Why Spiritual Trends Lead to Spiritual Emptiness
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Why Tarot, Reiki, Your New "Gift" of Reading Everyone, & Your Bali Trip Are Your Free Ticket to Hell on Earth
By [Hind Silkan] | Personal Essay
Let me start somewhere you probably didn't expect.
I wasn't raised religious. I wasn't sheltered or afraid of the world. I was curious, deeply feeling, spiritually hungry, the kind of girl who needed meaning the way other people need oxygen. And the wellness world handed me an entire menu of it.
Tarot. Reiki. Energy healing. The growing, quiet certainty that I could feel people, their pain, their energy, their intentions, before they ever opened their mouths. And then Bali. Because obviously, Bali. The spiritual finishing school for every woman who's ever burned sage and called it shadow work.
I did all of it. I believed in all of it.
And then I became Muslim, and everything I thought I knew cracked open.
This isn't a lecture. I'm not standing over you with a rulebook. I'm the girl who was in it — deep in it, and I'm telling you what I saw from the inside, what I felt when I left, and what I wish someone had said to me before I spent years building a spiritual life on sand.
So sit with me for a minute. Because this is going to get real.
The Tarot Cards, Let's Talk About What You're Actually Doing
Tarot has one of the best rebrandings in modern wellness history. In 2025, it's not fortune telling it's shadow work. It's self-reflection. It's a mirror, not a crystal ball. Perfectly packaged for the spiritually curious woman who is too smart to believe in magic but too hungry for meaning to put the deck down.
I understand it completely. I lived it.
But here's what the aesthetic doesn't tell you: in Islamic theology, the act of seeking knowledge of the unseen " ghayb " through any means other than what Allah has revealed is not a grey area. The Quran addresses it directly. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) was explicit: whoever goes to a fortune-teller and believes what they say has disbelieved in what was revealed to him.
Not might have strayed. Has disbelieved.
Now, I know your first response: "But I'm not predicting the future. I'm just using it for reflection."
I said the same thing. For years.
But here's the honest question I had to ask myself: if the cards are just a mirror, why do I feel genuinely anxious when I pull a bad one? Why does a good reading lift my mood in a way that lasts for days? Why do I consult them before big decisions?
Because I wasn't using them as a mirror. I was using them as a source. And there's a world of difference between the two.
The potential for sliding from "reflection" into "reliance" is a risk not worth taking spiritually. That line hit me harder than anything a scholar ever said, because it described my exact journey. What started as curiosity became a quiet dependency I didn't even notice building.
The cards became the thing I turned to when I was scared. Before Allah ever was.
Reiki, The Practice Dressed So Beautifully You Almost Miss What It Is
Of all the things I walked away from, Reiki was the one I defended the longest.
It's healing. It's energy. It's hands. How could something so gentle, so rooted in care, be anything but good?
Here's what I know now.
Reiki is built on the concept of a universal life force energy, ki, that flows through living beings, that practitioners can channel and direct. It sounds harmless. Peaceful, even. But when you trace that belief to its root, you find a theological claim that sits directly in opposition to tawheed, the absolute oneness of Allah.
Believing in this universal life force energy which runs through every living being and that it heals and affects our health is, in Islamic understanding, attributing the dominion of this universe and life to other than Allah.
The Quran puts it plainly: "And if Allah should touch you with adversity, there is no remover of it except Him." (6:17)
Not energy. Not a practitioner. Not a symbol drawn in the air above your body.
Him.
What shook me most wasn't the Islamic ruling on Reiki, it was realising how thoroughly the practice had rewired where I looked for healing. When I was in pain, physical or emotional, my first instinct wasn't dua. It wasn't prayer. It was: who can work on my energy?
I had built an entire healing framework that had no room for God in it. Not really. He was a nice addition, maybe. A finishing touch. But the source of healing in my worldview had become something I could book an appointment with.
As Muslims, we have mindful and righteous scholars, individuals connected to the Quran and prophetic guidance, Quranic healing through its verses, prophetic supplications, litanies of the pious throughout centuries,all of which has brought about change for the better and been tried and tested.
I had walked past all of that, centuries of it, to pay someone to hover their hands over my chakras.
Your "Gift", The One That's Actually the Most Dangerous
This one is personal. And I say it with love, because I had it too.
