02/20/2026
Powerful read
When Our Mentors, Heroes & Gurus Wind Up In The Epstein Files Or Otherwise Let Us Down
As someone who knows many of the people in the wellness and spirituality circles personally, I've long ago given up pedestalizing anyone, and I certainly wouldn't want anyone to expect any kind of perfection of me. I certainly have my own skeletons in the closets and have made many mistakes.
But it is disheartening to see, over and over, that where there is power, there is so often abuse of power. My heart goes out to the Epstein victims and everyone who has been harmed by violations from entitled people who think they're above the law and shouldn't be held to account. And to anyone who has been victimized by sexual abuse, we're all here rallying with you, even if as****es like Pam Bondi can't put their ethics in the right place.
What I keep coming back to — in my own private processing, in the many behind-the-scenes conversations, in the quiet grief I feel as this continues to unfold — is how predictably this happens when we confuse charisma with consciousness, power with ethics, and talent with integrity.
Understandably, we want our teachers to be good- not merely skilled or brilliant, but fundamentally good. We want the people helping us heal to be healed themselves. We want the people teaching ethics to embody ethics. We want the people speaking about awakening to be awake to harm. And when they’re not, the impact isn’t just disappointment — it destabilizes something deeper inside us.
Many of us didn’t just learn from these figures intellectually. We opened up to them. We trusted them. We let their words shape our bodies, our choices, our spiritual frameworks. Some oriented our entire healing journeys around these leaders. So when correspondence like this surfaces — flippant, objectifying, power-drunk in tone — it lands not merely as scandalous, but as a relational betrayal, even when no crime is proven.
Discernment matters. Proximity matters. Tone matters. Who someone chooses to be and to relate with in private matters.
One of the enduring shadow dynamics in wellness and spirituality culture is the way we mistake access to power for legitimacy. If someone is in rooms with gurus, bestselling authors, billionaires, heads of state, celebrities, or elite scientists, we make a terrible mistake when we assume they must be evolved, trustworthy, important. But proximity to power does not equal moral clarity. Often, it signals just the opposite.
Power attracts power-hungry people, and unexamined narcissism, especially when it’s tainted with spiritual aggrandizement, can be one of the most dangerous forms of power there is — precisely because it cloaks itself in enlightenment language while bypassing both trauma and accountability.
This is why I feel protective of students, patients, readers, and seekers right now. We went through our first phase of disillusionment and deconstruction during the movement and the pandemic. We lost respect for gurus, self help authors, mind body medicine doctors who betrayed their profession, yogis, priests, and meditation teachers who spread Covid disinformation, abused their power with students, and proved to be far from kind, caring, enlightened, well-intentioned, altruistic, social justice conscious, or even well educated.
Disillusionment can be shattering, but it can also be clarifying. Beneath the grief is an invitation — to take our projections back, to stop outsourcing authority, to stop collapsing into gurus, to stop confusing brilliance in one domain with integrity in all domains.
We need to own up to our own tendencies, to get to know the parts of us that are always looking for perfect Mommy or perfect Daddy, someone we can give our power away to and let them control us, make our decisions, tell us what to do, and give us role models we can aspire to become. We need to stop believing in perfect humans, in enlightenment, in a trigger-free life, free of suffering. We need to grieve the end of our magical thinking, take off the rose colored glasses, and grieve the loss of our childlike innocence.
No teacher is above shadow. No healer is beyond ethical scrutiny. No amount of meditation, breathwork, non-dual philosophy, psychedelic use, or even trauma therapy makes a human infallible or exempts anyone from the basic responsibilities of being a decent human being in community.
What’s heartbreaking is that, in order to hone our discernment and hold people who abuse power accountable, we have to grieve that Perfect Mommy and Daddy aren’t coming. They don’t exist.
But there are “good enough” mentors, people who surround themselves with those who hold them to account, who call them out when they mess up, who know how to confess when they make mistakes and repair when there’s been a relational rupture. There are some people who will betray you less, disappoint you less, admit to their mistakes more. Those people are gems, and if you find them, like I did with my mentor Rachel Naomi Remen, thank your lucky stars.
The other good news is that disillusionment gives us an opportunity to come into closer contact with the guru within, the part that’s not a part, the Perfect Mommy/ Perfect Daddy inside, which in IFS we call “Self.” This divine spark that animates us all is the antidote to hero workshop, guru pedestalization, and the magical thinking that perfect humans actually exist. When we make contact with this aspect of our own being, it makes us far less vulnerable to giving our power away to people we pedestalize, who then inevitably let us down.
That doesn’t mean we don’t then hold others accountable. Just because we own our projections, just because we connect with the Self inside, doesn’t mean we don’t call out abuse or hold people accountable when they make poor decisions or ally with power people who cause great harm.
I also want to be clear that naming this is not some judgmental “cancel culture.” It is consent culture. It is accountability culture. It is survivor-honoring culture. It is medicine reclaiming its ethical spine. What harms the credibility of wellness and mind-body medicine is not critique — it is silence. It is spiritual bypassing. It is circling the wagons to protect power brokers while asking harmed people to “stay in love” and “rise above polarity.”
Real spirituality does not float above harm. It metabolizes harm. It names harm. It repairs harm. It examines the systems that allow harm to replicate.
For me, this moment is less about any one individual and more about a maturation process for the entire field and for humanity as a whole. We are being asked to grow up — to move from hero worship to peer to peer accountability, from charisma to character, from brand consciousness to ethical consciousness.
I don’t need my teachers to be perfect. But I do need them to exercise discernment about whose tables they sit at, whose money they take, whose proximity they normalize, and whose humanity they honor when no one is watching. And when they fail — as all humans do — I need transparency, humility, and repair, not reputational distancing crafted for public consumption.
If wellness, spirituality, and mind-body medicine want legitimacy, we cannot keep tolerating shadowy behavior simply because someone’s teachings helped us. Two things can be true: someone’s work can benefit you, and their ethics can still require examination. That’s not betrayal. That’s adulthood.
Perhaps that is the deeper initiation here for all of us who once looked outward for heroes. We are being asked to become our own ethical authorities — to listen to our nervous systems when something feels off, to trust disillusionment as information rather than cynicism, and to remember that awakening, if it is real, always moves us closer to accountability, never further from it.
When it comes to wellness influencers and spiritual leaders, so many of us began our deconstruction process during the movement, , and the pandemic. But clearly, we all have more disillusionment to process. If you feel confused or destabilized because someone whose work you admired is implicated in the Epstein Files- or if you’ve been betrayed, disillusioned, or otherwise disappointed in someone you’ve put on a pedestal, we’ll be offering some healing towards those betrayal wounds- and doing the deeper IFS work around it, on Monday, February 23. We’ll be talking about finding the baby in the bathwater, what to keep, what to toss out, and how to grieve the loss of our idealized image of people we’ve looked up to. We’ll also be recording it, in case you can’t join us live.
*Hat tip to Conspirituality Podcast for dedicating the latest podcast to the issue of the Epstein files in wellness spaces.
*This time, I'm sharing the face of my dog Moose, rather than some disgraced guru's face. Go ahead and project perfection onto Moose. She can handle it.
