Blowing The Whistle On Deepak Chopra, The Epstein Files, Cancel Culture, & Holding My Influencer Peers (& Myself) Accountable
In Which I Reveal What I Know (& Wish I Didn’t) About Deepak, Louise Hay, Joe Dispenza, Gabby Bernstein, Wayne Dyer, Christiane Northrup & Way Too Many Others
by LISSA RANKIN, MD
The Epstein Files are all over the news, and as someone in the wellness space who has shared many stages and green rooms with Deepak Chopra, I’m getting a lot of confused messages from concerned clients and readers of my work. I posted about Deepak Chopra and longevity “physician” Peter Attia on Facebook (Read it here.) Over 300 comments reveal the depth of the disillusionment many people in the wellness and spirituality space are feeling.
If you’re not sure what I’m talking about and you’ve been a Deepak Chopra fan, read this summary of what’s in the Epstein files by fellow Substacker and disappointed Chopra fan Dr. Scott Mills The Silence: Inside The Chopra-Epstein Files. He painstakingly read the files directly and summarizes what’s in there about Deepak Chopra. He did this hoping the disturbing messages we’re reading about Deepak Chopra’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein were taken out of context, exaggerated for click bait, or otherwise excusable. Instead, he found that, in context, they were even more disturbing.
I especially appreciate how Dr. Mills points out how silent the biggest names in our industry have been-Tony Robbins, Mel Robbins, Brené Brown, Jay Shetty, Gabby Bernstein, Tim Ferriss, Jen Sincero, Eckhart Tolle, Marianne Williamson, Joe Dispenza, Rachel Hollis, Brendon Burchard, Lewis Howes, Marie Forleo, Vishen Lakhiani, Robin Sharma, Mark Hyman, Elizabeth Gilbert, Danielle LaPorte, Oprah Winfrey. “Twenty-one names. Over 250 million followers combined. The DOJ files have been public since January 30, 2026. Not one of these people has said a word.”
Now it’s been 5 days since he posted that essay, so maybe some of these people have spoken up. Admittedly, it took me a minute to catch up on the news myself- and to post something publicly to acknowledge the news on Facebook here and here.
Why do I keep speaking out? I am inspired every day by people like the ACLU lawyers, who wake up every day and go to dingy offices with little pay, so they can do the right thing at any personal cost. (Watch the 2020 documentary The Fight if you want to find the nerve to do more hard things.)
Why is it that so many people in our spirituality and wellness industry stay silent when harm is done by those in our own industry? Because it costs us something- a lot- to not be silent. I know. I’ve experienced it. Is it because we’re so trauma-informed we don’t want to point fingers at people who enable perpetrators, because we have compassion for why they do the things they do? Because it’s not zen to call people out or blame anyone for wrongdoing? Because we’re benefitting from making alliances that make us money with people who are causing harm? Because we’re so conflict avoidant that we don’t want to rock the boat, piss anyone off, be perceived as a trouble-maker, or lose followers (and therefore money)?
The reasons are understandable, but they don’t excuse the silence. Dr. Mills is right; silence is complicity. Silence is violence. Silence enables the perpetrators and betrays victims. And that is why I can’t stay silent about some thing I haven’t said publicly yet.
*I’m not the only one speaking up about the wellness industry, Deepak Chopra and the Epstein files. If you’re curious about how the industry enables people like Deepak Chopra to rise to the fame surface, veteran publicist who used to program Oprah Lisa Braun Dubbels blows the whistle on the corruption that explains how this happens in I Helped Build This Industry. Deepak Chopra’s Epstein Problem Shows Us Why It Needs to Fall Apart. You can also read this public statement by my friends Zaya and Maurizio of Science & Non-Duality and this one by my physician friend and colleague Sara Szal (Gottfried). Listen to Shamini Jain call out her friend Deepak on a video she sent directly to him here and here.
I Can’t Stay Silent Any Longer
It is exhausting to admit that I am never surprised when I find out people like Deepak Chopra have unsavory sides. I’ve co-taught with Deepak at the Chopra Center, at a Mind Body Green event, at the Science & Non-Duality conference, and let’s just say I wasn’t impressed by him as a person. While there are many geniuses in my industry, and while I admire the work of many of them, and while some of the teachings are helpful, far too many of these gifted, charismatic people are not kind, loving, honest, or trustworthy people of integrity. But that’s not a rare thing.
