I very much appreciate your discussion of shadow work, which felt quite true to my personal experiences.
I can no longer endure people who talk about shadow work while acting enlightened.
Because if you somehow become enlightened in one of these communities or manage to trip into real shadow work, you cannot avoid the rage. (And why wouldn’t anyone be feeling rage at this cultural moment anyway?)
I feel physically ill on behalf of women clinging to these types of identities right now. It’s better to just be fucked up.
Thank you for sharing this and for talking about your experiences. I find most famous spiritual gurus are selling the same crap and calling it enlightenment, profiting off others pain and exploiting it for profit. They have no heart and do not accept any accountability for their actions. As a hypnotherapist, I see it all too often now that other people claim to heal all your wounds with a snap of the finger.
I tell clients that when you break a bone or have surgery, healing takes time. You didn’t get here overnight, you cannot expect to be “cured” overnight. While some changes can happen quickly, others take time because by the time we recognize that we need help, there is a lot to untangle.
Our society in general has attached money to abundance which has been detrimental to so many. Abundance is an energy, a feeling, not a thing. Financial freedom as is any of our freedoms takes work, diligence, and discipline and it’s unfortunate most want to skip that part. We are responsible for our experiences in this world, not someone else.
It's always so interesting to me how these fake gurus preach about how "healing isn't linear, trust the process, etc." and yet they also create these "transformation" programs that promise to quantum leap your healing. It looks contradictory but the contradiction is absolutely by design. Because THE PROMISE is the hook to get people through the door while the "healing takes time, trust the process" philosophy is what keeps people paying. So when it doesn't work, they can blame the person, not the method. "You're just not ready yet." Everything is to serve the funnel, never the person. That's the difference between someone helping you heal vs. someone selling you healing.
So glad you are bringing these extractive dynamics to light. As you have written about, these gurus don’t promote healing, rather dependency. Many folks in our world are wounded, a bit lost, and often struggling financially. It’s upsetting when these vulnerabilities are targeted and then exploited. Predatory capitalism at work.
Amen, Kellie! Your clients are fortunate to have you as their hypnotherapist. Abundance is an energy/feeling for me too, and gratitude and humility amplify it.
Applauding you for this. I did a post about appreciation for her book, because similar to you, I read it on the way to the Osho Commune in Puné. I've always been a kinky person so it freed me in a way I needed at the time to give myself permission to be more of me. I actually had no idea she went or did magick stuff at all until she died.
Then I saw a video pop up on here of her in an interview with some woman and it was so hard to watch. You could see and hear her internal truth about her pain while she claimed she would just dissolve into the absolute and be mysteriously fine.
I know that to be tapping out of your body personally. I'm not here to bag her, her book came along when I valued it, deep in my own embracing of sexuality, thank my lucky stars the enlightenment for sale I witnessed in India smacked me out of it before I gaslit myself anymore..
Yep, shit things happen. People can be really shit. And no amount of fairy dust can blind you once you realise it. No more silver linings, just reality.
Thank you for sharing this. It’s empowering to be able to hold both truths at once, that you can find someone’s teaching helpful and also acknowledge that the system it came out of was harmful. These two things don’t have to cancel each other out and I think it’s an honest place to stand. I’m really glad to see you on the other side of it all!
I couldn't agree more. Holding often conflicting truths I've found is paramount and was initially what was creating my existential crisis to begin with..how can it be real and unreal at the same time? I swung from none of it being real to it was ALL real. It was only in the embracing of conflicting truths simultaneously that really allowed me to see.
I’ve been thinking that maybe instead of calling it spiritual bypass we should start naming it spiritually coping. Ultimately that’s what this is. Never being able to get to the actual pain of “you didn’t deserve this, you were abused”
Reading your article was a grounded breath of fresh air. I’ve read some whacky to disturbing things around her death and what it means, so this was definitely appreciated
yes, it's definitely a form of coping, 1000%. The inability to really sit with the pain because it's too much to bear. The rabbit hole about her death goes deep, I know. It's a lot. I tried to not add to the speculations but at the same time I wanted to be frank about who she was, from my observations; it was a delicate line to hold. Thank you for saying that.
I tried to monetize online during covid teaching herbalism. every formula we tried started with "this is how you make millions of dollars." In the end my partner and i gave up as we just weren't interested in the millions of dollars and it was becoming clear that the ones who were were extracting it from us by “teaching us” how to do the same. lol shadow in action!!!!
