Yesterday, in one of my advanced mentorship groups, one of the women brought up something that turned into a much larger conversation among all of us.

She had been describing a shamanic master class she is currently taking. A serious one. The kind where you are supposed to be advancing your mastery of sacred ancestral healing traditions, the deepest and most reverent end of the path. She paid good money to be there. She enrolled to learn deeper levels of shamanism.

What she got instead was politics.

She told us that every single class is dominated by the same fixation, returning again and again to who voted for a particular political figure, and what that supposedly says about a person’s soul. The group nodding along in agreement, certain that everyone present saw it exactly the way they did. The unspoken rule hanging over all of it, growing louder each session…..you cannot be “enlightened” or “spiritual” if you voted for this person.

Here’s the funny part…she did not even vote for the candidate they were all so worked up about. She had no personal stake in the topic at hand, nothing to defend. Her discomfort in the class had nothing to do with feeling implicated. It was something much simpler than that. It was the obvious recognition of how absurd and hypocritical it was to watch people entrusted with sacred shamanic practice weave in this kind of petty division, meeting after meeting, as though the two had anything to do with one another.

“What does who someone voted for have to do with shamanism?” she said. Rhetorically, of course, as she already knew it had zero to do with learning ancient and sacred healing practices.

And yet there it was… every… single….time.

What my client described is clearly not shamanism, nor is it ancestral wisdom, and most definitely not the deep end of the spiritual path. It is a pattern I have been watching move through spiritual spaces for years now. One that wears beautiful costumes and speaks fluently in the language of love and oneness, while practicing the exact opposite.

It is called false light.

The people caught in this would claim that they are awake. Many of them teach. They lead circles, hold space, charge for their guidance, and often genuinely believe they are operating from a high level of consciousness.

And that is exactly why this needs to be said plainly.

Perpetuating division is not high consciousness behavior. This side against that side, this candidate versus that one, your tribe against theirs….is the oldest manipulation that exists. It is designed to keep us split into camps, certain the enemy is the person who thinks differently, so that we never turn our attention to the system creating the division in the first place. It works on the educated and the uneducated, the awake and the asleep, the spiritual and the secular. None of us are automatically immune to it, which is what makes it so effective.

So here is the truth, and it applies to all of us equally. If you are still sorting people into the righteous ones who agree with you and the lost ones who do not, I hate to break it to you, but you are still inside the trap.

Not above it.

Inside it.

Choosing a corner of the arena and feeling justified about your corner is not the same as leaving the arena. The whole arena is the trap, and every corner of it is still the arena.

Some might call that the matrix.

This prevalent pattern being perpetuated amongst the modern spiritual community in particular is not a small thing when it comes to anyone who teaches or guides others. Our level of consciousness is the ceiling of what we can transmit to others. We cannot take anyone higher than where we are personally on our own journey.

So when a teacher is still not only measuring people’s worth by their politics, but making it a dominant point of discussion as part of a master level shamanic course, their personal limitation gets baked into everything they offer, no matter how sacred the tradition or how ancient the lineage. No matter how clean and true the wisdom being taught may be, when it passes through a human who’s consciousness is still entangled in the most basic division there is, by nature, will be tainted by that distortion.

Just as you can pour clear water into a muddy glass….the water will still be muddy.

The sacred teaching can only rise as high as the teacher. And someone still caught in us versus them is not teaching from the consciousness they believe they are.

None of this makes them bad people. It makes them human, and also limited in a specific and visible way. However, when someone steps into the role of guiding other souls, that limitation stops being private, because it shapes everyone who follows them, or learns from them. In other words, the distortion spreads and the true sacred teachings get diluted in its dissemination to others.

There is great responsibility in that.

This specific situation happened to be a political example, but the political one is just the costume it happened to be wearing in that shamanic circle. The pattern itself is much older and much bigger, and once you see its shape you can start noticing it everywhere.

The pattern is this:

You cannot belong, you cannot be good, you cannot be spiritual, unless you meet our condition.

Pick the condition. It changes depending on the room.

In one room it is who you voted for. In another it is whether you eat meat. There are entire spiritual communities convinced that you cannot be evolved if there is an animal product on your plate, as though the path to higher consciousness runs exclusively through someone else’s dietary choices. Or like the example from my previous article, you cannot be truly spiritual if you embrace your sexuality. Or like the Catholic priest I heard in sermon one day thirty years ago “Those who are not Catholic…pity them for they are not as enlightened as you are.”

This same move has worn the robes of organized religion for centuries. Believe these specific things, confess in this specific way, or you are not worthy of God’s love. Conform or be cast out. And if you think the spiritual world is any different, look closer. The same condition shows up there too, just dressed in sage and crystals instead of scripture. Believe the right things, hold the right views, or you are not truly awake. The costume may change, yet the underlying demand does not.

And let me be clear, because this is the part that matters most. True high consciousness, what some may call Christ Consciousness, does not draw this line. It never has. The line is drawn by the people who use spirituality, in any of its forms, as a way to decide who belongs and who does not. Who it worthy, and who is not.

Then there are the subtler costumes, the ones that are harder to catch because they sound so wise.

There is spiritual bypassing, where every difficult emotion gets waved away with a tidy phrase about vibration or manifestation, as though acknowledging pain were a failure of faith.

There is the relentless positivity that has no room for grief or anger or doubt, so people learn to perform serenity while quietly falling apart.

There is the belief that you create every bit of your own reality, which sounds empowering until it curdles into telling a suffering person that their suffering is their own fault, a spiritual bootstraps argument that abandons people at the exact moment they need compassion most.

