If you have spent any time in spiritual spaces online, you have probably seen the terms open and closed practices come up. What does that mean?
What Is an Open Practice?
An open spiritual practice has been shared freely across cultures, often by the communities that originated it. These are traditions that welcome participation from people outside the culture of origin. Many meditation practices, certain forms of energy work, and some herbal traditions fall into this category.
Intention and respect while engaging in an open practice are still essential.
What Is a Closed Practice?
A closed practice belongs to a specific cultural or spiritual community and is not intended for use by those outside of it. These practices are often tied to lineage, initiation, community membership, or sacred relationships that cannot simply be replicated by reading a book or watching a video.
Some examples include certain Indigenous ceremonial practices, initiatory traditions within African Diasporic religions like Candomblé, Vodou, and Lucumí, and specific rites within closed mystery traditions.
A common comparison I use is that reading the Bible is an open practice. However, receiving communion during Catholic mass is reserved for those who have received the Eucharist. One must be initiated before participating in the ritual aspect of the closed practice.
Closed does not mean secret for the sake of exclusivity. It means sacred in a way that requires relationship, accountability, and belonging to access fully.
Why This Distinction Matters
Here is the part I want to sit with for a moment.
The wellness and spirituality industry has a long history of lifting practices out of their original contexts, repackaging them, and selling them to people with no connection to the communities those practices came from. Sometimes this happens with full awareness. Often it does not. But the impact is the same either way. These sacred practices should not be viewed as trends.
When a closed practice is taken without permission, it is not just cultural appropriation in the abstract. It is a real harm to real communities. Communities that have often had their traditions suppressed, criminalized, or eradicated. Communities that are still here, still practicing, still protecting what is theirs.
As someone who carries indigenous Salvadoran ancestry and who has spent years in spiritual practice, I feel this personally. I have seen traditions from my own lineage repackaged and sold without credit, without context, and without any relationship to the people those traditions belong to.
What This Means for Your Practice
None of this is meant to make you feel like spirituality is a minefield. It is not. Numerous rich and open traditions welcome sincere seekers with open arms.
What it does mean is that curiosity is not enough on its own. Intention is not enough on its own. Research matters. Relationship matters. Asking who originated a practice, whether it is open or closed, and what respectful engagement looks like is part of the practice too.
Some questions worth sitting with:
- Where did this practice come from, and who does it belong to?
- Has this tradition been shared openly by its community of origin, or has it been taken without consent?
- Am I engaging with this practice in a way that honors its roots, or am I extracting what feels useful and leaving the rest?
- Is there a way to learn from or support the communities this practice comes from?
These are not questions with easy answers. But they are the right questions to be asking. Please be mindful and respectful that while there are some closed practices that can be initiated into, there are others that are closed due to lineage.
You Can Build a Rich Practice Without Crossing Those Lines
I want to say this clearly, because I think it gets lost sometimes in these conversations: there is no shortage of open, welcoming, deeply nourishing spiritual practices available to you.
Tarot and oracle work. Journaling and shadow work. Meditation and breathwork. Astrology. Herbalism rooted in your own ancestry. Energy practices that have been shared freely. Ancestral connection through your own lineage. These are just a few.
You do not have to appropriate anything to build a spiritual life that is full, meaningful, and deeply your own.
A Note on Gray Areas
I would be doing you a disservice if I pretended every practice falls neatly into one category or the other. Some traditions exist in genuinely complex territory. Some practices have evolved across cultures over centuries in ways that make origin difficult to trace.
In those gray areas, the answer is not to throw up your hands. It is to go slower. To seek out voices from within the originating community. To listen more than you speak. To hold your conclusions loosely and stay open to learning more.
That is what respectful spiritual engagement looks like. Not perfection. Presence and accountability.
This Is Part of What Staying Aligned Means
Alignment is not just about feeling good. It is about living in integrity with your values. For those of us who care about community, about justice, about honoring the people whose wisdom has shaped the world we live in, that integrity extends to our spiritual lives too.
You can be curious and careful at the same time. You can explore and still hold boundaries. You can build a practice that is genuinely yours without taking what was never yours to take.
That is the kind of spirituality I want to talk about here. The kind that holds both depth and accountability. The kind that makes room for all of us.
Stay aligned, one day at a time.
With love, Alesandra Folks
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