As someone who has written ten books, I have shared green rooms and off-the-record conversations with people who are household names. I have given four TEDx talks that have gotten over 6 million views. I’ve starred in two PBS specials. I’ve spoken on hundreds of stages around the world and taught workshops at some of the most prestigious wellness centers. That means I’ve had dinners in private dining rooms reserved for “stars,” and I’ve seen the real side of people in green rooms. And I’ve been privileged to be invited into some of the most sacred circles of the wellness and spirituality world.
While that might sound impressive, it’s come at a huge cost to my nervous system. For over a decade now, I have been carrying secret stories inside about people I’ve shared stages with, people like Deepak Chopra and so many others. But those secrets are corrosive and poisonous and have resulted in tens of thousands of dollars of therapy on my bystander trauma.
I’ve largely avoided naming names, because it’s so scary to do so. I don’t want to hurt anyone, deal with lawsuits, or shatter someone’s guru projections about someone who’s actually helped them. I don’t want to be the one to tell someone there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny- because it’s so lovely for our child-like parts to have role models we can pedestalize, even if that very dynamic makes us vulnerable to being harmed by the people we put in “one up” guru roles.
Some of the time, I wasn’t the actual victim of people like this- or there wasn’t an actual crime, just a shocking breach of integrity. But in light of the Epstein files, I’m going to risk sharing briefly some of what I carry inside, as an industry insider. Please know that my intention for sharing is to not to hurt any individual or to upset you, dear reader, but to call my industry forward- into greater integrity, and to warn those who consume what we create, so you can take good care of yourself and those you love.
Blowing The Whistle
The stories I could tell from inhabiting these influencer spaces for the past fifteen years…I’ve told some of them, off the record, to investigative journalists, trying to find absolution. I’ve gossiped about them with other insiders who are equally shocked. I’ve brainstormed about what to do about it with people like Lisa Braun Dubbels, the Conspirituality podcast guys, Rebekah Borucki, and others.
I’m tempted to put a pay wall here, just to have a little bit of protection, but I don’t want to make money off blowing this whistle. So here you go, dear readers. I’m sorry I I kept these secrets as long as I did.
The stories I could tell…
-About holding space for a young Hay House author in his twenties who came to me at a Hay House event, in tears, because he saw Louise Hay as a grandmother figure, but when she came onto him sexually and he refused her, she threatened to destroy his writing career forever and make sure he amounted to nothing if he ever told anyone. This was before the #MeToo movement blew up in October 2017 with the Harvey Weinstein case. By the time this young man might have felt empowered to tell his own #MeToo story about his publisher, Louise had died two months earlier. I asked him to report what had happened. But to who, he wondered? #IBelieveVictims #MeToo
-About finding out that my partner Jeffrey Rediger, who was pressured by Oprah, against his will, into coming on the Oprah Winfrey Show to talk about John of God, had warned Oprah that he believed John of God was a sexual predator- and while they tried to do due diligence to find out if it was true, ultimately, Jeff felt overridden, silenced, and not believed when voicing his concerns…and very little warning was given during the two Oprah Winfrey Shows, to caution people who trusted Oprah.
-About realizing that Oprah has removed all internet evidence (even from the Way Back machine) that she ever did two shows promoting John of God, without giving adequate airtime to the allegations against him that were already forming, which resulted in his conviction of 118 years in prison for countless rapes of his helpless and vulnerable victims…
-About realizing that neither Oprah nor Omega (who hosted him once a year) has ever apologized publicly and held themselves accountable for platforming John of God, who lured people into his web so he could assault them…
-About Christiane Northrup’s confusing attempt to recruit me into the culty dynamic of her “women’s empowerment” MLM- and how her daughter Kate played the role of flying monkey enabler- all in the name of encouraging me to become “financially independent” so I could sell her MLM products to my followers and cash in on the power of my influence…(I said no)
-About watching Carolyn Myss lose her shit and have a total tantrum in a green room when she didn’t get her way, and watching in bewilderment as her entourage acted like this was totally normal…
-About watching Suze Orman get on stage at Louise Hay’s 80th birthday party and largely ignoring Louise Hay altogether, while mocking the rest of us Hay House authors for selling only a fraction of the number of books she, in her narcissistic greatness, has sold..
