The Thing Nobody Wants to Admit
We are honored you are here for this one. Because this is the conversation that healing communities most need to have and most consistently avoid.
You came to this path to get free. To shed the performance. To stop living for other people’s approval and start living from something real. And in many ways, you have done that work. You have sat in ceremony. You have done the journaling and the therapy and the somatic work. You have read the books and listened to the teachers and committed to a level of self-examination that most people never attempt.
And somewhere along the way, without meaning to, without even noticing it happening, the work itself became something you perform.
The healing became an identity. The growth became a status. The spiritual path became another hierarchy, with its own markers of achievement, its own unspoken rankings, its own subtle competitions for who is the most conscious, the most integrated, the most awake.
And the ego that you came here to examine has simply changed its wardrobe. It is wearing linen now instead of a suit. It is talking about integration instead of promotion. But it is doing the same thing it was always doing.
Seeking approval. Maintaining status. Protecting itself from being seen as less than.
That is not an accusation. It is a pattern that runs in almost everyone who spends significant time in healing spaces. Including the people facilitating them. Including the person writing this.
What the Spiritual Ego Looks Like
It is worth being specific. Because the spiritual ego is good at hiding inside language that sounds like its opposite.
It looks like the person who cannot receive feedback without reframing it as the other person’s projection. Who has just enough psychological vocabulary to deflect every challenge back onto the challenger. Whose healing has made them, paradoxically, harder to reach than before.
It looks like the hierarchy of experience. The subtle ranking of who has sat with which medicines, how many ceremonies, how deep their journeys go. The way certain experiences get worn as credentials. The quiet competitiveness that nobody names because naming it would itself be evidence of not being evolved enough to be above it.
It looks like the performance of equanimity. The person who has learned to respond to everything from a place of studied calm. Who has confused emotional management with emotional health. Who is no longer reactive in the old ways but has replaced reactivity with a kind of unreachable serenity that keeps everyone at exactly the right distance.
It looks like the use of spiritual language to avoid accountability. I am working on releasing that. I am holding space for what comes up around this. My higher self knows this dynamic is here for my growth. Language that sounds like awareness and functions as avoidance.
It looks like the inability to be genuinely wrong. Because the spiritually developed person has reframed their path so completely that everything, including their mistakes, becomes part of the journey. Which is sometimes true and sometimes just a way of never having to sit in the discomfort of having caused harm.
What the Research Says About Self-Deception
This is not a spiritual phenomenon. It is a human one. And it has a research base.
Dr. Robert Trivers at Rutgers University, whose work on self-deception is among the most significant in evolutionary psychology, documents how the human capacity for self-deception evolved specifically because believing our own stories makes us more convincing to others. The most effective performance of authenticity is one where the performer genuinely believes it. The ego does not announce itself as the ego. It announces itself as the truth.
Dr. Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund’s research on self-awareness theory shows that genuine self-awareness, the kind that actually produces change, is deeply uncomfortable. It requires sustained attention to the gap between who you believe you are and who you actually are in practice. Most people, when that gap becomes visible, do not sit with the discomfort. They resolve it by adjusting their self-perception rather than their behavior. By telling a story that closes the gap without requiring any actual change.
The spiritual path provides unusually rich material for this kind of story-telling. Because the concepts are abstract enough, and the inner life is private enough, that it is genuinely difficult for anyone, including yourself, to verify whether the growth you are claiming is real or performed.
Dr. Jonathan Haidt at New York University, whose research on moral psychology shows that humans are primarily rationalizers rather than reasoners, is direct on this point. We do not form beliefs by reasoning carefully and then acting accordingly. We act, often from self-interested or ego-protective motivations, and then construct reasoning to justify what we did. The spiritual ego does this with particular fluency because it has access to a rich vocabulary of justification.
The Specific Danger in Ceremony Spaces
This needs to be said honestly because it affects the medicine work directly.
Ceremony is not immune to ego. And the assumption that it is, that the medicine will always cut through self-deception, that people who sit regularly with plant medicine must be doing genuine inner work, is one of the most dangerous assumptions in healing communities.
The medicine shows you what you bring to it. If you bring a spiritual ego that has become sophisticated enough to absorb new experiences into its existing narrative, the medicine will show you experiences that your ego will then incorporate as further evidence of its own advancement.
People can sit in hundreds of ceremonies and become more entrenched in their self-concept rather than less. Can use the experiences as material for a more elaborate story about their own depth and development. Can emerge from the most profound medicine journeys with a stronger ego rather than a more transparent one, because the ego has learned to use the medicine’s language.