Its taken me 30 years to settle into the fact that i have a small community who appreciate my work, gifts and service and thats actually enough. more than enough really. we look after each other and the magic flows in its mundane magical way. Its taken a while to understand that alot of society's shadow is the lie of making it big. its such a shadow of capitalism and its awful when it hits and swallows the healers. the herbal world is full off it also.
I lived inside a version of this world, which is part of why this landed so hard for me.
I wasn’t observing these ideas from the outside. I believed many of them. I worked closely with people deeply embedded in this world, and I had experiences that materially harmed me while I continued using the worldview itself to explain what was happening.
That may be the part I find most dangerous now: these frameworks can give you extraordinarily sophisticated explanations for why you should distrust the evidence directly in front of you.
Harm becomes an initiation. Your alarm becomes your shadow. Someone else’s behavior becomes something you manifested or secretly desired. And the more reality contradicts the story, the more spiritual material you have available to explain the contradiction away.
I wrote about my own experience with this last week in “Discernment Is the Real Magic.” I didn’t ultimately need to abandon mystery or spirituality. I needed to stop letting them outrank observable reality.
For me, that distinction came with very real consequences. Thank you for writing this.
oh wow, thank you so much for this. i literally have had this book on my tbr list for years but incidentally have taken a long break from self-help of any kind so i never got around to picking it up. i had zero idea about any of this and yet that book is touted like the alternative communities bible basically. ugh this reminds me of when i found out joe dispenza or whatever was a mf chiropractor. like, folks are so unserious fr. 🤦🏾♀️
This is the best, most clear eyed take I have seen on this yet. Thank you. That point about how it was her own methodology that kept her from healing is fire.
Very interesting. Reading that post, I initially thought that it was a resolution to do better. And then, as you pointed out, it turned into a grift. “This insight has enabled me to create another course — sign up here.”
I’m so glad to be part of a spiritual community that does not charge money for training.
I didn’t know who she was until last week, her story kind of reminds me of Dave (& Rachel) Hollis. The whole “guru” industry is rife with rip-off merchants at best, out and out nefarious deviants at worst. People really do need to stop outsourcing their own power!
I randomly clicked on a video on YouTube earlier about Nicole. Really sad, as I think she was super genuine when she first came on the scene. Her info was quite unique 10 years ago. I guess at the core of all this is the fact money and infamy corrupts people. I would imagine the folks probably who stumble into these worlds have no idea what they’re getting themselves into 😭
I don’t know about this person and it’s upsetting to hear of her death, however, I suspect we’re going to hear a lot more on these peoples’ downfall soon. Those coaches/spiritualists etc who made major profits of harsh selling and (what started as) subtle lies….there are a lot of these people who are crashing out now.
I appreciate your work. It's needed. Have you written anything about the cult of Osho? A lot of people refer to his work, and I don't think they are aware of the misdeeds in his sphere either.
Thank you, I’m interested. About twenty-five years ago, an Astrology teacher I had, Jeff Greene, used him as an example of the spiritual ego, etc etc. It really opened my mind to the cult-trap of being enticed by the “higher mind” concepts a person may be tapped into, while still being quite unresolved in other areas, and the harm that can come from it. And the mass delusional effect that type of charm can have on people.
I don’t know much about her other than I came across her online a few times and I was always fascinated in a sickening way. She repelled me but in a way where I wanted to keep looking.
I’m not surprised no one helped her. She was such a shuckster, played so fast and loose with how she portrayed herself and her offerings. Why would anything think it was anything other than another sales technique?
I hope she can rest between her lives and come back with less pain.
"...aptly titled Babalon (a goddess in the religious and occult system of Thelema). She explained that it was not she who was in charge of this offering, it was Babalon herself, acting through her as a vessel. To help herself and others stop suffering. “To be of service to genuine liberation,” as a self-proclaimed bodhisattva."
In my limited interactions with her on Twitter and Instagram, I often challenged her on the fact that she was appropriating a name and a practice she did not understand. It earned me a nasty meme on one of her marketing funnel posts.
“On some level you enjoy your worst patterns and self-sabotage.”
Reading Notes from the Underground rn, and yeah this is eerily similar to the character’s approach to life. Underground Man enjoys it on all levels. Geez crazy how we can arrive at the same conclusions in different ways.
I very much appreciate your discussion of shadow work, which felt quite true to my personal experiences.
I can no longer endure people who talk about shadow work while acting enlightened.
Because if you somehow become enlightened in one of these communities or manage to trip into real shadow work, you cannot avoid the rage. (And why wouldn’t anyone be feeling rage at this cultural moment anyway?)
I feel physically ill on behalf of women clinging to these types of identities right now. It’s better to just be fucked up.
