Premature Prophets

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In today’s spiritual economy, readiness has been replaced by branding.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

• Dunning, D., & Kruger, J. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134.
  https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/basics/dunning-kruger-effect

• Morin, A. (2022). What Is Spiritual Bypassing? Verywell Mind.
  https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-spiritual-bypassing-5081640

White Sage, White Spaces

They burned my ancestors’ herbs and spoke our tongues with borrowed breath—then asked for my trust. My Blackness was welcome on the altar, but not in the room.

I was one of the few.
One of the only Black bodies in a room thick with the smoke of stolen plants.
A room lined with crystal grids, white gauze curtains, and dreamcatchers imported from Etsy.
A room where the ritual had been gutted and resold in pastel packaging, and the sacred had been stripped of its memory.
Where spiritual language was fluent, but cultural fluency was nonexistent.
Where “love and light” meant “don’t make it uncomfortable.”
I wasn’t there to be initiated—I was already encoded. My blood carried the blueprint long before the room called it ritual.

When I questioned the absence—of elders, of history, of representation—
I was met with a well-rehearsed dismissal delivered like gospel:
“Maybe this just isn’t the right space for you.”
“Maybe I’m not the teacher you’re looking for.”

No effort to widen the circle. No reflection.
Just an elegant form of exile.

Let’s be clear: representation is not a request—it’s a requirement.
Especially when the ideologies you’re profiting from were once punished.
Especially when the words on your altar come from tongues your ancestors never spoke.
Especially when the wisdom you teach was kept alive by people you never credit.

Because when whiteness repackages ancient practices as intuitive downloads, the Source gets lost—and so does the integrity.

They were right about one thing: they weren’t the teacher for me.
Not because I couldn’t meet their frequency—because they refused to raise theirs.

Because what they offered had no roots—only reach.

They didn’t crave connection—they craved access.
To the power, not the people. To the form, not the function.
They wanted ancestral entry without reverence or relationship.
Practice with no pulse.
Meaning without memory.

And when you center your comfort over someone else’s history,
you’re not holding space—you’re hoarding it.

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Spiritual spaces don’t become exclusionary by accident.
They’re curated—consciously or not—by who is centered, who is credited, and who is kept at the margins.

Even in the most “inclusive” circles, whiteness often remains the default setting.
Wellness brands celebrate cacao but forget the genocide that tried to erase the Maya.
They host sound baths using singing bowls while never once mentioning Tibet.
They perform African drumming they can’t trace—with no ancestral connection, no acknowledgment, just a beat they borrowed and now sell as their own.
And they call it healing, when it’s extraction.

Author and spiritual activist Rachel Ricketts writes in Do Better: Spiritual Activism for Fighting and Healing from White Supremacy that

“Spiritual bypassing is when white folks weaponize spiritual tools to avoid accountability, perpetuate harm, and center their comfort while claiming it’s collective liberation.”

The aesthetics are sacred. The politics remain the same.

And when Black and Indigenous voices do enter the room, we’re often positioned as accessories.
Our wisdom is acknowledged only when it’s been curated, distilled, and made palatable—
Not too angry. Not too mystical. Not too loud.
We’re expected to inspire, not to lead.
Our medicine is welcomed, but our mastery is policed.

A 2023 plenary talk by Dr. Yolanda Covington-Ward at the African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association highlighted how Black and Indigenous spiritual voices are often erased or sidelined in spaces built on their cultural legacies—especially when those voices push beyond aesthetic to reclaim authority.

This is spiritual plagiarism—sacred knowledge rewritten without the authors.
Because in these rooms, proximity to the sacred isn’t the same as permission to teach it—
and yet the mic is often handed to those with the most distance from the Source.

This is how spiritual appropriation works: soft voice, hard silence.
It smiles. It smudges. And it erases.

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For a long time, I thought the problem was me.

Before I ever entered the room, my body had already said no.
But I mistook my refusal as avoidance—because I’d been conditioned to believe that any friction I felt was proof I wasn’t evolved enough to receive the teaching.
I labeled it resistance.
I called it shadow work.

Because when you’re taught to spiritualize your discomfort, you forget how to trust it.

I sat in silence and called it maturity.
I ignored my instincts and called it growth.

These spiritual spaces have the ability to exploit your willingness to override your instincts.
They recode boundaries as blocks and call coercion a rite of passage.
What should be discernment is framed as resistance—
and when you flinch, they tell you it’s your initiation—this is the medicine.

But healing isn’t comfort.
And discomfort isn’t always a lesson.

Sometimes what you’re being told is a lesson is actually a mechanism—engineered to make you doubt your perception so the system stays intact.

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
— Zora Neale Hurston

That wasn’t growth I was being asked to lean into.
It was spiritual gaslighting.

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I stayed in those spaces longer than I cared to admit.

Not because I didn’t feel the disconnect—
but because for too long, these were the only spaces that even spoke the language of ceremony—even if it was borrowed.

Because spaces where Black and Indigenous people teach our own traditions—fully, unapologetically, without dilution—are still too rare.
Because most altars are built on stolen soil, but few are led by the descendants it was stolen from.

I stayed because I was hungry.
Hungry for memory.
Hungry for meaning.
Hungry for language that sounded like where I came from—even if it came from someone who didn’t.

They invited me to bring my energy, my medicine, my resonance—
but not my questions.
Not my framing.
Not my critique.
They welcomed the symbols, not the system that made them sacred.

And when I spoke—when I asked where the elders were, where the origin was, where the integrity lived—
the answer was silence dressed in white.

Erasure has evolved. It doesn’t wear hoods; it wears hemp.
It sips from copper cups.
It burns sage and says “community” while avoiding everything that would make one real.

I don’t sit quietly anymore—not because I seek disruption, but because I finally trust the sound of my own discernment.

When I teach, I don’t translate.
I remember.
I invoke.
I protect.

Because I am not here to distill wisdom for mass appeal.
I am not here to soften the sacred for palates that refuse to do the work.
And I am not here to ask permission to reclaim what has always been inherited, rightful, and mine.

If a space demands your silence to remain spiritual—
it was never sacred to begin with.

One love, ESS xo

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References

• Ricketts, R. (2021). Do Better: Spiritual Activism for Fighting and Healing from White Supremacy. Atria Books.

• Covington-Ward, Y. (2023). Plenary Talk - African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association.

• Hurston, Z. N. Zora Neale Hurston Official Site.