The question that genuinely disrupts this pattern is not how evolved am I. It is where am I still unwilling to be wrong. Where am I still protecting something at the expense of honest seeing. Where does my spiritual identity require me to be a certain way in order to stay intact.
Those questions are uncomfortable in direct proportion to how much the ego has invested in the spiritual identity. Which means the discomfort itself is information.
A Personal Note
I have been on this path for a long time. I have served medicine for a long time. And I can tell you from direct experience that the spiritual ego is one of the most persistent and least visible forms the ego takes.
I have caught myself using the language of healing to avoid accountability. Have used the concept of everyone being on their own path to avoid honest confrontation with dynamics that needed confronting. Have allowed my role as a facilitator to become, at times, an identity that required me to be further along than I actually was.
The medicine has shown me this. Not gently. The medicine is not gentle with self-deception. It is the most honest mirror you will ever sit in front of.
What I have learned, and keep learning, is that the measure of genuine growth is not how peaceful you are or how much medicine you have sat with or how eloquently you can speak about your process.
It is how willing you are to be seen getting it wrong. How quickly you can move from defense to honesty when someone shows you something about yourself you did not want to see. How much of your self-concept you are willing to hold loosely rather than protect at the expense of truth.
That willingness does not arrive once and stay. It requires constant renewal. The ego is creative. It finds new forms. The work is noticing it in its current costume rather than congratulating yourself on having dissolved the last one.
The Marks of Genuine Growth
Genuine growth does not make you less accessible. It makes you more so.
It does not make you harder to confront. It makes confrontation less threatening because your sense of self is not dependent on being right.
It does not produce increasing certainty about your own development. It produces increasing humility about how much remains unseen. The further you actually go, the more clearly you see how much further there is. The people who are most certain about how evolved they are tend to be the ones who have traveled the least distance.
Genuine growth makes you quieter about your process and more honest about your failures. Less interested in being seen as a certain kind of person and more interested in actually being that person in private, when no one is watching, when there is no audience for the performance.
Dr. Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion is relevant here in a specific way. Genuine self-compassion includes honest self-assessment. It does not require you to see yourself as further along than you are. It requires you to see yourself clearly, including where you are still running old programs, and to hold that seeing without shame but also without denial.
The spiritual ego uses self-compassion language to avoid self-assessment. Genuine self-compassion includes both.
How Working with Plant Medicine Opens This
When you work with Kambo, the medicine does not negotiate with the spiritual ego. It does not respond to your level of experience or your familiarity with ceremony or your skill at navigating altered states. It meets the body where it is and it works with what is actually there rather than what you believe should be there by now. That encounter with the medicine’s complete indifference to your self-concept is itself a teaching. You are not as far above your body as you thought. You are not as in control as your spiritual identity requires.
When you work with Bufo, the complete dissolution of self that the medicine produces includes the dissolution of the spiritual self. The medicine does not leave the evolved version of you intact while dissolving the less developed parts. It dissolves all of it. And in that total dissolution, the ego cannot claim the experience as evidence of its advancement because there is no ego present to claim anything. What remains is prior to identity entirely. That encounter, when it is genuine, has a specific quality of humility that follows. Not performed humility. The real thing. The kind that comes from having been shown, without any room for interpretation, that everything you have built your identity around, including your spiritual identity, is a construction.
Something to Listen To This Week
Put on Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Into My Arms.” It is a song from someone who has stopped performing belief and started speaking from something more honest and more uncertain. It is not the voice of someone who has arrived. It is the voice of someone who is still in it, still uncertain, still reaching. Let it be permission to drop the performance of having figured it out and speak from wherever you actually are.
Action Prompt
This week, ask yourself one question and do not answer it quickly.
Where is my spiritual identity protecting me from something I do not want to see?
Sit with it. Not with the first answer, which will almost certainly be a clean and acceptable one. With what comes after the first answer. With what the question opens up when you stop trying to pass the test it implies.
You do not have to share what you find. You do not have to do anything with it immediately. You just have to be willing to look.
That willingness, more than any ceremony or practice or accumulation of insight, is what genuine growth actually requires.
Now We Want to Hear From You
Where have you noticed the spiritual ego running in yourself or in healing spaces you have been part of?
And what is one place where your growth story might be protecting you from something you have not fully examined?
See you next Monday.
