Is spirituality going to be so tainted by association to conspiracy theories that people turn away? Or will the rest of us finally start to speak louder than the noise?

I talked about this with friends privately early on in the year. I pointed out that Q was recruiting and radicalizing in the same way as a terrorist organization and I had a really awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had an inkling of it when my step daughter was threatened by one of her own family members on social media with, “bow down to Trump or be killed.” When some guy ran a train off the rails in California in an attempt to smash the navy hospital ship back in the spring, I knew we couldn’t keep sitting on it and saying nothing.

I watched the media sit on it though, and then ridicule it, and then slowly, but far too late, finally become alarmed by it. I watched spirituality and wellness influencers stay silent, or worse, perpetuate it, until some of them finally came out and made a statement. For a while there I felt a bit like Chicken Little screaming about the sky falling and no one was paying attention. Well, they are now. But they had to be pushed, and pushed, and pushed, and pushed until the monster that was created was too big to be put back in its cage.

The backlash from these events is likely going to be mighty in a variety of ways, but I am right now mostly concerned with the lane we are in, which is spirituality and wellness. Or should I say unwellness, because that’s what this obsession with Q is tantamount to.

It’s hard for me to blame (some of) the mob–you know, the subset that aren’t white supremacists wearing Camp Auschwitz hoodies or waving confederate flags–when I know that they’ve been gaslit by an overt narcissist for the last four years and by Fox News for far longer than that. You reap what you sow, and a certain handful of elected officials had to lay in the bed they made for themselves. I don’t think they liked it very much.

I don’t have a patriotic bone in my body, I couldn’t give two shits about American pride. What I do care about–what I hold sacred–is spirituality. And just like every cult and charlatan that has exploited the spiritually vulnerable, Qanon is a dark stain on the fabric of “love and light.”

But I am angry. Righteously angry. Mostly with the “influencers” in the wellness community who have enabled this with their silence or otherwise perpetuated it with their blind nationalism and blatant disregard for the spiritual principles they purport to uphold. They are hypocrites, and in an ironic twist of fate, also the very herd (nae, cult) of sheep that they pride themselves in being apart from.

Qanon has risen up to embody every single element of spirituality’s shadow, and holy shit is it ugly.

As members of the spiritual community, not only do we have a responsibility to ourselves to do our own shadow work, we have a responsibility to expose the shadow of our collective, and right now, today, that means all of the conspirituality bullshit, the anti-science attitudes, the whitewashing of spirituality, the exploitation of trauma for profit, the mental illness, the spiritual bypassing and gaslighting, the cults, the sexual harassment, the bullshit psychics and channelers who are doing nothing but operating from their inflated ego, ALL OF IT.

I don’t know how anyone can call themselves an intuitive or claim to be energetically sensitive and not feel how twisted and off the energy of the Qanon collective is.

Anyone who has not been actively educating themselves about or addressing these issues within the spiritual community is partially responsible for the culture that lead to what happened at the U.S. Capitol and is still happening online right now. And I include myself in that because I didn’t start speaking up about it loudly enough until a couple of years ago.

The people involved with these events will experience the consequences for their actions in the coming weeks and months, but this is a wake up call to America, and also, especially to the spiritual community, and it is a mirror of who we are as a collective right now.

The people who did this, and those who enabled the spread of this conspiracy cult–that is the dark side of spirituality. It is what manifests when you bury your head in love and light.

What’s important for us now, as a community of alleged lightworkers, is to walk our fucking talk and make ourselves accountable for ensuring that this never happens again.

That means doing our own shadow work. That means educating ourselves about the shadow side of spirituality. That means truly…TRULY… doing the very thing that we always say we’re proud to do, which is looking within and doing the work.

When I sent this message out via email, I immediately had multiple people respond with, “What about Black Lives Matter and Antifa?” and “Not everybody who opposes electoral fraud is a Q follower.” Diverging from the point and deflecting the conversation is an avoidance mechanism, so let me bring the conversation back to where it belongs:

 

What does Black Lives Matter and Antifa have to do with spiritual people spreading conspiracy theories and perpetrating acts of terrorism? Black Lives Matter and antifa aren’t running around fawning over a narcissist, praying for secret arrests and executions without a fair trial, living in a conspiratorial delusion, and attempting to overthrow the entire fucking system of democracy–in other words, exhibiting incredibly spiritually unwell behaviors that our out of integrity with spiritual values while simultaneously claiming to be spiritually enlightened.

 

Do you get it now? The problem is the climate that promoted these actions and that it’s being done in the name of spirituality by people who claim to be promoting “consciousness” when there’s nothing conscious about it. It’s not only about the boots on the ground. Black Lives Matter and Antifa did not create a culture of spiritual bypassing so profound that its led millions of people into a total delusional divergence from reality. 

 

Furthermore, I’m white. Black people aren’t my community. I have no right to critique the (perceived) actions of an oppressed people that I do not belong to, particularly when I am a member of the group that has oppressed them. I’m not a member of Antifa, either. I don’t have an audience with those people. But I am a member of the spiritual community, and when I see a culture of hypocrisy in my own community, you’d better fucking believe I’m going to say something. 

 

With regard to the second point, I don’t think everyone who opposes electoral fraud is a Q follower. I do think the people wearing Q t-shirts and hats and walking around with Q signs inside the Capitol building are Q followers, as well as Jake Angeli, the guy wearing the buffalo hat who’s face is literally everywhere, or the “Q Shaman” as the media is calling him since he gave a televised interview in 2019 proclaiming himself so.

 

But that’s also beside the point. The point is that the spiritual community has enabled and allowed the rapid spread of a conspiracy narrative that eventually made its way to the mouth of the president of the United States, creating a cycle of disinformation that feeds into itself. Whether or not people there protesting voter fraud were Q followers is irrelevant since the entirety of the voter fraud narrative was spurred by Q. They’ve been manipulated (or as some would call it, “mind controlled”) whether they are aware of it or not.

 

The wellness and spiritual communities gave Q its mainstream power, Q then generated an election fraud narrative which led to those events, which means the wellness community is partially accountable for those events.

Let me be clear. Conspiracy theories existed in the spiritual community long before Q. Most of the theories promulgated by Q have actually been around in the spiritual community for years. The Q “phenomenon” enabled those narratives to be woven together and mainstreamed, creating one giant massive conspiracy narrative. (I highly recommend reading that last link on a game designer’s analysis of Qanon)

I’ve always said that you can count on me to be the asshole that tells you need to hear and not what you want to hear. And if any part of what I just said makes anyone reading this feel defensive, then you’ve got some work to do. I challenge you to sit with your uncomfortable emotions, and instead of projecting, dismissing, and bypassing, DO THE WORK.

I intend to do everything in my power to create the educational resources necessary for this process and to make the connections between what we do spiritually, as a community, and how it affects the world around us. I hope you’ll do your part by learning and sharing.

Thanks for being here,

Ash

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