind of transformation that happens when someone returns to faith, tradition, or a spiritual home after a season of searching. It can be sincere, beautiful, and steadying. When a person finally feels anchored again—when devotion becomes alive in them—when their love returns—something in the heart returns, and the mind relaxes. There is relief in being accepted and feeling as one belongs once again.

But there’s a shadow that sometimes follows this epic return.

It often arrives in the way one speaks and creates narratives about past events, alignments, or relationships—accepted fallacies gone awry.

Many people go exploring after being hurt—especially when the hurt comes from a community that once held them in safety. When one’s been shamed, rejected, misunderstood, or spiritually injured, the soul does what it must to survive. It looks for a place to breath. It looks outside the current container. It looks for meaning beyond the current paradigm. It looks for a way to continue expansion.

For some, that exploration includes what others call “New Age,” mystical practices, alternative frameworks, or simply a season of spiritual experimentation. Not because they were foolish or sinister—but because they were trying to heal. Trying to understand themselves. Trying to find their place in the world again. And the healing modality arrived differently, openly, and compassionately.

That chapter isn’t an embarrassment. It’s a chapter of intelligence and persistence. Radical exploration as one looks for the missing part. This seeking chapter is part of one’s original design—part of how the person kept walking forward when forward was difficult.

And here’s the danger that occurs during this sort of eclipse: when the shadow appears as something other than its purpose, and that earlier chapter gets spoken about with contempt—when it’s dismissed as delusion, darkness, deception, or stupidity—something fractures.

Not just socially. Internally a schism is born. A demon is cast in the fires of personal rejection.

When one condemns the path once walked, one may not realize who or what is being condemned, including the aspects of the self who walked it. The searching self. The hurt self. The independent self. The hopeful self. The curious self. The innocent self. The powerful self. Etc.…  

And what we reject from within ourselves does not disappear. It becomes exiled. It is birthed seemingly separate from self.

Many wisdom traditions—Christian mystical streams, Buddhism, Shaivism, shamanic cosmologies—understand this in their own language: exiled parts do not die. They haunt. They return. They demand to be seen.

They become demons.

Not “demons” as cartoon villains. They become literal energetic entities. They are the abandoned demons of separation—the split-off aspects of self that were cast out through self-judgment and self-abandonment. These fragments as created by that part of me was bad, or this part of me is acceptable, grow into something independent that wants back, wants unity, wants non-judgmental love. But the frequency of the mind is such that it sees anything that feels a threat to its dominance, safety, or survival as evil. So it vilifies that energy, those aspects of self as they try to return. All this catalyzed by the fuel of shame and fear.

When either mind, heart, body, soul, or dream is rejected, it doesn’t become holy. It becomes hungry. It becomes distorted. It becomes something we later fight—either in ourselves or mirrored by others.

This is how spiritual superiority is born: not from truth, but from disowning. And this occurs when moving from one believe to another. Not just from New Age to Christianity or vice versa .

And it’s also how communities fracture. Because when someone speaks harshly about who they used to be, it can sound—whether they intend it or not—like they’re condemning the people who are still there. Or the people who helped them survive that season. Or the people who are searching right now the way they once searched. This entrenches the exiled parts into false stories so that they might never be accepted – out of fear of rejection, being seen as hypocritical, or called out. Viscous shadow loops.

From what I can tell, each religious or spiritual belief has a simple core purpose which many of us relate to. The core teachings of old traditions I study are inherently love-based. Kashmiri Shaivism, Buddhism, Christianity, Shamanism. The roots of all these are about unity and non-judgemental love. Their purpose is unified love. This is a love that creates unity for all people through its own method. But the game isn’t quite that simple, because down even deeper, these communities strive to help followers find enlightenment, or said another way, unity of self. This self-unity includes the unification of all aspects of mind, heart, body, soul, and dream. Some would refer to the unification of chakras or energy centers. When any aspect of self is rejected or cast out, they become the abandoned demons of separation that we later fight.   

Every stage of a life path has its role and truth.

The earlier steps are not enemies of the later ones. They are the ground that made the later ones possible—flowing from one to another, perfectly.

One doesn’t have to agree with everything once believed or experienced. One doesn’t have to stay in a worldview now outgrown. One is allowed to choose a new home without needing an story or shameful justification. One can just simply move, shift, flow, exit and enter. No story required.

One’s past self deserves gentle kindness. The person who carried the earlier version of self through something. That person was trying. That person was not disposable. That person was brave and courageous.

True spiritual maturity does not require exile.

It requires integration.

It requires the unification of self—the willingness to love and include the parts that were confused, the parts that were wounded, the parts that were experimenting, the parts that were desperate for meaning.

Because when we refuse to honor those parts, we create an inner war. And sooner or later, that war leaks outward.

So if you are newly devoted, newly anchored, newly in love with your faith—beautiful.

Just don’t let your devotion become a blade turned against your own history or against One’s own liberty.

Honor the searching self. Honor the hurt self. Honor the hopeful self. None of them need to be shamed for the others to exist.

One’s current path doesn’t need enemies to be real.

And one’s wholeness doesn’t require a scapegoat.

Reintegration of one’s rejected parts is what helps people heal—truly heal.

This is why I am here. Helping people integrate cast demons so that one might return, ignite, and become whole as one is, where one is, who one is, why one is. Book a session here. (O|OO|O)

Racheal Lomas