Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The world of healing can be treacherous, but suddenly, spiritual aims to provide real, honest, practical, spiritual knowledge and wisdom for the true seekers among us.
The goal is to ignite the divine human within each listener, raising the collective consciousness for our planet. We will challenge your preconceptions, push your buttons, and encourage deep reflection. We're not here to adhere to the status quo of what the new age spiritual market wants you to buy into and believe. Consider this your antidote to the woo woo and a place of woo you.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: This happened to me yesterday where someone said to me that I should forget all the history of different countries and I should only focus on the present moment. And in theory, that is beautiful and wonderful. Yes, the present moment. To be here now, as Ram Dass says, who I feel Ram Dass is one of my main teachers.
If you don't know Ram Dass, please look him up. He's amazing.
Yes. Being here now, being in the present moment, cultivating the awareness of the present moment, is all beautiful.
This planet works in a paradigm of duality, and we have history, and there have been wars in history, and there's wars currently going on. Now, I would love to just forget genocide and war and just live in the present moment, but that's not where I'm at in my spiritual development.
And unfortunately, there's many healers, especially on instagram, I see them where this toxic positivity. Everything is love and light. All day, every day, everything is love and light. There's no credence, no acceptance of darkness and understanding that the darkness needs love and acceptance just as much as light does.
And the more that you relegate your shadow, the more it comes and finds you.
And what happens is people get enchanted by this. The secret. The secret, the actual book, the Secret and the documentary, the secret was known for that, where it's like, oh, all you have to do is really, really wish upon a star that you can manifest millions of dollars. They rarely talked about action. There wasn't a whole bunch about action given in the secret. It was spoken about, but not the focus. The focus was your thoughts become things, and you just have to positively think about everything and only align yourself with positive things in your life. And ta da, you are now going to be a millionaire, living on the cliffs of Malibu with your lovely spouse and your 2.5 children, and all instantly, just because your thoughts were aligned with that. That's a part of the equation, but that's not the whole equation. And people get shamed, which I personally have been shamed by other people who are healers and lightworkers. When I bring up anything having to do with the shadow, where, hey, bad things happen in the world, people are not in alignment with the light all the time. I'm not in alignment with the light all the time. That's just being a human. And so when there's people who want to dismiss that there is evil and darkness in the world and shadow and shame people for even bringing it up, that is a huge red flags flag for me when it comes to healers. And I think it's getting more sophisticated now. Or they may not be saying it outright on instagram that, you know, their love and light, and that's it.
But there was a time where it was pretty evident that toxic positivity and the spiritual bypassing was pretty rampant. Now it's a little more subversive how it's being done.
But guess what? The shadow exists. We all have a shadow. And by working with the shadow, by accepting that shadow and integrating it and dancing with it in our lives, then we become more whole human beings.
[00:04:38] Speaker C: I love that you talked about duality, and instantly, it obviously always makes me think, sun and moon, we need one, defines the other, lack thereof.
If the sun was out all the time, you wouldn't know what nighttime was. Vice versa.
And when I run into people like this, I find that the underlying thing that my intuition tells me is they're trying to get me.
And here's the thing. It may not even be conscious. Maybe they've done it to themselves. They're suppressing that intuition.
But it always is really, really glaring to me that they're trying to decrease somehow my self awareness that I've increased at this point. And then knowing that things are not always going to be perfect, but they can't be because I won't appreciate the light if there isn't any darkness. No, it doesn't mean I. And if I suppress the darkness, then I'm not dealing with whatever that emotion was. And then it'll come back.
Every time for me, it's the most inopportune time, and then it just pops out and then it creates more and a lot of other things happening.
When I see this spiritual bypassing, as you're referring to, sometimes it's hard for me, and maybe a little bit of advice for the listener here. It's hard to me to figure out, is that just a happy, pleasant person who's enjoying life? Or is it somebody who's forcing themselves to focus on the positive and the light because there's so much negative and they can't deal with it. Right now.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: You're talking about fear that they have. Fear that if they were to reveal that shadow, that they would be thrown into abyss. An abyss which I can understand. I have sympathy and empathy for that. I can understand wanting to keep yourself very positive, especially in challenging situations. My mom in December had a really, really intense surgery. She was in surgery for 5 hours. And she's older, she's not young, and it was really serious. And my older sister kept saying, for us to be positive.