-About witnessing, in shock, many of the married bestselling authors in the spiritual self help space, authors you may have come to know and respect in the Transformational Leadership Counsel (TLC), get wasted and hook up with each other in hotels around the world- all in the name of “transformation” and “illuminating each other with transmissions”…
-About being dismissed and derided by said TLC members when I suggested we needed to have forums of accountability for transformational leaders who have no licenses or board certifications (convicted felon James Arthur Ray was a TLC member before he landed in jail for the deaths of three students he trapped in a sweat lodge)…
-About discovering that many of the famous authors that you know and love “blurb” each other’s books without reading them. They write their own endorsements for their own books, reach out to their friends, and ask for permission to put the other famous author’s name on the back of their book. When I refused to do so, and when I stated that this was betraying the trust of those we are privileged to have influence over, I was mocked, called “goody two shoes,” and derided for not playing along…
-About holding space for Wayne Dyer when asked by our shared producer to talk to him because he was having trouble delivering on his contract for his next PBS special- because, according to him, he was having an affair with a married woman who wouldn’t leave her husband and he felt like a hypocrite for getting on TV to talk about divine love when his love for her was so…carnal…
-About going to Byron Katie’s house (with Martha Beck and Rachel Naomi Remen) to film footage for the bonus videos to accompany my National Public Television special, fundraising for PBS, about interviewing Katie on camera, only to have her say, on film, that Byron Katie the enlightened master was only one of her parts, how it was the only part most people wanted to interview, but that the other parts of Katie, the ones who aren’t so enlightened or present or good, would like to meet me too (Needless to say, we protected her image, kept her secret, and did not broadcast that interview. I actually own the footage but chose to do nothing with it.)
-About being the one to finally introduce Martha Beck to the guru she worshipped (Byron Katie) and watching her fall to her knees in front of Katie with the oddest deference. About Martha then ghosting me right afterwards when we were midway through preparing to teach our second online class together- with no explanation, no response to my emails or texts or phone calls. About finding out later that I was far from the first person Martha had love bombed and then ghosted after extracting from them- without even the courtesy of an explanation of what I’d done to upset her.
-About witnessing blatant racism at Hay House and privately leaving the organization, but without naming why publicly- and then standing in solidarity with Rebekah Borucki- feeling great shame because she was a victim of it at the hands of many Hay House authorities and authors- on this Conspirituality podcast episode, where I finally broke my silence…
-About sitting in green rooms at Hay House conferences with other Hay House authors who were all gossiping about the married guy we reported to, who was allegedly having an affair with another Hay House author- about how so many of us felt royally betrayed, confused, and icky about having to pretend it wasn’t happening right in front of us, when we really weren’t okay with it…
-About visiting the Indigenous Q’eros in Peru, where I said that I’d studied for coming to study them by reading the work of a famous American psychologist and author who founded a famous shaman school- who claims he was granted permission to share the wisdom of the Q’eros with Westerners- and when they told me what they really feel about this guy they consider an exploitative opportunist- and how he had betrayed them…
-About hanging out at the Science & Non-Duality conference with a “famous on Facebook” self-published author and former lawyer, who writes about spiritual bypassing, about then offering to do a free teleclass with him, to help promote his new self-published book, only to be accused, in multiple paranoid emails, such as this one, of plagiarizing his work: “You are a hustling criminal building a following by stealing other people’s ideas. Shame on you. Shame. I will read every word you write, listen to ever word you say from now on, to be sure that you are presenting ORIGINAL ideas. If you have any in you.” And this: “Dirty business, this industry. If an offering doesn’t arise through your soul, grab it from someone else’s. Jump on the next topic train and grab that book deal! Not clean at all. You played me.” Five years later, I reached out and tried to initiate a repair, which only led to more accusations- and me giving up. When I told my publisher at Sounds True about this dynamic, because he was threatening to sue me, they said he’d sent the same kinds of threatening, paranoid letters to them when they declined publishing his books.
