White Spirituality

*This is an extended adaptation of a thread post I made after the election*

After COVID I left the spiritual community because the rapid pipeline to undercover white supremacist and Christian nationalist ideology was getting hard to bear.

I have recently started making an effort to get back out into the public world because isolation sucks and it did not take long for me to see it…again…even among people who clearly don’t mean to or know they are on this pipeline to chanting MAHA and sending all their friends anti-vaxx “research.”

Before you exit out of this article faster than you can say good vibes only, sit with whatever is driving you insane about what I just said and read a little more. Grab a coffee or your holier than though mushroom alternative. Get pissed. Type out a reply and backspace it. Send it. I don’t care.

I will air out myself first.

I am white.

I am a white female for the purposes of this article, I still identify as non-binary.

I grew up evangelical.

I too, left and became spiritual.

Yoga. Herbs. Astrology. Tarot. I MEAN LOOK WHERE YOU ARE!

So I can say this very confidently:

Sitting across my old self the other day was freaking hard. Thank the souls on this earth that had the patience to wait out my very necessary deconstruction.

And I don’t mean literally myself, but I do literally mean a white spiritual woman. The yoga retreats, ayurveda, the “emotional release,” and the “I am so glad I left my old racist Christian town.”

Now you are probably saying, “Uhh what’s wrong with that?” Nothing at face value, but this article isn’t face value.

First off America’s capitalism and consumerism made it possible for every white person in America to enter into “spirituality” thinking they left behind the negative aspects of the Church. The yoga studios are pretty, they smell glorious, decorated very well, and every yoga student whoever had the thought “I want to be a yoga teacher” is there to guide you. The metaphysical stores are perfectly curated to look authentic (and some are) with a white guru behind the cashier desk who knows just the white Shaman you should see for that shoulder pain they suspect is probably repressed childhood trauma.

“Okay wait just a minute!” Yeah, I know. Sit tight because I am not even to the part that is really going to make you mad.

Unless you are the other camp, “Thank goodness you said it!” You could actually still get mad too, so just hold in the applause.

This space is perfectly easy to linger in for a long time, gather certifications, read a bunch of books written by white people (WhAt iS wRoNg wIth ThAt!), and probably even start making money yourself. I mean you just have to host a retreat to share your spiritual awakening right?

It’s also very easy to suddenly be exactly where you were when you were with the Church surrounded by racist uncles, it just doesn’t look the same to you. I mean, this guy says he studied with a Native American tribe and wears tibetan malas, he’s nothing like your touchy pastor, right?

Except suddenly you may realize you are not deep down the spiritual rabbit hole, no you are deep down the illuminati is real and politicians are lizards rabbit hole.

“But they have a point, they are trying to poison us! I just took a bunch of yoga classes and now I don’t need my anxiety medication.”

I won’t argue a more active lifestyle probably helps some people wean off medication, but let’s not act like that means the conspiracy theories and the westernized spiritual gurus telling us we don’t need our medications as long as we practice yoga enough are on to something.

What they are actually on is white supremacy, Christian, and colonizing undertones. They may not even realize it, but they are. Or they totally do, and they abuse their power over you too.

Ever hear of the people who swear spirituality and new age stuff was making them worse so they ended up back with the Church?

They weren’t worse in the spiritual community, they were in the exact same situation as they were in the Church. They did not deconstruct, they fell into fear, and they went back to something they knew because Christianity told them that would happen if they left.

If you are in America, like I am, the truth is you cannot leave your racist overly Christian fundamentalist hometown. It will sound different. It will be more subtle. It will feel less in your face. But it is there. It is ingrained in our culture, in our systems, in everything we experience; even your yoga studio.

Your yoga teacher, your massage therapist, your reiki master, your sound bowl healer, your shaman;

They play off progressive. They play off anti-racist. They play off like they care about life with their vegan diets. But they too could have voted against human rights last fall in America, on purpose. It wasn’t about cheaper eggs and they don’t regret it.

I don't just say this because of the state our country is in, I say this because while you may think you are working on yourself and you may think the people guiding you have done that work already, it could all be a facade. It often is in the spiritual community and we can’t end it and we can’t move passed it if we don’t start calling it out.

Spiritual people are going deeper into the fear mongering claiming that is the very reason they left the church in the first place.

And how do you know that is where you are instead of where you think you are?

Look around and listen to what is being said underneath the surface.

Black and white thinking, good and bad, them or us, this or that, it is very strict thinking that leaves no room for true growth and breeds fear. It breeds hate.

In reality, vaccines are a modern scientific marvel that are constantly being worked on since they’re debut which only happened in the last 100 years.

They aren’t perfect and they aren’t evil.
Those two things can co-exist.

In reality, yoga can help with your mental health and you can still need medication.

In the spiritual world, the real deep dive is to realize human rights for everyone is necessary for us to evolve in our collective spiritual enlightenment and all attempts to say one way is evil and one way is pure is to prevent us from spiritual enlightenment, not bring us closer to it.

That includes understanding the balance between what we need and what exists, what we do and do not understand yet, what is like us and not like us, what works for others and what works for us. Life is a messy, interwoven, sphere of multitudes and we need space for all of it.

And we know MAHA isn’t making space for that. Not with their anti-vaccine and now brutally ableist anti-autistic agenda.

It is no different than the anti-trans agenda. It is no different than the anti-brown and anti-black agenda. It is no different than the anti-liberal Christian and anti-Catholic agenda. The scope of what is really acceptable here is slim.

If anyone is less than in anyway, we are all that much closer to being less than except white men.