At some point in every spiritual woman's New Age journey, something shifts. You start noticing things. Feeling people. Sensing energy in rooms. Picking up on emotions before they're spoken. You pull a card for a friend and it's uncannily accurate. Someone tells you that you have a gift. And something in you, especially if you're neurodivergent, especially if you've always felt like you experience the world at a higher frequency than most, believes it.
I believed it.
And listen, some of what we experience is real. Deep empathy is real. Heightened sensitivity is real. Pattern recognition is real. Intuition, in the most human sense of the word, is real.
But the New Age world takes that real, God-given sensitivity and routes it somewhere it was never meant to go. It turns it into a power you possess. A gift you can offer others. An identity you build a practice around.
And when you're charging people to "read" them? When you're letting people make life decisions based on what you sense? You have stepped into territory that Islam names clearly, and the naming is not soft.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said that whoever goes to a fortune-teller and asks them about something, their prayer will not be accepted for forty days. That's not about punishment for its own sake. It's pointing to a severance, between the person and the connection they're trying to build with Allah.
When I stopped calling myself an empath with gifts and started calling myself a sensitive woman trying to understand herself, something settled in me that the "gift" never could.
Bali, The Destination That Sells You God Without Naming Him
I want to be careful here, because I know how sacred Bali feels. I know how real the experience is, the rice terraces, the ceremonies, the healers, the sense that the entire island is alive with something.
It is. Bali is genuinely, deeply spiritual.
But it's spiritual in a specific direction.
The wellness industry has turned Bali into something it was never meant to be for us, a spiritual blank slate where every woman can project her own meaning onto Hindu ceremonies she doesn't fully understand, water temples she enters as a tourist, healers whose tradition is rooted in an entirely different cosmology than the one she's hoping to access.
Bali healing retreats combine meditation, energy healing, fire-blessing rituals, sacred sound baths, all presented as paths to purify mind, body and soul. And for the woman who is hungry genuinely, desperately hungry for transcendence , it works. The setting works. The intention works. The community of other seeking women works.
But here is what I had to reckon with: I had flown to the other side of the world looking for God. I had sat in a water temple, spoken to a Balinese healer, and felt moved, and then I came home, and within three weeks I was exactly the same as before I left.
Because a location cannot give you what only a relationship can.
The spiritual hunger that Bali is selling to, that ache for transcendence, for ritual, for a life structured around something sacred, Islam answers it. Not as a weekend retreat. As a life. Five prayers a day that anchor you to the divine every few hours. A lunar calendar that marks your year. Dhikr, the remembrance of Allah, that you can do in a car, in a queue, in the dark at 3am when Bali is six thousand miles away and you need something real.
What I found in Islam was not a less beautiful spirituality than what Bali offered.
It was a more honest one.
Hell on Earth, What the Title Actually Means
I want to address the title, because I meant it, but not the way you might think.
"Hell on earth" is not fire and brimstone. It's not divine punishment raining down.
It's what happens to your interior life when you spend years building your spirituality on things that cannot hold you.
It's the anxiety that never fully lifts because you're always checking something, a card, a transit, a sign, instead of resting in certainty. It's the exhaustion of being spiritually "on" all the time, reading everyone, sensing everything, carrying energy that isn't yours. It's the identity crisis when the practices you built your whole self around turn out to have been taking from you more than they gave.
It's the feeling of being spiritually full and somehow still starving.
I know that feeling. I lived in it. And I walked out of it, not through another ritual, not through a better healer, not through a more expensive retreat.
Through the simplest, most radical act I'd ever performed.
I stopped outsourcing my soul. And I started talking directly to the One who made it.
For the Woman Who Sees Herself Here
If you're reading this and feeling defensive, good. I felt defensive too. Defensiveness usually means something landed.
If you're reading this and feeling something softer, a quiet recognition, a wondering then this is for you.
You don't have to throw everything away overnight. I didn't. But I'd ask you to sit honestly with one question:
What am I actually looking for when I pull a card, book a session, or board a plane to Bali?
If the answer is connection to something true and lasting
That's already inside you.
It was always the destination. The practices were just detours.
I'm a neurodivergent revert Muslim navigating faith, clean living, and the beautiful chaos of an examined life. If this article stirred something in you, come find me. The conversation is just getting started.