And then there is the most dangerous one of all.

“Do not focus on the darkness,” they say, “or you will attract more of it. Keep your eyes only on the light. Do not look at the hard things, the shadow, the manipulation, the evil that is genuinely operating in the world, because looking will only feed it.”

This one is dangerous precisely because it disarms you. I have spent the last ten years in particular, helping others understand the darkness, not to fear it but to face it, and render it powerless in their lives.

The darkness does its best work on the people who refuse to admit it exists. Real light is not the absence of any awareness of the dark. Real light has the courage to understand exactly how the dark operates, not to wallow in it, not to be seduced by it, but so that it cannot move through you undetected. Awareness is not attraction. Awareness is protection. The teaching that tells you to look away is not protecting you. It is removing your defenses and calling it peace.

Every one of these is the same tactic. A condition for belonging. A line drawn between the worthy and the unworthy. And every one of them, no matter how spiritual it sounds, is doing the opposite of what real spirituality does.

Some of you might be catching what looks like a contradiction.

Erika, are you not doing the very thing you are describing? Are you not saying that people stuck in division are less evolved, and is that not its own line between the worthy and the unworthy?

It is a good question and it deserves a clear answer.

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I have been affectionately calling these people spiritual posers for years. Anyone who has watched my videos over the last nine years has heard me use the term.

The spiritual poser performs spirituality without genuinely living it. In other words, they don’t practice what they preach (that is what makes them a poser and also clearly gives away my age at the same time). The gap between the image they project and how they actually treat people is the whole tell. And one of the most common ways that gap shows itself is in line-drawing, deciding who is in and who is out based on some external criteria. How you choose to pray, what you choose to eat, what you believe about controversial topics. None of those things have anything to do with consciousness. They are about conformity to a group.

What I am calling out is the opposite. I am not asking you to be on any side. I am showing you that being caught choosing sides at all is what keeps everyone limited. I am saying notice that you are on a team in the first place, and notice what it is costing you. One sets a condition for belonging. The other hands you the freedom that arrives the moment you stop needing one. They are not the same move. They are opposites.

And there is a second distinction underneath that question, which is the difference between judgment and discernment.

Judgment is a verdict or conclusion. I like it, I do not like that, this one is good, that one is stupid. It oversimplifies a person into right or wrong and in essence closes the book on them.

Discernment sees far more, not less. It observes the behavior or information clearly, names it honestly, and then looks underneath to understand why. Someone caught in division is almost always acting from their wounding, from their programming, from how genuinely frightening it can be to question a story they were handed long ago. Discernment does not ignore the behavior, yet it does not condemn the soul underneath it either. It holds the awareness that every person is somewhere on their own path, working through karma and lessons we cannot see and have no right to judge.

So when I name false light, I am not ranking anyone’s worth. I am naming a pattern. I can see when someone’s shadow, or unconscious patterns are showing, when they are teaching from a place they have not yet healed, and I will say so plainly, while still holding real compassion for them as a soul doing the best they can from where they stand.

Naming the pattern is discernment. Condemning the person would be judgment.

I intend always to live on the side of the first one. And I continually watch myself for the second, because the line is real and it is easy to cross.

So let me be clear about what false light actually is, because the term gets used loosely and it matters that we are precise.

And let’s back up even further, and define what I mean by light. Light is Divine. Light is truth. Light is pure. Light is love. Light is clarity.

False light is anything sounding, resembling, acting as if it is light, yet isn’t truly of the light.

It is anything that presents itself as spiritual, as loving, as awakened, while operating from somewhere else entirely. It is not defined by which tradition a person claims. Yoga, Christianity, shamanism, the latest modality, none of that is the issue. False light is the gap between the light someone portrays to the outside world and what is actually happening underneath it. And it shows up in a few different forms.

So let’s get back to the spiritual poser. Of which there are two types.

First, there is the one who has taken spirituality on as a persona. A performance. They have learned the language, the aesthetic, the right things to say, and they wear it because of what it gets them or how it serves them. These people have rarely ever done any type of meaningful healing work in their lives.

The other type, is the one who genuinely believes they are spiritual but has not done the deep inner work (though they may have done some initial healing work). The gap is just as real, but it is invisible to them.

I have a friend who lives in that second version. She is deeply into her yoga, talks a beautiful game about presence and peace and higher living, and she is also one of quickest to anger, and most judgmental women I have ever known. She does not see this about herself, nor is she faking on purpose. She genuinely thinks of herself as a spiritual person and aspires to be that. But her behavior shows that she’s not done the deeper work, to understand her triggers, or her deepest wounds, so the anger and the judgment leak out of her constantly, completely invisible to her even as everyone around her feels it. That is the unconscious spiritual poser. Not dark. Just unhealed and unaware.

Then there is the darker expression of the spiritual poser, and of false light, and this is where it stops being about limitation and starts being about something with intention and an agenda.

Some darkness is dark at its core and deliberately wears the costume of light, because the costume is exactly how it reaches people. The proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing, where their projected light is the bait (what was that scary fish with the big teeth and the luring light in the movie Finding Nemo again?)

I had another close friend, someone I trusted, who stole fifteen thousand dollars from me at the lowest financial moment of my life, when she knew I needed it most. I was a single mother, and she was married to a wealthy man, living on a lavish golf course in an upscale community and attending charity events and the like. This is a woman who built her entire identity around being a good Christian. Last year, she ran for public office on precisely that image, the upstanding Christian woman, and she actually won. She is a very, very good spiritual poser. Yet hers is not an unconscious gap. That is someone who knows exactly what image she is projecting. The costume of light is the strategy she uses to get what she wants, and to deceive others in the process.