-About spending a week watching Covid denier Zach Bush in the Maldives nauseate many of us with his shameless displays of out of control grandiosity…
-About spiraling in shame when I wanted to close the loop and meet the wife of a famous influencer you’d all know, who portrayed himself as polyamorous and took me as his so called ethical non-monogamy lover while we were together in Australia- only to discover, when I introduced myself to his wife, that she had no idea he was having affairs at many of the keynote stops he frequented around the world and was devastated when I inadvertently broke the news. (That was 2014, and I learned my lesson and never tried ethical non-monogamy again…)
-About attending a meeting for what would become the Association for Spiritual Integrity (ASI) and listening to an audience full of mostly male non-dual teachers in the vein of Deepak Chopra claim that they are beyond accountability, because they’re operating on a whole other plane in which things like sexual assault don’t happen…and we should choose “oneness” instead..
-About all the people I’ve endorsed when I agreed with them, only to watch them go off the rails, like Charles Eisenstein, whose spiritual bypassing and false equivalencies during the pandemic caused a great amount of harm. (You can read my attempt at calling him out after calling him in failed here. And you can read his publisher calling him out and backing me up here.)
-About how most of the trauma “model builders” talk smack about each other behind each other’s backs, how they one up each other, diminish each other’s work when we should be collaborating, and generally think their model is the way, the only way, the panacea that works for everyone’s trauma all the time ,and if it isn’t working, it’s because the therapist practicing it isn’t good enough or it’s the patients fault. (Gag me. The hubris! At least doctors, for all our faults and grandiose narcissism, know that penicillin works wonders for strep throat but it doesn’t do shit for Covid.)
-About listening to Daniel Schmactenberger call out the members of TLC publicly, without holding back, at the TLC conference, where he said:
“Stop broadcasting this fear/love dichotomy- how you can’t feel fear and love at the same time. It’s bullshit. It’s just not true. I can only be afraid of something I love being harmed because I love it. If I’m afraid for my kids, it’s because I love them. Care is what fuels fear. If I’m angry, it’s proportional to what I care about. Every negative emotion is a response to care and love. If you feel angry, find what it is that you hold as sacred and ask “How is what I hold sacred getting violated?” See the sacredness in it and ask, “Am I willing to make sacrifices to protect that sacred thing?” That’s when it’s appropriate to use your will, aligned with what you love.
To do this, you’ll need your mind, your heart, and your gut. Your mind needs clarity on what it is that you love and hold sacred and are willing to protect. Your heart needs to feel heartbroken because what you care about is being hurt. Your gut will give you the courage to do something about it. Think about and feel into what is most sacred to you. What will still matter after you’re dead? What are you devoted to and willing to sacrifice your comfort for- because it matters so much and you love it so much? What is at the heart of what is meaningful about life? Take time to feel into it and connect to whatever has you feeling that. Between now and when you die, think about the biggest problems in the world that you understand- climate change, racism, AI warfare, human trafficking. What do you really care about? Feel what bothers you. What is the actual state of the world you live in? Then ask yourself, ‘If this is really what I care about, what should I be doing to be congruent with my own self, my own deepest values? What am I doing now that is different than that? How do I close that gap?’”
-About how I cried for hours (I’m not exaggerating) after Daniel said that, because I felt so relieved that someone was finally saying the things I felt too scared and confused to say to those influencers myself…
-About how I cried again, with tears of exhaustion and also feeling seen and heard and validated, when Dr. Scott Mills, who did the labor of researching Deepak Chopra in the Epstein Files, noticed- and acknowledged- that I was one of the first influencers in the industry to speak out about Deepak Chopra and the Epstein files(You can also read Scott’s article In An Industry That Has Lost Its Voice, Lissa Rankin Keeps Speaking Out.)
Now some of these stories are secondhand hearsay, and that’s part of why I’ve kept the secrets. I can’t prove that what other people have come crying to me about actually happened. But many of these things happened to me personally, right in front of my eyes. I can’t stomach sitting by and watching people continue to influence others, who do not know what happens behind closed doors and who may be projecting all kinds of guru projections onto people who are as flawed, power hungry, greedy, narcissistic, and imperfectly human as anyone else in the Epstein files.
How long do I have to keep saying the same things about a corrupt industry in distress? How much do I have to lose to keep blowing the whistle? Why aren’t others as distressed about the harm caused by my peers as I am?