I said, yeah, that's great. I'll be positive. However, also, you need to be realistic and understand the realities of things and the truth of things, not try to just, again, put your head in the sand. There's a Sufi saying where there was a caravan going to an oasis and they wanted to tie up the camels. But one side of the people who were coming in the group said, no, but we trust Allah. We don't have to tie up the camels. And then the other group was like, well, yeah, but you also have to tie up the camels. Yeah, we can trust Allah and tie up the camels. It's both things. It's like trust that you'll be taken care of by source or God, or however you want, whatever languaging you want to put to that force, but also do the practical things. So, yes, you can be positive, that's absolutely wonderful. And have trust and faith that everything will work out and it will work out, but also do the practical things in life. And if you have trauma, ignoring that you have trauma, and spiritually bypassing your trauma will only increase the voice of that trauma, and it will start to leak out and bleed into your life in ways that you have not realized it could or would.
And you will be potentially miserable. So you'll have this veneer of happiness, but it's a mask, it's a veneer underneath. You'll have all of this trauma, shame, guilt, depression, anxiety. If you're not cleaning up that side of the street and you're constantly traveling on the side of the light and the beauty and all that. Again, we live in a dualistic world. This is just how all this stuff is set up right now. And until we transcend the 3d, this is the construct we live in, understanding the realities of things, whether it be trauma or depression or mental health issues, family dynamics, poverty, racism. There's so many things, like understanding that those exist and working with them, but also having faith that things will be okay. So both things are important.
[00:09:27] Speaker C: Yeah. I find when I'm about to give a keynote address, and there's tons of people I'm about to perform.
I need to have that little bit of it's excitement, but it is a teeny bit of fear. And what I found, as I work through it, it's a very small window, but it means I care about what's about to happen. I care about the situation that's about to happen. And as I've gone through my spiritual journey and finding when those negative emotions do come out, the fact that I, a, recognize it, b, no, I have to let it run its course. And that it's serving a purpose has definitely helped me become more spiritual.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: You know, I don't want to blame a very popular actress, which everyone knows who she is. I'm not going to say her name, but she has a rather large company that rhymes with poop.
She kind of created aspirational spirituality with her Yoni eggs, which are crystal eggs that were to help women with trauma and their sexual energies. Interesting. She actually had a show, I believe it was on Netflix. It was maybe six different episodes that she had, where she was talking about things like Wim Hof.
For all of you who don't know who wim Hof is, he's this Belgium guy, the Iceman, who created a technique of breathing, and then coupled with that technique of breathing and movement, would have people do cold exposure. And when I'm talking about cold, I'm not talking about just a little bit of ice water. I'm talking about submerging yourself in an ice bath, which now many, many biohackers have adapted. Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, the whole, let's, you know, do these breathing techniques, which I have done, the breathing techniques, they're very, very helpful. However, the cold, that's just one thing my greek blood cannot handle, is the cold. It's just not for me. I'd rather be in a sweat lodge for six and 7 hours. That sounds much more pleasant. But what this created, I want to say it was in 2010, maybe, maybe a little bit earlier, was this very, very etheric, almost way of dress where people would be wearing all white.
Usually it was a lot of blonde women in Los Angeles, a lot of blonde women all in white with a green juice in one hand, and maybe a bottle of ionized, you know, alkalized water in the other.
A lot of it did align with people who had lots of money, who had the time to go to Kundalini yoga classes at Golden Bridge Yoga, which is no longer in Los Angeles. It's now a different yoga studio, but it was just like a mecca of willowy blonde women wearing long white dresses and wide brim hats, doing yoga at all hours of the day and night. It was not inclusive. It definitely wasn't inclusive. I don't think that that was the intention, but it did turn out to be that way. And I never felt that I fit into that crowd or scene, and many people didn't because I wasn't wearing all white at that time, and I still don't wear all white. I definitely don't wear black anymore, but I don't wear white all the time. I wear a lot of color, but it was just the energy of it seemed very separatist. Like, this is our special club, and you guys just aren't cool enough to be in this club. You don't go to Erewhon, which is a grocery store now it's in the United States. It's actually dubbed the most expensive grocery store probably in the US.
The epicenter of that was in Venice, California, and places here in southern California where a smoothie was $30, which is obscene to me.
And it really made people feel less than and not part of that spiritual community, because they had positioned themselves as the spiritual community in Los Angeles, and it was really sad, and people didn't feel they were good enough. And it was just this aspirational spirituality that. That was their branding.
[00:14:06] Speaker C: Yeah, I've seen that happen a lot. And when people are discovering their spirituality, and I went through this, too, to do it the best for them in the situation they're in or the place they are in their journey, they have to be vulnerable. And we talked about increasing your self awareness.
I found this, too, for me, once I got to that point, when that self awareness increases, I think as a symptom of that, it kind of has to be isolating for you to increase your self awareness. But then another symptom of that, in that isolation, I think, is a desire to belong, a desire to join a community, to have that communal feeling. And for the people that are listening right now and going through that, and I went through it to an extent, and then realizing, hey, I want to belong. And then kind of the first thing that sort of speaks your language or what you think your language should be, and then you join that.