Yes, I'm really tired of the performance of it too. It's all just a decorated form of spiritual bypass. Thank you for reading and getting it.
Thank you for sharing this and for talking about your experiences. I find most famous spiritual gurus are selling the same crap and calling it enlightenment, profiting off others pain and exploiting it for profit. They have no heart and do not accept any accountability for their actions. As a hypnotherapist, I see it all too often now that other people claim to heal all your wounds with a snap of the finger.
I tell clients that when you break a bone or have surgery, healing takes time. You didn’t get here overnight, you cannot expect to be “cured” overnight. While some changes can happen quickly, others take time because by the time we recognize that we need help, there is a lot to untangle.
Our society in general has attached money to abundance which has been detrimental to so many. Abundance is an energy, a feeling, not a thing. Financial freedom as is any of our freedoms takes work, diligence, and discipline and it’s unfortunate most want to skip that part. We are responsible for our experiences in this world, not someone else.
It's always so interesting to me how these fake gurus preach about how "healing isn't linear, trust the process, etc." and yet they also create these "transformation" programs that promise to quantum leap your healing. It looks contradictory but the contradiction is absolutely by design. Because THE PROMISE is the hook to get people through the door while the "healing takes time, trust the process" philosophy is what keeps people paying. So when it doesn't work, they can blame the person, not the method. "You're just not ready yet." Everything is to serve the funnel, never the person. That's the difference between someone helping you heal vs. someone selling you healing.
So glad you are bringing these extractive dynamics to light. As you have written about, these gurus don’t promote healing, rather dependency. Many folks in our world are wounded, a bit lost, and often struggling financially. It’s upsetting when these vulnerabilities are targeted and then exploited. Predatory capitalism at work.
Exactly and it drives me crazy.
Amen, Kellie! Your clients are fortunate to have you as their hypnotherapist. Abundance is an energy/feeling for me too, and gratitude and humility amplify it.
🙏
Applauding you for this. I did a post about appreciation for her book, because similar to you, I read it on the way to the Osho Commune in Puné. I've always been a kinky person so it freed me in a way I needed at the time to give myself permission to be more of me. I actually had no idea she went or did magick stuff at all until she died.
Then I saw a video pop up on here of her in an interview with some woman and it was so hard to watch. You could see and hear her internal truth about her pain while she claimed she would just dissolve into the absolute and be mysteriously fine.
I know that to be tapping out of your body personally. I'm not here to bag her, her book came along when I valued it, deep in my own embracing of sexuality, thank my lucky stars the enlightenment for sale I witnessed in India smacked me out of it before I gaslit myself anymore..
Yep, shit things happen. People can be really shit. And no amount of fairy dust can blind you once you realise it. No more silver linings, just reality.
Thankyou loving your stuff.
Thank you for sharing this. It’s empowering to be able to hold both truths at once, that you can find someone’s teaching helpful and also acknowledge that the system it came out of was harmful. These two things don’t have to cancel each other out and I think it’s an honest place to stand. I’m really glad to see you on the other side of it all!
I couldn't agree more. Holding often conflicting truths I've found is paramount and was initially what was creating my existential crisis to begin with..how can it be real and unreal at the same time? I swung from none of it being real to it was ALL real. It was only in the embracing of conflicting truths simultaneously that really allowed me to see.
It's refreshing you get it 🔥
I’ve been thinking that maybe instead of calling it spiritual bypass we should start naming it spiritually coping. Ultimately that’s what this is. Never being able to get to the actual pain of “you didn’t deserve this, you were abused”
Reading your article was a grounded breath of fresh air. I’ve read some whacky to disturbing things around her death and what it means, so this was definitely appreciated
yes, it's definitely a form of coping, 1000%. The inability to really sit with the pain because it's too much to bear. The rabbit hole about her death goes deep, I know. It's a lot. I tried to not add to the speculations but at the same time I wanted to be frank about who she was, from my observations; it was a delicate line to hold. Thank you for saying that.
I tried to monetize online during covid teaching herbalism. every formula we tried started with "this is how you make millions of dollars." In the end my partner and i gave up as we just weren't interested in the millions of dollars and it was becoming clear that the ones who were were extracting it from us by “teaching us” how to do the same. lol shadow in action!!!!
Its taken me 30 years to settle into the fact that i have a small community who appreciate my work, gifts and service and thats actually enough. more than enough really. we look after each other and the magic flows in its mundane magical way. Its taken a while to understand that alot of society's shadow is the lie of making it big. its such a shadow of capitalism and its awful when it hits and swallows the healers. the herbal world is full off it also.
great article
I lived inside a version of this world, which is part of why this landed so hard for me.