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How To Hold Ourselves & Others Accountable
Now I’m no angel. I have made so many mistakes in my thinking and teaching that I even rewrote Mind Over Medicine and put out a revised edition in 2020- with an honest explanation about why. To make amends, I’ve tried to support others who are on an off ramp from spiritual bypassing with many classes- Spiritual Bypassing Recovery 101, Spiritual Bypassing Recovery 2.0, and Spirituality Without Bypassing, with Dick Schwartz. (You can find them all here.) And I’ve offered all of them to those who ask at scholarship prices.
I have fond memories- and also a lot of shame- about my spiritual bypassing days. I wonder whether I hurt people with things I previously said and taught. It’s taken years to do my own deconstruction work, to listen to the cult recovery podcasts, to do my own therapy, to read the books, to try to find the baby in the bathwater of a lot of muddy ass bathwater.
I’ve also made many mistakes in my personal life. Some of these people I’m naming names about could probably publish dirt on me, and it might be true. When we hang out with our peers, outside of the gaze of those we’re speaking to from keynote stages, we’re not inhabiting our personas in the same way we might when we’re on stage. That’s to be expected.
What’s hard is that we don’t expect movie stars, athletes, or rock stars to behave well. We expect them to be narcissistic, self-absorbed, and naughty sometimes. But we expect more from our spiritual teachers, doctors, therapists, coaches, and transformational mentors. And we have a right to expect more. We make ourselves more vulnerable to them. We open our hearts, our psyches, and our bodies to them. But what many don’t realize is that spiritual narcissism can be ten times more destructive than the garden variety narcissism of movie stars, sports stars, rock stars, or even doctors who don’t claim to be spiritual teachers. Just look at Deepak Chopra, going on and on about how he’s in some higher plane than the rest of us while chumming up with Jeffrey Epstein. Well, isn’t that convenient?
What do we do about this? I don’t believe we have to “cancel” a public figure as our only option when they do something wrong. We can try to “call in” rather than calling out. We can try to invite self-reflection and personal accountability, if someone is humble enough to be open to that. That’s what I advised Wayne Dyer to do- to just tell the truth to his adoring fans, to quit pretending he was capable of some greater love than the rest of us. Many people are generous when our heroes and heroines own up to our human fallibilities. But he couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. He died soon afterwards, and I always wondered whether they were honest with us about his cause of death, given that he claimed to have been cured from cancer by John of God but never got retested.
Calling In Joe Dispenza
Unfortunately, many influencers are not open to feedback or being “called in.” They do the classic DARVO thing (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender), described by Jennifer Freyd. I learned this the hard way when I was researching the work of Joe Dispenza for my Sacred Medicine book. Joe and I are not friends, but we are peers. The first time I met him in Hawaii, he came up to me and apologized. He said he’d just read Mind Over Medicine and that I must have thought he plagiarized me when he wrote You Are The Placebo. He swore he’d only read it after he wrote his own very similar book. I brushed it off and haven’t actually read the book. Surely, I didn’t invent many of the ideas in that book, which were largely influenced by my mentor Rachel Naomi Remen, one of the mind body medicine pioneers- and others like her.
Joe and I have taught at the same conferences, traveled together in Europe, and known each other for years. He invited me personally to come and study with him, because he claimed people were getting cured from incurable diseases as a result of his advanced meditation retreats. I participated in one of them, as his gift, so I could see what was happening and report on it for my book.
I was shocked and horrified by what I witnessed.
Afterwards, he asked for my feedback, and when I gave him critical feedback (because I thought he was endangering students in a significant way, without enough guardrails, supervision, or integration support), he dismissed me, ignored me, minimized everything I said, blamed me for not getting it, and basically left me feeling like an annoying bug he felt entitled to silence and flick away. I was shocked that someone who is not a medical doctor could care so little about what an actual doctor had to say about the safety of his meditation “treatments,” which he claim can cure disease (and which have caused some people to refuse potentially curable medical treatment, resulting in potentially unnecessary deaths.)
