Healing Is Not Your Identity
The Rise of the Aesthetic Healer
The problem isn’t beauty. Or success. Or well-lit imagery.
The problem is performance without depth.
(read that again.)
Curation without embodiment.
Magnetism without nervous system regulation.
Words without lived wisdom.
And when people come into your space expecting transformation and instead receive marketing, mimicry or energetically unsafe containers…
That’s spiritual harm.
Even if it’s unintentional.
Especially if it’s unacknowledged.
The Responsibility of the Teacher
Leadership in Spiritual Work Isn’t About Being Seen
…It’s about how deeply you’re willing to see yourself.
The ability to sit with your own shadows.
The courage to confront your patterns.
The willingness to dismantle your projections and take radical responsibility for your impact.
Because if you haven’t done that work…
You will inevitably leak harm even with the best of intentions.
Unintegrated teachers don’t just stall healing, they distort it.
They unconsciously center themselves. Or create co-dependence with their students.
Or model nervous system dysregulation as leadership.
This perpetuates a shallow, performative spirituality that looks/sounds good… but leaves people starving.
From Practice to Performance: When Spirituality Becomes a Show
If we’re not careful, we’ll keep offering spiritual spaces that look beautiful… but leave people starving.
We’ll give students just enough dopamine to come back, but not enough depth to transform.
We’ll attract followers… but we’ll stop forming practitioners.
And that is a betrayal of what this work is meant to do.
What We Lost When We Stopped Breathing
Yoga was never meant to be escapism.
It was never meant to be used as a dopamine hit or a means of avoidance.
My understanding of yoga is that it was meant and intended to return us to the divine truth that lives inside of us – to yoke, to bring together, back home to our center, our breath, our sacred aliveness.
But now, I watch and witness students take consecutive classes, pushing past the edges of their body, skipping savasana, posting about the burn and I wonder…
Why isn’t one practice enough?
Why isn’t one deep breath, one embodied experience, one intentional session enough to shift something?
Because it’s not about depth anymore.
It’s about chasing a feeling. Or avoiding the obvious (life and all it’s challenges).
It’s about doing more, not being more.
Yoga is not meant to be an obsessive, over-used product of performance and postures. It was never intended to be that.
It leads me to ask… What have we actually created here?