I wasn’t observing these ideas from the outside. I believed many of them. I worked closely with people deeply embedded in this world, and I had experiences that materially harmed me while I continued using the worldview itself to explain what was happening.
That may be the part I find most dangerous now: these frameworks can give you extraordinarily sophisticated explanations for why you should distrust the evidence directly in front of you.
Harm becomes an initiation. Your alarm becomes your shadow. Someone else’s behavior becomes something you manifested or secretly desired. And the more reality contradicts the story, the more spiritual material you have available to explain the contradiction away.
I wrote about my own experience with this last week in “Discernment Is the Real Magic.” I didn’t ultimately need to abandon mystery or spirituality. I needed to stop letting them outrank observable reality.
For me, that distinction came with very real consequences. Thank you for writing this.
https://stephaniedawnclark1.substack.com/p/discernment-is-the-real-magic?r=69r3h7
“these frameworks can give you extraordinarily sophisticated explanations for why you should distrust the evidence directly in front of you.”
Well said
oh wow, thank you so much for this. i literally have had this book on my tbr list for years but incidentally have taken a long break from self-help of any kind so i never got around to picking it up. i had zero idea about any of this and yet that book is touted like the alternative communities bible basically. ugh this reminds me of when i found out joe dispenza or whatever was a mf chiropractor. like, folks are so unserious fr. 🤦🏾♀️
Don’t even get me started on “Dr.” Joe Dispenza 🫠
i feel youuuuu 🫠
This is the best, most clear eyed take I have seen on this yet. Thank you. That point about how it was her own methodology that kept her from healing is fire.
Very interesting. Reading that post, I initially thought that it was a resolution to do better. And then, as you pointed out, it turned into a grift. “This insight has enabled me to create another course — sign up here.”
I’m so glad to be part of a spiritual community that does not charge money for training.
I didn’t know who she was until last week, her story kind of reminds me of Dave (& Rachel) Hollis. The whole “guru” industry is rife with rip-off merchants at best, out and out nefarious deviants at worst. People really do need to stop outsourcing their own power!
I thought of Dave and Rachel Hollis as well. The next person that's on my mind for a deep dive is the Nicole LaPera aka Holistic Psychologist.
I randomly clicked on a video on YouTube earlier about Nicole. Really sad, as I think she was super genuine when she first came on the scene. Her info was quite unique 10 years ago. I guess at the core of all this is the fact money and infamy corrupts people. I would imagine the folks probably who stumble into these worlds have no idea what they’re getting themselves into 😭
I don’t know about this person and it’s upsetting to hear of her death, however, I suspect we’re going to hear a lot more on these peoples’ downfall soon. Those coaches/spiritualists etc who made major profits of harsh selling and (what started as) subtle lies….there are a lot of these people who are crashing out now.
👏
I appreciate your work. It's needed. Have you written anything about the cult of Osho? A lot of people refer to his work, and I don't think they are aware of the misdeeds in his sphere either.
Hi there, I have written extensively about my experience in the Osho cult.
Start here:
https://seekwithser.substack.com/p/what-the-osho-cult-taught-me-about?r=1nh25u&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thank you, I’m interested. About twenty-five years ago, an Astrology teacher I had, Jeff Greene, used him as an example of the spiritual ego, etc etc. It really opened my mind to the cult-trap of being enticed by the “higher mind” concepts a person may be tapped into, while still being quite unresolved in other areas, and the harm that can come from it. And the mass delusional effect that type of charm can have on people.
I don’t know much about her other than I came across her online a few times and I was always fascinated in a sickening way. She repelled me but in a way where I wanted to keep looking.
I’m not surprised no one helped her. She was such a shuckster, played so fast and loose with how she portrayed herself and her offerings. Why would anything think it was anything other than another sales technique?
I hope she can rest between her lives and come back with less pain.
"...aptly titled Babalon (a goddess in the religious and occult system of Thelema). She explained that it was not she who was in charge of this offering, it was Babalon herself, acting through her as a vessel. To help herself and others stop suffering. “To be of service to genuine liberation,” as a self-proclaimed bodhisattva."
In my limited interactions with her on Twitter and Instagram, I often challenged her on the fact that she was appropriating a name and a practice she did not understand. It earned me a nasty meme on one of her marketing funnel posts.
Great article.
“On some level you enjoy your worst patterns and self-sabotage.”
Reading Notes from the Underground rn, and yeah this is eerily similar to the character’s approach to life. Underground Man enjoys it on all levels. Geez crazy how we can arrive at the same conclusions in different ways.