I tried to call Joe in- privately. I tried to make suggestions about how he might make his work safer. I went to other people in his inner circle to register my concern as a medical doctor who was witnessing dangerous things happening in his community, like psychotic breaks, having blackouts and head injuries during his meditations and losing memory of falling down during walking meditations, and cancer patients not seeking medical treatment because they believed they could manifest their cure with thought alone. (For more about Joe Dispenza, I recommend this Conspirituality podcast Placebo Joe.)
I did not wind up naming Joe Dispenza or writing about his work in Sacred Medicine, because I did not want anyone to misinterpret anything I might write as an endorsement, and I did not want to write a whistleblowing book, naming the names of dozens of people like Joe and Deepak Chopra, whose work I studied and whose work I could not recommend. Instead, I wrote about spiritual narcissism, changed names to protect privacy, and spoke honestly about how much the energy healing field is rife with grandiosity, unsafe practices, healers who abuse their power with vulnerable sick people, and fraud.
I’d be a rich woman right now if I’d just played along, if I’d praised Joe’s work in Sacred Medicine- and the work of so many others who would have helped me build my brand, if I’d played the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” game of nepotism. If I’d just played along, looked the other way, and let all these influencers help me promote my books to their millions of followers, I’d be owning my home and not just renting. My business has not been in the black since I spoke out during the pandemic. I am still paying off credit cards and do not own a home or have much of a retirement account beyond the small inheritance my mother left me.
But the price I’d have to pay to play the game is something I can’t stomach paying. I’ve come to realize that, for many, integrity is a privilege some cannot afford. I feel lucky I’ve gotten by good enough, privileged enough, and able to sleep at night most of the time. As my mother once taught me as a little girl, “You have to live with yourself and so you have to be fit for yourself to know.” I know that sounds kind of self-righteous, but I never forgot her good advice.
Calling In Gabby Bernstein
I’ve lost many “friends” because I refused to endorse the work of someone I was casually friendly with in the influencer space. I’d written sincere endorsements for two of Gabby Bernstein’s books, but when she asked me to endorse her next one, Spirit Junkie, I could not. What she was teaching was the exact opposite of what I was teaching. It would have been hypocritical for me to endorse her book while teaching my own work.
When I declined to endorse her book, she flew off the handle and was very angry at me. When I asked her what she would do if I’d written a book she didn’t agree with, she said flat out, “I would lie.” I told her I wasn’t willing to lie or abuse the trust of those I influence. I never heard from her again, even when I found out she was starting to practice Internal Family Systems and I reached out to see if Dick Schwartz could facilitate a repair between me and Gabby.
Here’s the letter I sent to Gabby and Dick Schwartz in 2020, before her book about IFS Self Help came out.
Dear Gabby,
I know it’s been a long time since we’ve been in touch, and I’ll admit I’ve had parts that carry many judgments of you and parts that disagree with the core messaging of your teachings in the past years. That said, Dick Schwartz and I have been collaborating and teaching together for many years now, and he told me about his connection with you and how much you’ve been touched by IFS therapy. My therapist is also an IFS therapist, and I’ve been working with the model for six years now. There’s a whole chapter in my upcoming book Sacred Medicine about IFS, and Dick and I just did a free group healing for 3200 people to help them treat spiritual bypassing parts that are protectors, protecting people from feeling their exiles. We also taught a workshop together at the last IFS conference about IFS as medical treatment for people with intractable medical conditions.
Anyway, our past aside, if you’re becoming a public ally of IFS, as it seems you may be, it would make sense for you and me to be allies too, since it’s something we both seem to care deeply about…If you ever want to have a parts-to-parts healing conversation, I expect Dick Schwartz would be willing to facilitate it if we asked.
Caring about you,
Lissa
I never heard back from either Gabby or Dick about this. So much for IFS as a communication tool.
Calling Someone Out Is Not The Same Thing As “Polarizing” Or “Being Divisive”
During the pandemic, I watched a disturbing trend in spiritual circles I’d been a part of. People with loads of unearned privileges used the spiritual ideas of “oneness” or “non-duality,” not only to avoid taking a stand; they also used their spiritual grandiosity to demean, devalue, and criticize those who do take a stand, labelling activists who actually protest injustices as “polarizing,” “divisive” or “unenlightened,” the opposite of the spiritual ideal of “all one.” They accuse whistle blowers of going on a witch hunt, as a way to silence us and invalidate us, not realizing that this is just another form of DARVO.