And there is a third form, the one that is hardest to talk about because it does not involve bad intent at all.

There are well-meaning people who never set out to deceive anyone, who genuinely want to serve the light, but because they have also not done the deep inner work, they are left vulnerable to being used by the dark. When there are holes in your energy system, when there are wounds and shadows you have not addressed, darkness can move right through those openings and actually use you to do its dirty work - unknowingly. It can work through a sincere person, borrowing their credibility and their following, and spread distortion through them while they believe with their whole heart that they are spreading truth. They are not villains. They are unguarded. And the unguarded are exactly what darkness looks for, because a genuinely sincere soul is far more convincing than a sinister one.

Those are the primary types of false light. The conscious poser. The unconscious poser. The deliberate deceiver. And the sincere person being used. Different in intent, identical in effect, because all of them put something into the world that looks like light and is not.

There is something happening right now, in this window of time, that makes all of this matter more than it would have even a few years ago.

Every December I channel the energies of what is coming in the upcoming year, sharing the larger themes moving through the collective. One of the strongest themes I have been shown for 2026 is a bifurcation. A splitting. A point where consciousness and reality begin to diverge in a way they have not before.

I want to be clear on what I can and cannot tell you, because this is exactly the kind of moment where the false guru reveals themselves.

I see the bifurcation clearly. What I cannot tell you is precisely how it will look, because no one actually knows that. It could show up as a widening gap between the people waking up and the people staying asleep. It could look like lives visibly diverging, paths separating, relationships and communities reorganizing around what people are no longer willing to put up with. It could be something more subtle and energetic than any of that. It could be something even more dramatic, where we may all enter a different parallel reality aligned with our level of consciousness, and those not aligned will stay in theirs. It could be any combination of all of those.

Anyone who tells you they know how this is going to play with certainty, is a clue. Certainty is the costume false light loves most.

The same is true of timing. I read these energies as a dominant theme of this year, and I trust what I am being shown. But energetic timing and the timing of the physical world are not the same thing. The energy can be accurate and still take longer to fully land here in the third dimension, because divine timing has its own intelligence that none of us command (and that is a whole conversation of its own for another day). I will simply say I am confident in what I am seeing, and I hold timing of it much more loosely.

What I can say with conviction based on what I’ve been shown to date, is that the systems that have propped up false light are beginning to break down. What has been hidden is being revealed, and that revealing is accelerating. The patterns I have been describing, the posing, the division, the costumes, are getting harder and harder to keep hidden, because the energy of this time is pulling everything up to the surface to be seen. And the moment something false is truly seen for what it is, it loses its power. That is why myself and others have called this the end of the false guru. Not because the posers will vanish overnight, but because the cover they have operated under is dissolving.

If you are someone who has followed a teacher, a guru, a community, and later felt the sting of realizing it was not what it claimed to be, I want you to hear this clearly. You were not foolish or weak. You were deceived by something that was engineered to deceive, that spoke the language of light fluently enough to fool many sincere and intelligent people. The fact that you can see it now is not your failure catching up with you, rather it is your discernment coming online. That is the bifurcation working in your favor.

And if you are one of the genuine ones, the real light that has spent these years feeling pushed to the margins, unseen, unheard, quietly wondering why the loudest voices in this space so rarely seem to be the truest ones, I want you to hear this even more clearly.

You are not imagining it.

For years now, the genuine voices have been buried while the posers were amplified. Suppressed, shadow banned, pushed down by systems that seem to have no trouble boosting the hollow and burying the real. AI has made this even more obvious.

I know this one personally, more intimately than I will get into here. It began for me very clearly in 2019 and it has not stopped since, and it has cost me in ways that are impossible to overstate. But this is not just my story. Far from it. More and more of us are seeing it now, naming it, comparing notes, realizing it was never a coincidence and never a personal failing. The suppression of real light and the amplification of false light are not two separate problems. They are the same machinery, running in both directions at once.

I am going to tell that whole story in a piece of its own, because it deserves the full telling and the specifics matter. For now I will only say this. If you have felt buried, there is a reason, and the reason was never that you were not good enough (and the darkness salivates knowing that you may have doubted yourself). It was that what you carry is exactly the thing the old machinery was built to keep quiet.

That machinery is breaking down now. That is what this year is about.

Here is the thing none of us escapes. Every single one of us has been caught somewhere. In some division, some condition, some certainty we were sure was true right up until the day it cracked open. There is no one reading this who is exempt, and there is no one writing it who is either.

Every one of us has been caught somewhere. Myself included.

Early in my career, when I was healed by and then studied the naturopathic route, I stepped straight into one of the most heavily perpetuated divisions there is, the war between conventional medicine and natural healing. Each side certain the other was the problem. And for a while I absorbed that division as well, especially as my healing via unconventional methods went directly against what allopathic medicine had told me. That was before I understood what I know now, that both have a time and a place, and that the certainty on either side was its own kind of trap.

It went deeper than that, too. For years I recommended supplements with real conviction, backed by research, confident I was standing on solid scientific ground. Today I question all of it. I have come to wonder whether the darkness is clever enough to own both sides of the story, to seed distortion into the natural world precisely because that is where the discerning people went looking for something cleaner. I have changed my mind on things I once taught with certainty. Big things. And I will change it again the moment I am shown something truer, without shame and without apology, because I refuse to remain stuck in a prior version of myself that has stopped growing.

