And We Need to Talk About It
I have sat in ceremony. I have held space. I have spent years training in the modalities this industry sells in a weekend workshop, and I have watched what happens when powerful practices land in unprepared hands. I say this not to establish authority, but because what follows comes from the inside, from someone who has seen enough to no longer stay quiet about it.
The spiritual and wellness industry is one of the least regulated arenas of psychological influence in modern culture. That is not an accident. It is a feature. Because in the absence of accountability, extraordinary things become possible, financially, reputationally, psychologically. And harm finds fertile ground whenever there is no one required to name it.
There is something deeply uncomfortable happening inside the modern spiritual world. Many people feel it. Few are willing to say it out loud. This is my attempt to say it plainly.
People Do Not Arrive Unbroken
The spiritual industry is built on a particular kind of vulnerability. People do not come to these spaces because life is going well. They arrive grieving. Broken open. Exhausted by anxiety, trauma, identity collapse, or the kind of existential emptiness that ordinary life has no language for. They arrive looking for meaning.
And increasingly, they are met with a marketplace.
Healing has become a product. Awakening has become a brand. The promise running underneath all of it, the one that keeps people buying, is this: you can bypass the slow, unglamorous work of actually healing, and arrive somewhere better faster.
Today, someone can become a breathwork facilitator, a trauma release practitioner, a plant medicine guide, a somatic activation coach, after a weekend certification. No supervised clinical training. No deep psychological education. No trauma stabilisation frameworks. No duty of care. Just a certificate, an audience, and a payment link.
Mental health professionals spend years understanding what happens when a nervous system becomes destabilised. Because opening someone emotionally is not healing. Holding them afterward is. And that is the part that is consistently, profitably missing.
The Practices Are Powerful. That Is Precisely the Problem.
Let me be clear about something, because I know how this reads to those of us who have built lives around this work. I believe in these practices. Breathwork, plant medicine, somatic healing, microdosing, spiritual inquiry, held responsibly, with proper training, ethical awareness, and ongoing psychological support, they can open doors to insight and genuine transformation. They can reach parts of a person buried beneath decades of grief and disconnection.
The problem is not the practices.
The problem is what happens when powerful tools are placed in unprepared hands. When psychological doors are opened without the structures needed to walk someone safely back through them.
Breathwork can induce altered states of consciousness. Microdosing changes neurological processing. Ayahuasca can dismantle psychological defences in hours. These are not casual wellness trends. They are powerful psychological interventions. When they are practiced without proper integration and aftercare, people are left dissociated, emotionally flooded, retraumatised, psychologically ungrounded — and utterly alone with what was opened.
People are being cracked open in ceremonial spaces, encouraged to purge trauma, relive memories, dissolve identity, and then sent home with a voice note and a reminder to trust the universe. No containment. No integration. No long-term support. Just the next intake group waiting to pay.
We know this happens. Many practitioners know this happens. And the work continues, because the groups keep filling.
The Untouchable Authority
Here is the shadow few want to name: the modern spiritual industry often rewards narcissistic traits, not obvious arrogance, but something more insidious. Spiritual superiority. The facilitator who claims special energetic access, who positions themselves as awakened while others are still unconscious, who reframes every critique as projection and every expression of pain as evidence that the client is not yet ready for truth.
Spiritual language becomes armour.
Question the guide and you are told your ego is reacting. Push back and you are told you are avoiding growth. Report harm and you are told you do not spiritually evolve enough to receive what was offered. And slowly, quietly, the seeker stops trusting themselves. Stops trusting their own body, their own knowing, their own instincts.
This is not empowerment. It is dependency wearing the face of liberation.
Kindness as Camouflage
Spiritual abuse rarely announces itself. It does not shout. It whispers. It holds you while slowly removing your capacity to question. It sounds like love while quietly invalidating pain.
They are deflections, ways of placing responsibility for harm back onto the wounded person, while protecting the authority of the guide. Ways of closing a conversation before it demands anything of the one in power.
When a practitioner projects back at a client everything they bring into the room, they are not facilitating growth. They are recreating the original wound. The person who was raised being told their pain was too much, their perception was wrong, their instincts were not to be trusted, they recognise this dynamic. It is familiar in the worst possible way. Projection used as a spiritual tool does not dismantle trauma. It reinstates it. And in the most damaging cases, it does so while the client is nodding and thanking the facilitator for the insight.