Can you maybe talk about some things people need to look out for? Once their self awareness increases, they realize they're isolated, and then all these communities are there with welcoming, open arms.
What kind of things should they look for? I think the obvious one would be, we're the only ones that would be, number one, red flag. But what, what other things should people look for? And then what should they try and work on to not, for lack of better term, fall prey to these groups?
[00:15:49] Speaker B: That's a really good question.
Definitely. As you said, we're the only ones.
That's the first red flag. The second red flag would be in order for you to be one of us, you have to look this way, you have to dress this way, you have to buy these things in order to belong to us.
Also, the languaging that those groups use, whether it's, it does go back into spiritual bypassing. Oh, those people just aren't enlightened because we're enlightened. They're not. And you see this with high control groups and cults where they will say that someone is a suppressive person or someone is going to impede your enlightenment if you're with them, whether it be family or friends. That's a hallmark of a high control group or a cult, is when you, you are being taken away from your family and friends because your family and friends just don't understand the dogma that's being preached within the group, and they're not falling in line or they're asking too many questions and the group does not, is not very amenable to asking questions. You should listen to what they say. Follow what they say. Dress how they want you to dress. Speak to only the people that they want you to speak to. Pay however it is for membership or buy certain things in order to belong, whether it's very expensive memberships to yoga studios, or very expensive clothing or programs or trips and retreats. Those are some other things to watch out for that are red flags. It could be very seductive, and you may want to because of the way it looks on the outside. It draws you in because you see how, oh, wow, they're so spiritual and light. And look how much money these people make or how happy they seem to be. All I have to do is release my identity because I need to fall in line with this identity. It could be very seductive because of what it looks like on the outside. But once you get in, you realize that many times it's all a facade. It's all these people are wearing a bunch of masks, and it's only to bring in new membership into these groups.
[00:18:19] Speaker C: But Maria, I don't care. It makes me feel better.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: It can make you feel good, perhaps short term, but then is it really helping you be content and have joy and happiness? In your life long term, it could turn into a nightmare.
You know, at the beginning of most horror movies, everything, the family is very happy, everything's great, and then, you know, then there's a turn in the plot and then things are not great.
[00:18:50] Speaker C: So it's making me feel better in the short term immediately. Hopefully I'm not falling prey to that because I can independently increase my self awareness.
What would be a good measuring stick? If somebody's listening to this and hey, they have joined the community and everything's roses right now, maybe they could just participate, you know, be aware. But how long? Again, I know it's different, but how long should they kind of wait until they go back and assess and say, hey, I've been here for a bit. Is this good or bad? Let me leave. What will be sort of a timeframe, you think?
[00:19:33] Speaker B: I would say once something in your life comes up as a challenge to you and you go to the community with this life challenge that you have and seeing people's responses, if people are responding to in a way of spiritual bypassing, and while you're not doing enough yoga or you're not going to as many retreats as you should be going to as the solution to the challenge in a life, in your life, then that is where it's time to consider backing away. When everything is great and your life is going in a positive direction, it's going to be difficult for you to see where this group that you're a part of is going to support you because everything's great. But once the same thing, honestly, with the relationship.
A relationship can be great when there's no problems. But once a problem arises, how do the two people respond? So the same thing with a group. How does the group respond when you have a challenge in your life? If someone in your family gets sick, you are laid off from your job, whatever that challenge is, it's really how that group responds to you. So there's no specific timeframe. It's really life circumstances and how people react and respond to those life circumstances. Are they supportive? Are they not supportive? Do they shun you? Or do they bring you closer and really support you?
[00:21:00] Speaker C: So when people are in this vulnerable position, I love that answer, that they'll have to just give it some time and see if they feel fully supported in the non amazing times.
I think I see this a lot, too. People are in this vulnerable state and I can talk. From my experience, when I'm enhancing my spirituality, I'm realizing there's a void I'm becoming more self aware.
And then I'm looking for examples of how to live. And, you know, because of the capitalist thing we're in right now and the way it's lined up, and I find myself trying to deprogram myself. We're programmed to be aspirational to the point where we need something or someone to aspire to be. And we always want an example to work towards. I think, that's been programmed into us. And then, through no fault of our own, we're on the spiritual journey. But that muscle of I need someone or something to aspire to so I can follow a blueprint, when in reality, the blueprint is marketed to us, to consume, but that muscle is still there, going through that journey of being more self aware, wanting to be more spiritual, and then having that muscle kicking. Hey, I need to aspire. I need a guru. I need a blueprint. If you could talk about how the people listening, if they're realizing something in me, wants something to copy, how do we push through that? Aspire to be someone else so I can be better. Me. Which really doesn't make sense.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: No.