And that is the whole point. Higher consciousness is not a fixed destination you arrive at. It is a willingness to keep seeing, keep questioning, keep loosening your grip on what you were certain of yesterday. The false guru cannot afford to do this, because their authority depends on already having the answers. The genuine seeker does it constantly, because their integrity depends on the truth, not on being right.

So if you found yourself in here somewhere, you are not the problem. You are exactly the kind of person this is for. The willingness to look is the entire difference.

I want to come back to the woman who started all of this.

Because the reason she brought it up in our group was not to complain, and it was not really about politics at all. She was noticing something in real time. She was feeling, in her own body, the contrast between two spaces and what each one did to her.

One of those spaces she could physically walk into anytime she wanted. The shamanic class meets in person, and she has every opportunity to be in the room, in the flesh, with the teacher and the rest of the group (and if there is anything lightworkers have been facing is the feeling of loneliness and a desire to connect with other like-minded people).

She chooses not to. She attends online instead, deliberately keeping a screen between herself and a room that leaves her feeling tightened, guarded, and drained, meeting after meeting.

The other space she has no choice but to enter through a screen. Our mentorship group is scattered across the entire world, so there is no opportunity to gather in person. And yet that is the one where she feels she can finally exhale and feel welcomed. Among people whose presence does not ask her to shrink or to perform or to pick a side.

Physical proximity gave her nothing. Nor did the sacred lineage and the in person circle and the ancient credentials, because underneath them was a frequency that drained her. And a group she can only reach through a screen, with people she may never stand beside in person, gives her something real, because the frequency underneath it is clean.

But here is the part that matters most, and it is the part almost no one talks about.

She could feel the difference because of where she is on her own journey. Her ability to sense the contrast between those two rooms was not random. It was a function of her own level of consciousness. She had done enough of her own work to feel, in her body, what was clean and what was not.

This is the sinister part. When someone is at certain level of consciousness, sitting in a room full of spiritual posers operating at that same level, they do not necessarily feel anything is wrong. It does not register. The false light messages resonate, because they haven’t experienced the true light yet. In other words, they don’t know what they don’t know. Everyone in the room is nodding along, and not one of them can feel the thing my client felt, because the very capacity to feel it is what they have not yet developed. False light can sound good. It can feel good, for a while anyway. Over time, it begins to show its cracks. This is precisely why many true lightworkers have been suppressed and shadow banned, because once people experience the real thing, it’s much easier to spot the fake.

That is how you tell the difference. Not by the costume. Not by the title or the tradition or how spiritual something looks from the outside. You tell by how it actually feels to be in its presence.

Because the body knows.

We were simply taught to override it, to talk ourselves out of what we could clearly sense, to give the benefit of the doubt to the thing that looked right even as something in us contracted.

The whole shift, the one happening in you and the one happening in this larger moment, comes down to learning to trust that knowing again.

I went deep on exactly how to spot false light in an episode of my podcast, including the specific signs to watch for, if you want to take this further.

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So if a space, a teacher, a community, or a belief leaves you feeling smaller, more divided, more afraid, more certain that the problem is some other group of people out there, pay attention. And if something leaves you feeling more free, more whole, more able to hold another human being in compassion even when you disagree with them, pay attention to that too.

One of them is the costume.

The other is the light.

And once you experience the true light more and more, the false guru will be no more.

Prefer to listen? Hear me read this article to you here.

Most people who find their way to my work do not arrive knowing something is missing.

They arrive having already done the work. Years of it, in many cases. Therapy. Energy healing. Breathwork. Somatic sessions. Coaching. Spiritual retreats. They are not beginners. They are committed, self-aware, genuinely invested in their own growth. They have accumulated real insights, real breakthroughs, real shifts along the way. By the time they sit across from me, they have a story about themselves that is honest, thoughtful and makes sense.

What they don’t know… is that the story has chapters they have never connected.

Not because they missed something. Not because the other work they did was wrong or incomplete. But because every modality, every practitioner, every session gave them a real piece. A genuine piece to the puzzle of their life story that makes them who they are.

Yet rarely, if ever, have they seen the hidden factors connecting all of them, into a larger, more complex soul story.

That is what I do.

I did not start with that as the end goal when I began my work in the field of health. My entry point into this work was about as far from the invisible as you can get. I began as a clinical nutritionist, trained in the measurable and the provable, grounded in naturopathic medicine and clinical evidence.

Early in my practice I began using a biofeedback system, a tool that measures the body’s stress responses and identifies which organ systems are not resolving the way they should. It gave me data. Actual numbers. A physical representation of what was happening beneath the surface.

But I brought something to those sessions that the machine could not provide on its own.

Years of study in the relationship between organ systems and emotions had given me a map. I already knew that a stubborn liver response was rarely just about the liver. That a chronically out of balanced adrenal result was rarely just about stress. One of the first books I read when I embarked upon my quest to figure out how it was possible that I had healed of the incurable disease was Carolyn Myss’ book The Anatomy of the Spirit. In that book, is a line that I have carried with me ever since I first read it over 25 years ago.

“Your biography becomes your biology.”

The body tells a story, and speaks to us through the only way it knows how – through physical symptoms. When emotional or spiritual discord is left unaddressed, eventually this can manifest physically, normally years later if we don’t heed the more subtle warnings it give us first. I had spent years learning to translate these signals. The biofeedback system showed me where the body was not rebalancing. And my own understanding, and increasingly my own gifts, showed me why.

From there, depending on the client and their level of consciousness and readiness, I would sometimes do timeline work. The system would prompt a client with an age, and from that age we would uncover the scenario, the experience, the emotional root that was still living in the body and preventing it from resolving. Not every client needed this. Not every client was ready for it. But when it was right, it was always revelatory.

