Is the Prescriptive Approach Making Life Exhausting?

The prescriptive approach is exhausting...to me at least.

Personally, I’ve danced in prescriptive realms a lot. Maybe most of us have?

First, in the fields of medicine and physical therapy, healing is often reduced to diagnosing, treating, and fixing.

The body is seen as a machine to be repaired, with pain as a problem to be silenced rather than a messenger to be listened to and stood under. 

I have encountered a similar exhaustion with religious circles. 

Rigid doctrines and prescriptive beliefs seek to bind the mysteries of the human experience into narrow containers. There is little room for doubt, ambiguity, or the wildness of the soul’s journey. It is wearying to feel that genuine spiritual inquiry has to conform to predetermined answers rather than unfolding through direct experience.

In new-age spiritual circles, the prescriptive approach lingers—masked in language of liberation, but often caught in cycles of "doing it right." 

Practices become prescriptions: meditate this way, breathe this way, heal this wound, manifest this outcome. The journey inward becomes a project to optimize or perfect rather than an art of listening and becoming.

Now, on social media, the prescriptive approach echoes louder than ever. 

Complex inner processes are reduced to bite-sized advice and one-size-fits-all solutions. 

The soul’s call for depth and mystery is flattened into formulas. 

It can all feel disheartening—how can something as wild and untamable as one’s individuation be packaged and sold?

Perhaps it exhausts the soul because it denies the sacredness of the unknown and the depth of suffering.

It seems to me like the prescriptive approach dismisses this, mistaking complexity for disorder, soulfulness for dysfunction. 

It overlooks that healing is not about eradicting wounds but about tending to them—allowing the daimon to shape us through the very suffering we’d rather escape.

This doesn’t promise comfort or certainty, but it beckons us toward a life that is uniquely our own.

The exhaustion lies in the endless pursuit of a solution rather than the willingness to dwell in the complexity of the human experience. 

What happens if we let go of the need to fix?

Ahh, breath….