The quick-fix machine depends on this cycle. The marketplace runs on urgency: heal faster, manifest quicker, awaken now. But trauma does not operate on marketing timelines. When people are promised rapid transformation and fail to achieve it, they do not blame the system. They blame themselves. They assume they did not surrender enough, did not release enough, were not spiritually open enough. And so, they buy another program. And another. Not understanding that the cycle itself is the product.
What No One Talks About
Behind curated testimonials is a quieter reality. People leaving spiritual spaces more destabilised than when they arrived. Panic attacks after ceremonies. Identity confusion. Emotional dysregulation that has no container. Deep, private shame for failing at healing in a space that promised healing. The feeling of being mentally unanchored — not because spirituality is dangerous, but because a nervous system was opened without safety and walked to the door without support.
You cannot dismantle psychological defences without providing structure afterward. That is not awakening. That is abandonment.
And there is something even harder to say. Emerging research now links inadequate integration support to serious harm outcomes — including suicidality in the most vulnerable participants. The people most likely to be in those ceremony spaces. We do not have clean data on how often this happens, and that absence is not neutral. Suicidality is rarely tracked as a primary outcome in unregulated spiritual settings. It is not systematically asked about. It is left to the participant to disclose, after they have already been told that their pain is resistance, that their instincts cannot be trusted, that suffering is just low vibration. The industry is not counting what it is not looking for. And what is not counted does not demand accountability.
And here is the question we do not want to sit with: what happens when healing is more profitable than recovery? A stable, integrated client may no longer need constant guidance. An unhealed seeker is a returning customer. Most practitioners are sincere. Sincerity does not prevent harm. And sincerity without training causes harm every day, in spaces we have been told are safe.
What Healing Actually Looks Like
Real healing is often quiet. Slow. Unglamorous. It does not produce dramatic breakthroughs suitable for social media. It looks like learning emotional regulation. Building safe relationships. Repairing attachment wounds over years, not weekends. It is unmarketable by design, because it asks for patience in an industry built on urgency.
So, intensity replaces depth. Experience replaces integration. Performance replaces care. And we keep calling it awakening.
Spirituality should expand autonomy, not create dependence. A true guide does not position themselves as the answer. They help you find your way back to your own knowing. Healthy spaces welcome questioning, acknowledge limits, refer on when something exceeds their scope, and treat psychological safety not as a bureaucratic inconvenience but as the entire point of the work.
Because awakening without grounding is not liberation. It is fragmentation with better branding.
The Only Awakening That Matters Now
The next evolution of this industry will not come through stronger ceremonies or deeper altered states. It will come through ethics. Through trauma-informed practice. Through the willingness to say: this is beyond my scope. You need support I cannot give. I do not have all the answers.
The most radical spiritual act available to us right now is not transcendence.
It is accountability.
It is the refusal to mistake intensity for healing, or performance for care, or dependency for devotion. It is the willingness to be a practitioner who leaves people more anchored in themselves, not more dependent on you.
Helping people come back to themselves, rather than convincing them they need saving, is the work.
It always was.
A note to those of us in the work
Most of us came to this because something broke us open first. We chose this path from lived experience, from the places in ourselves that had been cracked apart and slowly, painstakingly, put back together. We came because we wanted to hand something of that to others. Because service felt like the only honest response to survival.
Somewhere along the way, humanity got replaced with a revenue model.
And we told ourselves it was abundance mindset. We told ourselves we were worth it. We built funnels and masterclasses and high-ticket containers and called it sacred work. We learned to speak the language of transformation while quietly perfecting the language of conversion rates.
This is not about whether to charge for your work. It is right and necessary to be paid for skill, time, and genuine expertise. But there is a difference between a sustainable practice and a business built on the rotating door of the unhealed. One requires you to actually get people well. The other requires you not to.
A question worth sitting with; in the silence what your original reason for was and does it still live inside you.
Most of us knew the difference between a calling and a product when we started.
The work is remembering it. And then choose accordingly.