One of the most fascinating examples of this happened with a client who was a healthy 28 year old woman, who had randomly stopped menstruating. She had been to every doctor, every naturopath for the better part of a year, and no results. She tried supplements, Chinese herbs, homeopathy, medicine….and nothing helped. She had every test under the sun, and everything checked out healthy and normal. There was no visible reason for her amenorrhea.

I did the timeline work with her towards the end of her first biofeedback session. It turns out, her lack of period related to an experience she had had at the age of twelve. It was sexual in nature, and she carried a lot of shame around it. Fast forward to her present day life…and it connected to what she was going through then. She had joined a yoga community that she felt very connected to, yet this particular group believed that in order to be “spiritual” that one had to denounce one’s earthly desires. In other words, you could not be spiritual and express sexuality at the same time – you had to pick between the two. This caused such an internal struggle for her that her body listened to her and shut down her sexuality (the ability to reproduce) so that she wouldn’t have to choose.

She started her period two weeks later.

She came to see me two more times after that. Not because something was wrong. Because she wanted to make sure she could trust what had shifted. By the time she walked out the door for the last time, she was a different person than the one who had first walked in. The worry she had been carrying, about her body, about having to choose between who she was spiritually and who she was as a woman, was gone. She was alive again. Fully. In a way she had not been in almost a year.

There are countless stories like this from my practice.

What fascinated me most was not the biofeedback tool itself but what it kept revealing. Every time, almost without exception, people who came in with something physical had something non-physical at the root. An emotion that had never been fully processed. A childhood experience that had been filed away but never truly resolved. A pattern that had been running silently beneath the surface of their adult life for decades. The body was not the problem. The body was the messenger.

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Over time, as my practice deepened and my own gifts expanded, I used the biofeedback system less. Not because the science stopped mattering but because I had developed something that could not be measured: the ability to see the whole picture. The mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual dimensions of a person simultaneously. The patterns across seemingly unrelated chapters of their life. The soul arc, the trajectory, the lessons a particular situation is here to teach. I could see the connections before the client could. And my job was never to hand them what I saw. It was to walk them toward seeing it themselves.

Before every session, I prepare my clients for what might happen. I tell them that what comes up might feel familiar, something they believe they have already healed through in previous work. Or it might feel completely unrelated to why they came to see me. Either way, I ask them to stay curious rather than surprised. Because if something familiar surfaces again, it does not mean the previous healing failed. It means there is a deeper layer that is ready to be seen. And if something unrelated surfaces, there is a reason.

There is always a reason.

People carry their life in chapters. A childhood wound over here. The relationship pattern over there. The career crisis in another compartment entirely. The physical symptom in yet another. They have worked on each chapter separately, often in isolation, the way you might sort papers into different folders without ever reading them together. What they cannot see, because they are inside the story, is that all of those folders are chapters of the same book. The same themes running through all of them. The same invisible root expressing itself in different languages across different decades of their life.

When the connection finally surfaces, and it always does, something in the room changes.

I watch it happen every time and it never stops moving me. The tension they arrived with releases. Their shoulders drop. Their breathing changes. Their energy becomes lighter. The room itself seems brighter, the way it does when clouds move and the sun finally comes through. They smile, often through tears, not because something painful just happened but because something true just landed. Dots that had been floating separately for years, sometimes decades, suddenly tether together into a story that makes sense. A story that finally has an arc.

That moment is not me telling them something. It is them finally seeing something that was always there, waiting to be seen.

I consider it a sacred honor every time someone trusts me with that process. To let me into the deepest recesses of their experience, to be vulnerable in ways they often have not been with anyone else, to follow me into territory that cannot be mapped in advance because it is different for every person. I do not take that lightly. Not once in twenty years have I taken it lightly.

And when we are done, I give them a recording of the session so they can go back and listen again. Because the first time through, they are inside the experience. The second time, they become the observer of it, and they see even more connections than they caught in the room. I also give them tools and exercises they can use when things surface between sessions, because my goal has never been to become someone they need. My goal has always been to show them how to read their own map.

If I am doing my job right, they eventually do not need me anymore.

That is not a loss.

It is the whole point.

The invisible has been operating under the surface and running your life whether you knew it or not. The patterns you have been trying to change at the level of behavior. The physical symptoms you have been treating at the level of the body. The relationships you have been analyzing at the level of the other person. All of it has a root that lives somewhere you have not looked yet. Not because you are not ready. But because you did not know there was somewhere else to look.

You already have the pieces. More of them than you probably realize. What changes is the moment you finally see how they are all connected.

It’s like the moment you put in the last few puzzle pieces, step back and can see the entire picture.

That is where everything shifts.

Where in your story, have you made some connections, only to later discover the root was something else?

Prefer to listen? Click the audio above to hear me read this to you instead. (and please excuse my voice - had a cold when I recorded this and the previous article as well)

I was twenty five, maybe twenty six.

I had just moved to Los Angeles, fresh out of getting my MBA, healthy, young, doing exactly what you were supposed to do at that age. Go to college. Get the degree. Get the better degree. Get the job. Figure the rest out later.

The spiritual world was not on my radar. Not really. I had not yet gotten my first tarot reading. I had not yet been diagnosed with the disease that would eventually crack my world wide open and send me down a path I never could have predicted.

I was just a girl in a black Ford Mustang convertible with tan leather seats on a beautiful sunny day, driving up Vista Del Mar from Manhattan Beach heading north toward Playa Del Rey, reveling in the thought that I actually lived in LA after having grown up enduring the cold and grey New England winters.