And that is why I pointed out I am a white female for this article. They will come for everyone first and the white spiritual community will be okay with it and then they will come for us. They have already started. They want us breeding and they want to make it clear if we have female organs, that is our purpose in society. Yet, we remain steadfast in supporting MAHA like we almost want that after all that talk about leaving the Church that often made us feel exactly like that.

When we allow it to exist in the speech and values of the people our spiritual gurus stand behind simply because of MAHA, it is pure bull shit. To watch them and support them as they talk down so harshly and incessantly about children who they don’t believe will be productive tax paying citizens is insane.

If you follow one thing they say,

you follow everything they say and MAHA is MAGA.

Ideas from someone who says vile things are not the only good thing they said, it is just as vile, you just haven’t made the connection yet. Or worse, you will eventually speak those ideas yourself as if you finally realized they were true.

Okay, but why did you have to call out white people specifically?

It isn’t necessarily white people, as much as it is white supremacy. In fact, non-whites can push for and support white supremacy too and they can even know that is what they are doing. For a long time, I didn’t understand Candace Owens supposedly supporting black people, but marrying a white man. Then I studied history and the idea of “bettering the line.” Basically, she married white on purpose. But they can still push for others in their community to stick to themselves because they can’t “better” themselves if they are pushing for everyone to do the same. Someone needs to be at the bottom for supremacy to work after all.

This isn’t specific to skin color either. White supremacy also pushes for heterosexuality and ableism too. Like the first autistic child in America was diagnosed during the era of US eugenics and family competitions. Keeping up with the Joneses (Kardashins, yeah not named that by accident) meant having a perfect family and any deviation from that meant disgrace from society and being sterilized. This boy was born to a semi-wealthy family so that was a no no. They hid him in a mental health hospital at first, but fortunately his semi-wealthy family decided against that and took him home. However, that was not the fate of most disabled children in that era nor for many decades following if your family didn’t have the money or the ability or willingness to tell society to screw it.

White supremacy is in many ways exactly as it sounds, reigning supreme above others. White is associated with skin tone, but a better way to place it to truly encompass it would be to say it is an attempt at “purification” of society by specific agreed upon standards. That allows some wiggle room for “less than ideal” skin tones to support it, because much like the ambitions to be a millionaire someday, one could argue you could “whiten” yourself too. And they believed that was happening slowly to Native American children who were forced into white Christian families in the 1900s.

However, you can look at our current administration and immediately see the people who truly pave the way for white supremacy are white people. And not just white people, but the “perfect whites.” The women for example are plastic surgery blonde dolls for the most part. That is also by design, that is the ideal white person. Yes, we even have that. There is no limit.

Yeah okay, this is getting extreme. So let’s tone it back down to how you are probably seeing it.

If you are in the new age spirituality world, how many times does the algorithm of any kind push skinny white pretty people at you as your teachers?

Expensive skin tight yoga pants?

Blonde hippies?

When you google a new age book, have you ever noticed the author? Try it. Unless you’ve consciously and intentionally screwed with your algorithm, it will give you white authors first.

Maybe you just hate white people.

I have to throw this in there because I always get it. The first time I got it was about ten years ago from a fellow white parent because I was teaching my first generation Mexican children about their culture. Like it was anti-white to teach them their Mexican side. If you are laughing with me, thank you.

If you are the one saying it, first of all, super impressed you made it this far. It is a hard one to address because despite being white and despite how I grew up, I don’t get thinking I hate white people, and simultaneously myself, because I acknowledge it is easier for me to show up in algorithm by default (minus the platinum hair, plump lips, symmetrical features, and blue eyes). Yet I know it is a real concern of my fellow whites that I do in fact hate myself.

I don’t hate whites or myself, but I can acknowledge that how I look, how I grew up, how I see and understand the world, and so much more as a white person is not the only representation that exists. We can study all the things in the world, be well-traveled, well-educated, and speak foreign languages. Those things can supposedly even make us “cultured.” But it doesn’t mean we have all the voices and we tend to dominate in speaking for everyone.

Why doesn’t it feel weird to have white authors tell us about cultures and spiritual practices that they didn’t grow up with? And why do you feel the need to argue with me that they studied it so they deserve to talk about it? Why do you not want to read the perspective from the woman who grow up with it in her home, flowing in her blood like a pulse? Why doesn’t it bother you that you have to dig to find her work?

Reading a book by a white author who didn’t live it is often stale, like reading anthropologist’s discoveries because in many ways that is exactly what it is. With the odd exception of the white woman who spends half the book talking about her chronic illness or major life changing injury that led her to it.

Im not saying don’t read them. But I am definitely saying you have to make an effort, a real effort, to read from those who inhaled the spirituality you want to learn about since their first breath.

Im also not saying there isnt the occasional non-white author who also writes about things they discovered later in life.

Yeah okay, what do you want me to do about it? Seriously?

Stop supporting it and do the work to change it if you are currently a voice in the community.

It is so hard right now to confidently walk into a yoga studio and know it isn’t MAHA and that is NOT GOOD!

We need to start making it clear and we need to start recommending digging deeper beyond our loosely defined “spirituality.” If we left Christian fundamentalism, we are babies in the spiritual world. We can’t pick and choose and sell it as some unnamed “spiritual” practice. It isn’t helping us and it isn’t helping the community.

Let’s do better.

It will take baby steps to do and that’s fine, just do them.

Call out your own thoughts.

Call out your own hate breeding in your mind.

Call out your own desire to be accepted by white supremacy and to benefit from it.

Study the spirituality of people different from you and from before us. Name it so it doesn’t slip into Christianity again unnoticed.

Until next time!