Essays

ESSOESS ESSOESS

Premature Prophets

An editorial on the rise of self-ordained spiritual leaders and the commodification of sacred work. It unpacks the dangers of spiritual bypassing, the beauty of slow mastery, and the responsibility that comes with being truly called.

The new priesthood was born in a checkout cart.

There are those who walk with Spirit because they were summoned.
And there are those who walk with Spirit because it sells.

We are living in an age where a broken heart and a logo are enough to launch a healing business.
Where trauma is treated as credential.
Where initiation is self-declared.
Where spiritual work has become influencer performance—high on aesthetic, low on integration.

But sacred work isn’t for everyone. And that’s the part no one says aloud.
Some of us are here to hold space.
Others are here to learn how to sit with their own.

In today’s spiritual economy, readiness has been replaced by branding.

We are witnessing the rise of self-ordained seers—
guides with no grounding,
healers with no humility,
mentors with no memory of what it means to actually be a student.

They don’t wait for initiation. They declare it.
They don’t listen to Spirit. They leverage it.

The danger isn’t just misinformation—it’s misembodiment.
Because when we skip the journey, we skip the integration.
And when we teach from an unintegrated place, what we pass on is not wisdom. It’s residue.

This is about reverence.
This is about responsibility.
This is about remembering that some tools require time, tears, and tending before they are safe to pass on.

In spiritual work, the cost of false authority isn’t just confusion.
It’s karmic collapse.

And too often, it leaves someone bleeding on an altar they were never meant to build.

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Spiritual maturity cannot be streamed, styled, or sold in six easy payments.

Yet the current landscape rewards performance over process. In a culture obsessed with immediacy, many mistake spiritual sensitivity for spiritual authority. They confuse intuition with readiness. Vision with integration. Presence with preparation.

But access doesn’t equal embodiment.

The Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias identified by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, explains how those with the least experience often overestimate their skill—and lack the self-awareness to recognize their deficits. In spiritual spaces, this manifests as “coaches” who haven’t done their own shadow work. Readers who channel but haven’t integrated. Practitioners who teach what they’ve barely begun to live.

And because we’re swimming in a capitalist current that turns everything into content, these voices get amplified—while the slow, quiet work of becoming gets buried.

Studies in spiritual narcissism—a phenomenon where ego latches onto spiritual identity—show that bypassing isn’t just misguided. It’s dangerous. According to Verywell Mind, spiritual bypassing can become a psychological defense mechanism: a way of using rituals, teachings, and language to avoid personal responsibility, suppress emotional work, and posture enlightenment. Add a ring light and a monetized link tree, and that becomes a business model.

We’ve created a marketplace where the metrics for leadership are aesthetic fluency, social media virality, and curated “vulnerability.”
Not depth.
Not embodiment.
Not lived initiation.

But spiritual technology—real spiritual technology—has never been safe in the hands of the unprepared.
What looks like a gift can be a liability when not grounded in time, practice, and deep ancestral accountability.

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There is an intelligence in delay.
A wisdom in waiting.
A medicine in not being ready yet.

But our culture treats slowness like a failure. We rush toward mastery because we are terrified of being in the middle—where things are messy, uncertain, unbranded. Where there’s nothing to sell, only something to learn.

Yet in every sacred tradition that has survived colonization, commodification, and crisis, there has always been one constant: apprenticeship.
Time spent under the eye of someone who holds more than you.
Time spent in stillness, watching, tending, unraveling.
Time spent not performing wisdom, but being reshaped by it.

In many African and Indigenous systems, you are not permitted to lead spiritual work until your elders have watched your life—not just your rituals, not just your visions, but how you move through grief, failure, community. It is your being, not your branding, that confirms your readiness.

But in the rush to monetize the mystical, we’ve replaced that with click funnels and trauma-as-testimony.
We’ve made the sacred marketable.
And in doing so, we’ve taught people that spiritual power is something you can unlock.
Not something you must earn.

True readiness is not a certificate. It’s a frequency.
It comes not just through study—but through endurance. Through death and rebirth. Through surviving your own teachings before daring to offer them to someone else.

And no—
Not everyone is meant to teach.
Not everyone is meant to guide.
Not everyone is meant to stand at the front of the circle.

That doesn’t make you less powerful.
It makes you honest.
And honesty is the first altar.

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We don’t need more courses.
We need more courage—
the kind that speaks truth even when it costs you a launch date.

We need teachers who know when to step back.
Healers who know when they’re not ready to hold anyone.
Leaders who understand that silence is sometimes the highest form of service.

There’s no shame in not being ready.
The shame is in pretending you are.

Because sacred work is sacred for a reason.
And the consequences of mishandling it don’t always arrive on our doorstep.
Sometimes, they show up in the people we claim to serve.

The altar doesn’t care about your aesthetic.
The spirits don’t care about your following.
But they will care how you use your voice.

So ask yourself—
Would you still want this if no one was watching?
Would you still offer it if you weren’t being paid?

Who called you?
And who confirmed it?

Because real power doesn’t announce itself.
It arrives when you’re quiet enough to receive it.
And responsible enough to carry it.

The spiritual work I do did not come through convenience.
It came through collapse. Through grief. Through years of being stripped down to the bone until only truth remained.
It’s rooted in real life—in loss, in listening, in learning to sit with things no one else could name.
It is the slow, unsexy, inconvenient, ancestral work of becoming someone who can actually hold what Spirit dares to give.

And if you’re just here to be seen—
if what you really want is attention wrapped in incense—
then step aside.
This work will chew you up and call it a ceremony.

But if you stay,
if you commit,
if you surrender to the kind of becoming that breaks you open just wide enough for the Divine to move through—
you will not come out the same.

You will come out forged.
Clear-eyed.
Called.
And finally, ready.

One love, ESS xo

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References

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