I stopped at a red light near the water treatment facility intersection at the north end of Manhattan Beach. First car in the lane. My convertible top was down. Sun on my face.

I did not know that everything was about to change in a matter of seconds.

From my right, a car was making a left turn heading south onto Vista Del Mar. Standard intersection. Standard day. And then, out of nowhere, a car going south ran the red light at what I would later estimate was around fifty five miles an hour and smashed directly into the turning car with a force I had never witnessed up close in my life.

What happened next is something I have never forgotten and never will.

Time stopped.

I sat frozen in the front seat of my Mustang watching the impact happen in slow motion, the way you hear people describe accidents but never quite believe until you are inside one. The car that had been hit was not stopping. It could not stop. The physics of that much force at that much speed do not allow for stopping. It was being pushed, spinning, coming directly toward me. I watched it getting closer. And closer. I was completely exposed, completely trapped, first in line at a red light with nowhere to go and no time to get there.

I remember the particular quality of that helplessness. It was not panic exactly. It was something stiller than panic. A terrible clarity. I was a sitting duck. There was nothing I could do. So I did the only thing available to me. I closed my eyes. I braced. And somewhere in that frozen moment between closing my eyes and waiting for impact, something in me reached out. Not in words exactly. More like a plea that came from somewhere below language. A desperate, wordless, whole body asking to be okay.

I heard the screech of rubber on asphalt.

And then … the screeching stopped.

I opened my eyes.

The car that by every law of physics should have slammed into my driver’s side door had stopped. Less than an inch from my car. Parallel to it, the entire length of it, close enough that I could have reached out and touched it. There was no earthly reason that car should have been able to stop that quickly at that speed. None. I knew it in the moment and I have known it every day since.

I sat there in shock, shaking from adrenaline, trying to process what had just happened. And underneath the shock, underneath the shaking, there was something else.

A knowing so clear and so immediate that it did not feel like a thought but rather as truth. Something had just helped me. Something I could not see had intervened in a moment where the physics said I should have been seriously hurt, and had made the impossible happen.

I thought of my grandfather.

He had passed about five years before that day. Of all the people I had lost by that point, he was the one I felt closest to. In the last years of his life, when I was away at college, we had been pen pals. Actual letters, back and forth, the kind of correspondence that builds a particular kind of intimacy that other forms of communication do not quite replicate. Losing him had been a real loss. And standing there on the side of Vista Del Mar, still trembling, the first face that came to mind was his. I did not know if it was him. I still do not know. But it felt good to believe that someone who had loved me was watching from somewhere I could not see, and had shown up exactly when I needed them most.

I drove away from that intersection in a stupor. I told people what had happened. I felt profoundly grateful in a way that stayed with me. And I filed it somewhere in the back of my knowing, that quiet place where the things you cannot explain but cannot dismiss tend to live.

And then, less than a year later, I was driving north again. PCH, right near LAX, not far from where the first incident had happened. I was stopped at another red light.

This time I never saw it coming.

A car hit me from behind without warning. No screech of brakes. No slow motion. No moment of terrible clarity. One second I was sitting there and the next second I had been shot forward like a bullet and I was injured.

I have thought about that second accident many times in the years since. And the more I have thought about it, the more significant the contrast becomes.

The first time, I saw it coming. Time slowed. I was present, conscious, and somewhere in that frozen moment of total helplessness, something in me reached out across whatever distance separates this dimension from the next one and asked, wordlessly, desperately, completely, to be okay.

And something responded.

The second time, I had no warning. No time to be present. No moment of reaching out. No conscious participation in what was happening. And I got hurt.

I do not think that is a coincidence.

I think it is evidence.

Not the kind of evidence that holds up in a courtroom or a laboratory. But the kind that holds up in the deeper court of lived human experience, where the most important things we come to know arrive not through proof but through the accumulation of moments that refuse to be explained away.

What I have come to understand, years of healing work and thousands of client sessions and countless hours in channel later, is that we are not passive in our experiences. We are not simply moving through a fixed world where things happen to us and we react. We are active participants in a co-creative relationship with dimensions of reality that most of us were never taught to acknowledge, let alone engage with consciously. The moment I closed my eyes on Vista Del Mar and something in me reached out was not me being lucky. It was me participating, however unconsciously, in something real.

Consciousness is the bridge.

We have all had experiences we cannot explain. Moments where something happened that defied the odds, or where we knew something before we could have known it, or where we felt a presence we could not see. Perhaps we dismissed them as coincidence. Or we told ourselves it was just a romantic way of thinking about something that probably had a rational explanation we simply had not found yet.

Only to realize later, sometimes much later, that no…..this shit is real.

Maybe we were not fully aware of it at the time. Maybe we did not have the language for it or the framework or the courage to say it out loud. But the universe was telling us all along.

Hey. There is more to this than meets the eye.

If you only pay attention.

And how I want to hear from you. Tell me your story. Drop it in the comments below.

Because if there’s anything I’ve learned over all these years of doing this work, that what you have been calling a coincidence for all these years is anything but.

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I’ll never forget the day it happened.

We were having lunch, the founder and I. Someone I deeply respected, and considered not just a colleague but a genuine friend. The kind of lunch where conversation flows, where the professional context holding it together almost disappears. They had been curious about my “other work.” Fascinated by it, even. Personally intrigued enough that they had asked if I would do a reading for them sometime. And then, somewhere between bites of food and a pause in the conversation, they leaned in with the particular quality of attention that comes over someone when they have been sitting with something for a while, something they have decided they are finally going to say.

