Let me say the thing nobody in this space seems willing to say.

There is a particular breed of person thriving in online spirituality right now. They have the vocabulary. They have the following. They have been around long enough to wear their experience like armour and they have developed an ego so enormous, so perfectly camouflaged in the language of light and healing and discernment, that the people around them have stopped being able to see it.

Or more accurately the people around them have stopped being willing to name it.

Because in the spiritual community, calling out ego is seen as the ultimate irony. Surely the person doing the calling out is the one with the ego problem? That's the trap right there and these people know exactly how to use it.

The Devil's Advocate Who Isn't Playing

You know this person. They show up on your posts your carefully written, genuinely felt work and they drop a comment that seems designed to destabilise rather than engage. Not to explore. Not to genuinely question. To test. To position. To remind you and everyone watching that they were here first, they know more and you should probably be grateful they're even reading your work.

They call it playing devil's advocate. They call it keeping the conversation honest. They call it discernment.

It isn't any of those things.

The real devil's advocate comes from genuine curiosity. It says: I want to examine this idea from every angle. It is collaborative. It elevates the conversation. What these people do is something else entirely: it's a power move dressed up in intellectual clothing. The goal is not to find the truth. The goal is to be seen as the smartest person in the room or to quietly remind you of your place below them.

"Discernment is a gift. Using it as a weapon is just ego with better branding."

Wearing Your Wounds As a Crown

Then there is the wound-wearing and this one is more insidious because it is wrapped in something that looks like vulnerability.

Real vulnerability in a spiritual practitioner is sacred. The willingness to say: I have been broken, I have walked through darkness and here is what I found that is genuine service. That is the transmission that actually reaches people.

But there is a version of this that has curdled into something else entirely. A performance of suffering. A catalogue of traumas deployed strategically to claim authority, deflect accountability and make it impossible for anyone to push back without looking cruel.

You cannot question their methods. They have suffered too much. You cannot challenge their perspective; they have been through things you cannot imagine. Every critique becomes an attack. Every boundary you draw becomes a wound they add to their collection.

The wounds stop being something they carry. They become something they wield.

"There is a difference between someone who has integrated their pain and someone who has built a brand from it. One will set you free. The other will keep you close enough to need them."

The Jealousy Nobody Will Name

Here is the part that really needs to be said.

When someone who has been in this field for years starts undermining the people coming up behind them the newer voices, the fresh perspectives, the people doing genuine work with genuine results that is not discernment. That is not mentorship. That is not holding the space accountable.

That is jealousy. Plain, recognisable, human jealousy and it is absolutely rampant in online spirituality.

The field attracts people who have done real inner work but inner work is never finished and the ego does not simply disappear because you've sat in a meditation circle or held a grieving person's hand or delivered a hundred accurate readings. The ego evolves. It gets more sophisticated. It learns to speak the language of the space it occupies.

So instead of showing up as obvious arrogance, it shows up as subtle dismissal. Backhanded engagement. Comments that seem supportive but land like a slow puncture. Positioning. Gate-keeping. The unspoken hierarchy of who deserves to be taken seriously and who needs to prove themselves a little longer and the people below them the ones coming up, the ones doing their best work, the ones who deserve support feel it. They might not be able to name it yet. But they feel it and it costs them.

"The most dangerous gatekeepers are the ones who genuinely believe they are protecting the gate."

The Mirror Nobody Holds Up

The tragedy in all of this is that most of these people not all, but most started from a real place. Real gift. Real calling. Real experience that earned them the right to be taken seriously.

But somewhere along the way the following grew and the following started to feel like validation and the validation started to feel like proof and the proof started to feel like permission permission to stop questioning themselves with the same rigour they apply to everyone else and nobody around them is willing to say a word because they are surrounded by people who either need something from them, are afraid of them or have watched what happens to the ones who try.

That is how an unchecked ego in a spiritual space grows to the size it does not because the person is irredeemably broken but because the community around them has decided that keeping the peace is more spiritual than telling the truth.

It is not. Silence in the face of harm is not neutrality. It is participation.

Why I Am Done Staying Quiet About It

I have spent only a couple of  years surrounded by this work. In grief. In mediumship. In sitting with people at the edges of life. I have seen what genuine service looks like and I have seen what its counterfeit looks like and I am no longer willing to treat them as if they deserve the same silence.

The people who are new to this space the ones searching for real guidance, real connection, real answers about death and grief and the continuation of the soul they deserve better than to be handed to practitioners whose primary concern is protecting their own position.

The people doing genuine work, quietly, without the posturing, without the performance they deserve to be able to do that work without being subtly undermined by the ones who should be their peers and frankly, the people with the inflated egos deserve the truth too. They deserve someone willing to say: I can see what is happening here and it is not what you think it is and the work you once did was real and you can find your way back to it but not while you are doing this.

"The spiritual community does not need more people performing healing. It needs more people willing to be honest about when it has stopped."

This Is What Accountability Actually Looks Like

Accountability in this space is not a pile-on. It is not a takedown. It is not performed outrage for an audience.

It is the willingness to look someone in the eye or on a screen and say: this behaviour is doing harm. You are better than this and I am not going to pretend otherwise because it would be easier for both of us. That is what a genuine peer does. That is what a genuine community does. Not applaud everything. Not silence everything. But tell the truth, carefully, consistently, even when it costs something.

If you have recognised yourself in any part of this good. Sit with it. That discomfort is the beginning of something.

If you have recognised someone else stop protecting them with your silence.

If you are one of the ones who has been quietly affected by this kind of behaviour in this space I see you. It was real. You were not imagining it and you are allowed to name it.

The light is not diminished by being honest about the dark.

In fact, that is exactly what the light is for.