I’m all for being all one! I hate divisiveness and polarization as much as any conflict avoidant spiritual seeker would! I despise it when people are fighting and a young peacemaker part of me cries inside with language like “Can’t everyone please stop fighting and just get along!”
I love those young, naive, childlike parts of me. But they should NOT be driving the bus when it comes to things like fighting for justice and holding clueless people who harm others with their cluelessness accountable. Those parts need a hug, from me, in Self. They don’t have any business telling Epstein’s victims or marginalized people or those who are their allies to stop “polarizing” or “being divisive,” when they’re just fighting for their rights and calling out anyone who fails to treat them as equals.
All of this is why it’s so important for influencers to speak out, to hold ourselves and each other accountable for the influence we wield- and to admit when we mess up, as humans inevitably will. To do our own work in therapy to get brave enough, to get confrontational enough, to heal our conflict avoidance and scared young parts that are terrified of telling the truth, and to build shame resilience, so we can own up to the things we do that DO hurt people- because we’re human, we’re imperfect, and we mess up.
That way, we aren’t complicit with a system that both helps and harms people. So that we at least hold ourselves and each other accountable. And that is why I’ve been advocating for discernment and reform in my industry for many, many years, even though it’s hurt my ability to earn a living by playing the game I’m expected to play to “get ahead” and it’s gotten me labelled by some in the “love and light” world as too upsetting to read or follow.
I get that. I really do. And I don’t take it personally. But the grim truth still needs to be told.
I Still Believe We Can Do This Differently
I’ve thought about just quitting this influencer job. I already quit one job already- my job as a conventional OB/GYN- because of moral injury. I’ve already blown the whistle on my former career, in my books Mind Over Medicine and The Anatomy of A Calling. And now I’ve been blowing the whistle on this industry for many years, as I write about here on Substack for my paid subscribers in my unpublished book LOVE BIGGER- and elsewhere.
But I haven’t thrown in the towel yet. Despite all of this—I cannot give in to helpless cynicism. And I haven’t lost my spirituality either. But the deconstruction process- and reckoning with my own complicity- has required a lot of therapy sessions.
I am heartbroken at times, yes. Disillusioned, certainly. I grieve the loss of innocence many of us carried into this field, the longing we had to believe that those standing on the stages embodied what they taught. But I am not without hope. Because what this moment reveals is not only corruption or hypocrisy; it reveals something far more human and far more redeemable—a profound collective hunger for truth, for integrity, for leaders who are willing to live their teachings not perfectly, but transparently. Not from pedestals, but from the messy, accountable reality of being fully human.
If anything, this reckoning feels like an invitation. An invitation for all of us—teachers, healers, writers, coaches, seekers—to step out from behind curated personas and into deeper congruence. It asks us to tell the truth even when it costs us something, to hold one another accountable without collapsing into dehumanization, and to repair when we inevitably cause harm. It calls us to refuse the seduction of proximity to power when that proximity requires us to betray our own values. We do not need perfect leaders; we need honest ones. We need communities that prize humility over grandiosity, accountability over image management, and service over fame.
Most of all, this moment asks us to remember that the real work was never about the gurus anyway. It has always been about awakening our own discernment, our own inner authority, our own capacity to sense what is clean and what is exploitative, what is loving and what is harmful—regardless of who is delivering the message from the stage. If this reckoning is painful, it is because something sacred is being protected. If anger is rising, it is because love and a desire for truth live underneath it. And if illusions are falling away, it does not signal the end of the wellness or spiritual movement, but rather the beginning of its maturation.
The falling apart is also a falling open—an opening toward a field that is more trauma-informed, more ethically boundaried, more justice-aligned, and more psychologically awake. Rather than turning away in despair, I find myself turning toward the work with even greater devotion: toward integrity, toward accountability, toward truth spoken with love, even when my voice shakes. Because the healing of this field will not come from the top down. It will come from those of us willing to remain awake within it—willing to stay, to speak, to listen, and to protect what is sacred, even when protecting it costs us.
If you’re an influencer or someone who has been keeping the secrets, who has disturbing stories like I have that you’ve never revealed publicly, reach out to me. We can have each other’s backs. I know I’m not alone.