“Don’t let anybody know you’re doing this,” they said. “Because you will lose ALL credibility.”

I heard the words. I understood them. And I sat with them in a way that felt very quiet and very loud at the same time.

What made that moment sting was not just the warning itself. It was how familiar the sentiment felt. Because I, too, had wrestled with the same thing. That same voice of doubt, uncertainty, and concern.

But let me back up, because the lunch scene only makes sense with the full picture behind it.

I started my healing practice in January of 2007. Not as a side project, not as a curiosity. As a calling I had been moving toward ever since I had been cured of an incurable disease in less than an hour. Over the years that followed I worked with countless clients across naturopathic practice and energy healing. By the time that lunch happened, I had been doing this work for almost a decade. It was not a hobby I had stumbled into. It was a life’s work, already fully in motion, already changing people’s lives in ways I had witnessed up close, one person at a time.

Because of my professional credibility, in 2014 I began working with a global company as a full-time marketing consultant, also serving on their Scientific Advisory Board in a separate capacity. They developed products across multiple areas of health and wellness, and the work felt, at the time, like hitting the jackpot. It was incredible to work among such brilliant professionals who cared so deeply and passionately about clean ingredients and supporting people’s health journeys. I was in the proverbial sweet spot, the place where my work as a naturopath, my marketing and strategy background, and my consulting experience all converged into something that finally felt like a complete picture. I traveled the world, speaking in front of crowds of thousands, educating and teaching about health. Lending my expertise in product development and future strategic expansion. For someone who had taken a winding path to get there, it felt like everything had led exactly where it was supposed to.

Then in the fall of 2016, out of the blue, my consulting gig came to an end. The company wanted me in house, which meant relocating from San Diego to Salt Lake City to accept a high level marketing role. I was a single mother, and wasn’t willing to uproot my daughter out of her life just for a job. So I said no. And just like that, the most incredible corporate opportunity I had ever had was over.

What followed was one of the hardest years of my life.

All of 2017, I struggled financially in a way I had never experienced before. I had a very specific skill set at a very high level, and the market was not particularly interested in that. Companies were hiring younger, less expensive people, and I kept finding myself overqualified in rooms that had already decided what they could afford. I also had three major entrepreneurial opportunities I was pursuing, and if one of them landed, I would have been more than fine. None of them did though, they all fell through. I found myself financially desperate, trying to figure out what came next, trying to hold everything together as a single mother while the financial ground kept shifting under my feet.

I was still a member of the Scientific Advisory Board, still showing up for speaking engagements and board meetings when asked. But the full time work was gone, and the steady income that came with it.

It was during that challenging time that I began studying tarot in earnest, as a way to distract myself from the financial stressors and daily uncertainty of my life. In the fall of 2017, on what I can only describe as a whim, I did a tarot reading for myself, decided to record it, and randomly threw it up on YouTube.

Just for fun. I had no plan, no strategy, no expectations. Nobody knew my real name. Nobody saw my face. I was hidden, carefully and deliberately hidden, from a world of judgment and exposure I was not yet ready to face.

To my surprise, people commented on that video. Some asked if I did personal readings. I scrambled, created an email address, threw up some pricing, and thought “Sure, that sounds fun.” The universe, as it turns out, had other plans for me.

Imagine my shock, when my channel blew up.

As the channel grew, so did my income, eventually surpassing anything I had ever earned in my corporate work several times over. I was doing readings, energy healing sessions, selling my online courses and hosting live events. More importantly, I was doing something that brought me pure joy, something that was genuinely helping people across the world, and it quietly became the thing that pulled me back from the edge. The YouTube channel did not just become my career. It literally turned my entire life around overnight.

I want to pause on that for a moment, because I think it matters to the larger story. The thing I had been hiding, the thing I had been told would cost me everything if anyone found out, was the very thing that showed up when everything else fell away and carried me through.

By the time that lunch with the founder happened, the channel was already well underway. And here is where context becomes important, because this was not a company with a neutral audience. This was a network marketing company with a large distributor base that was predominantly devout Christian. They wanted to learn from me because of my education, my credentials, my mind. I was exactly the kind of person they held up as proof that this company had legitimacy.

And yet. If they had known I was doing tarot readings on a YouTube channel with a rapidly growing following, they would have claimed I was doing “the devil’s work.”

That is not an exaggeration….it is the actual belief system I was navigating.

So when the founder leaned across the table and told me not to let anyone know what I was doing, I understood exactly what they meant and exactly why they were saying it. I even agreed with the logic of it on the surface, at least the part of me that had spent years managing my own internalized indecision about being out there visibly.

But I also knew, in a quieter and more certain part of myself, that something about it was deeply wrong.

Because these were the same people who were perfectly happy to have me on their stages. The same people who wanted to be photographed with me and call me brilliant and learn from my expertise. The moment tarot entered the picture, suddenly I was “of the devil.”

Never mind who I was as a person. Never mind my soul. My heart. Never mind whether I had actually helped them or made a difference in their lives. The hypocrisy was, and remains, breathtaking.

What happened next probably should not surprise anyone who knows a Gen X woman well enough.

Being told what I should and should not do has always had a particular effect on me.

And it was on June 4th, 2018, that I showed my face on camera for the first time. I changed the name of the channel from Crystal Rose Insights to Erika Elmuts, my actual name, and I stepped out from behind the anonymity I had built like a shelter. I continued to expand my offerings, create courses, hold live events, work with more people as my full self. I decided to own, publicly and without apology, the complete truth of who I was.