Being someone else is only gonna lead to more disillusionment and sadness, because being someone else is like a costume. You're never gonna feel like you're being seen truly or heard, truly. And I'm very. I know this is an unpopular opinion. However, I don't believe in gurus. I don't subscribe to gurus.
I think that there are people who are wise and are ahead of you on the path. However, they are also human beings. And how I've helped to navigate this within my own life is to not just have one person that you see as someone who you can aspire to, but to have many people and to draw on the best characteristics of each of those people. Because I love Alan Watts. He's an incredible philosopher, psychologist, spiritual master. But I also love Ram Dass. And Ram Dass and Alan Watts are very different, even though they were friends when they were alive, but they have different qualities that I admire in both of them. I also admire Buddha and Jesus, so many other more common religious figures.
And so I think having a diverse set of people that you look at as examples to emulate, but not putting them so much on a pedestal where you try to copy them, or even teachers who are alive, there's many spiritual gurus and influencers to look at, but again, they're always human. And when you put someone on a pedestal that high, they tend to fall. And then you start to question yourself and say, oh, my gosh. But I thought this particular guru was perfect, and now come to find out that they were unethical or they were doing things that were not in alignment with what their teachings were outwardly.
It can be very destabilizing when someone has one guru, and then it all starts to crumble. I think it's important to have a diverse set of viewpoints that you resonate with and then create your own icon of what it is to be a spiritual person, but to be you, to be you, your higher self, really explore who your higher self as. You can do this through meditation, and you can have this open inquiry of, if I was in my highest alignment as me, what would that look like? Who would I be? What would I be doing in the world? How would I show up in relationships? What would be important to me? What would be my goals and intentions? What would be my purpose in this world? And. And create that picture in your mind and then start to reverse engineer it.
So that's. That's what I would say, rather than having one guru and having that kind of smashed to bits when that guru falls from grace. Because, again, we're human beings. None of us are perfect.
Using a multitude of different gurus, for lack of a better word, and then creating your own avatar of what that is for you.
[00:26:25] Speaker C: But part of that journey for me, and maybe you could talk about this, was wondering if I could trust myself, because the me who's here now got me here because of not being as spiritual as I quote unquote, could be.
And then I love that idea of the buffet of qualities from people you admire to build sean 2.0, to aspire to be that.
And I went through sort of this period where, and I think I obviously needed to go through it, and I think most people will at some point. Where should I be? Trusting me with these thoughts and these aspirations of the best me, because I've come from a place of less spirituality. How do I navigate that thought process and realize I can't trust anyone but me?
[00:27:32] Speaker B: I think it helps to not be rigid and know that there's a Shan 2.0 and there's a Shan 3.0 and there's a Shan 4.0 into infinity. There's all of these versions of Shan, and each of them is a stepping stone for the other, rather than, okay, I'm going to stop at Sean 2.0, and that's it. And it better be perfect, or else. Or else what? I don't know. But the shoulds and the lack of fluidity and knowing that it's going to change the above and the all of this other stuff, it's going to happen. So rather than being so rigid in the mindset that it has to be perfect or else, this is my last version, you know, this is my last and most perfect version.
That's a lot of pressure to put on yourself. And the only thing that's really constant in this world is change. And so to know that maybe Sean 1.0, you're going to, there's a saying that if you're not embarrassed about how you were, you know, five or ten years ago, then are you really growing?
So am I shaking my head sometimes at things that I did five years ago? 100%. Absolutely. I'm shaking my head at that.
But that's good. That's good that I'm shaking my head, because if I wasn't, that means that I've stagnated and I've stayed the same.
So there's always going to be change. And getting very, very comfortable with change is also very helpful because then you're not stuck in an identity and then you don't feel like you're not doing the 2.0 version right, because there is no am I doing myself right? The only time you're not doing yourself right is when you're trying to be somebody else and you're not listening to yourself internally and using your inner compass as your north star.
[00:29:30] Speaker C: Agreed. And that was a big revelation for me, to realize there isn't a final destination.
It's the process, it's the journey, getting there.
And I hope that everyone listening is going to give themselves a break. Don't be too hard on yourself. I know that was something I constantly did because it was a learned behavior and through a lot of work and basically realizing that it's okay to make a mistake. But at the end of the day, just trying is a win.
And I hope everyone listening is going.
[00:30:11] Speaker A: To just keep trying, keep trying, keep moving forward.
