What You Keep Covered
Why Lent asks you to give up the quick fixes—so you can finally face what’s been waiting underneath
Lent always involves giving up something. Why is that? Why do we give things up—especially the things we crave?
Because what we’re really craving isn’t the thing. It’s wholeness. That feeling that you’re enough. That the present moment is complete. That you can inhabit your own life without the nagging sense that something is missing.
But we keep trying to find that wholeness “out there.” As if the world could hand it to us. As if the right purchase, the right pleasure, the right attention, the right person, the right achievement could finally make us feel settled inside ourselves.
It can’t. Because wholeness is an inside job.
If something is lacking—something you know should be there but isn’t—you can’t go shopping for it. A hole in the soul doesn’t get filled by external things. Because what looks like a void is often just a cover, not emptiness but a lid.
What you’re looking for is already there. It’s just hidden.
So Lent asks you to step back from the quick fixes—the dopamine hits, the validation loops, the obsessions, the little anesthetics you reach for without thinking. Not because those things are “bad,” but because they keep the lid sealed. They keep you distracted from the place where your deeper life is waiting.
And then the real question shows up: if you stop reaching for the outer fixes… what rises?
What’s underneath the cover that wants to be seen?
Whatever it is, it has power. You can feel that. And when we sense hidden power in ourselves, we usually fear it. It’s natural. Why lift a lid when you don’t know what’s been living underneath?
That’s the dilemma, isn’t it?
This is shadow work. And now you can see why so few people dare to engage it. The thing we need most is often hiding in the place we least want to look.
Can you go there?
More to the point—do you want to go there?
If you do, Lent is a good time to try.