I stayed on the Scientific Advisory Board for a couple more years after that lunch, not because I agreed with the arrangement, but because I still felt a thread of obligation to that chapter of my life. Until eventually I realized that thread was actually a tether, and that what I wanted, what I needed, was to be completely free to pursue everything on my own terms. I resigned and never looked back.

Part of what finally got me there? I was in my forties and had genuinely stopped caring what people thought of me. There is something that happens in that decade of a woman’s life that I can only describe as a kind of magnificent clarification. The noise quiets. The apologizing stops. You begin to see, with a precision you did not have before, exactly who you are and what you are here to do. And you stop being willing to shrink for anyone.

I was still Erika. The Harvard educated, MBA holding, strategic mind who had sat at tables with C-suite executives and helped companies find their way. And I was also Erika, the High Priestess, the healer of many lifetimes. Even writing that feels strange to claim out loud. And yet I cannot deny what I have been shown and what I have lived, not only in this lifetime but in others. I have traced the tapestry of my soul’s journey across many incarnations. This is not my first go around. And I know, with a certainty I cannot fully explain but also cannot argue with, that I was placed in this exact position for a reason. The family I was born into, the education I received, the career I built, all of it was preparation for the impact I am here to have.

Ever since my first tarot reading at Regina Russel’s Tea Room in Quincy, Massachusetts back in my mid twenties, I had been fascinated by and drawn to the esoteric world. Though I could not have fully articulated why. What I can tell you is that I had carried certain gifts since I was a little girl. I thought everyone had them. I didn’t yet have a word for what it meant to always know what someone was really thinking or feeling about me, even when they held a smile on their face and played the role of a friend. I was hyper aware of darkness, of energy that felt wrong before I could explain why. I was told I was just a chicken shit. It took me most of my life to understand that what I was sensing was real, that I had the ability to see and feel things that others simply did not.

It was through doing thousands of sessions with people over the years that I came to understand those gifts clearly for the first time. And through that understanding I came to see that they were never actually separate from the rest of who I was.

This is the part I want you to sit with for a moment.

What people called my brilliance as a strategist, the ability to see multiple dimensions and angles of the same situation simultaneously, to sense what was coming before the data supported it, to read a room and the people in it with a precision that went beyond observation, that was not just intelligence at work. I was tapping into a stream of knowledge and energy that I have since come to understand is very real and very available to all of us, when we stop pretending it isn’t there.

I used to think it was just because I was smart. It was only years later that I understood it was more than that.

There is a difference between intelligence and wisdom. Intelligence can be earned and trained and credentialed. Wisdom is carried. It moves with the soul across lifetimes, accumulating, refining, teaching us quietly what to do and who to be in ways that often live far below the surface of conscious thought, even in the most skeptical among us.

And so the credibility I was supposedly going to lose by coming out of the spiritual closet turns out to be exactly what gives me a voice.

Not in spite of this work.

Because of it.

Countless times over my career people have said some version of the same thing to me. “I never would have considered that if it hadn’t come from you. I would have dismissed anyone else, but the fact that you’re the one saying it made me stop and actually think.”

I consider that one of the greatest honors of my calling. It is a direct reflection of what happens when credibility is put in service of something true. People listen in places they otherwise would not. Doors open that would otherwise stay closed.

I’m grateful for that conversation over lunch that lit the match. It was all exactly as it needed to be. I needed to be told that. I needed to feel the sting of conditional acceptance before I could fully understand why unconditional self-acceptance was the only way forward. I needed to hit rock bottom so that when grace showed up in the form of a YouTube channel I had thrown up on a whim, I would recognize it for what it was.

So why is it so strange that credibility and professionalism and spiritual gifts can coexist? Why do we treat them as separate worlds that must never touch? Why did we learn to compartmentalize ourselves this way, to offer the world only the parts of us we calculated it would accept? What if “good gut instinct” or “business visionary” were actually expressions of these gifts, just labeled as palatable phrases?

Credibility did not disappear when I chose courage.

It deepened.

What was told to me would be a detriment, is actually one of my greatest assets.

Courage and credibility were never in opposition.

They were always waiting to be united in someone willing to claim both.

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There is no shortage of spiritual content out there right now.

What there is a shortage of is spiritual content that is grounded in reality and not just a false illusion of “love, light, and namaste.” Content that bridges consciousness, healing, energy, and soul growth without dumbing it down. The kind that does not ask you to leave your intellect at the door. The kind that does not smell like incense and false certainty and someone who figured it all out on a yoga retreat.

Here is something most people do not realize. Serious, accomplished people have been living inside this world for a long time. They have been amongst you. You just did not know, because nobody dared say anything out loud. The stigma, the stereotype, the fear of losing credibility or status kept it quiet. So everyone assumed they were alone in it. They were not. They never were.

The era of the false guru is ending. What is emerging in its place is something different. Spiritual leadership that has been through the ringer. That has lived in the real world, built real careers, guided real people through real transformation, and still came out the other side saying, yes, all of this is real, and here is what I actually know about it.

That is what you will find here.

I am a channeler, a healer, a teacher, and someone who works one on one with people in the deepest moments of their lives. I hold a Harvard degree and an MBA. I have guided over 1,800 clients and taught more than 2,200 students. I drive a truck, wear cowboy boots daily, and love boating on the Gulf Coast.

I am not your typical anything.

What I bring to this space that you will not easily find elsewhere is the combination of real world practicality, intellectual rigor, and genuine depth that serious spiritual conversation actually requires.

One essay a week. Free. For people who are done pretending the two halves of themselves are separate.

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