I want to start this post by saying that this is NOT a post about the evils of money and greed or selling your goods and services. Bear with me…

I spent 2020 and 2021 deeply involved in the online coaching community. It was a weird time.

But it’s not about the evils of online coaching, either. Promise.

I’m not going to claim I wasn’t fully invested in that world at the time. Especially in the early parts, I think there was a spirit behind it all, an overall uplifting vibe, which was exciting and empowering more than detrimental. I was working for an entrepreneur turned business coach who was also very much into the more New Agey spirituality stuff. Not really my thing, but the Venn diagram of witchy things and New Age thought does have an area of overlap, so we vibed pretty well.

When Covid happened, her fledgling, barely-getting-off-the-ground coaching practice took off like a rocket. Everyone and their brother was looking to build an online business, and there we were, already poised to help. I was a freelance VA, but soon my contracted position and pretty small task list turned into a full-time salaried position as Operations Director for a team of 12. The spiritual stuff was integrated into the business coaching, and other similarly spiritually-minded entrepreneurs piled into our programs.

What I loved about that whole era at the time was that I saw so many people, many of whom were suddenly out of work, turning to their own passions as an answer. In the beginning it truly didn’t feel like it was about finding just any way possible to get money from other people. It truly seemed to be a whole lot of people who looked around at their formerly stable but passionless careers and chose to take the opportunity to finally do the things they’d always dreamed of but never thought practical or possible. There was a real sense of passion and desire to do something positive and good with their interests and skills. It was palpable and contagious.

And yes, a lot of these aspiring entrepreneurs were tapping into their own spiritual practices and interests, wanting to offer their skills and services to spread that healing and empowerment to their communities.

I felt the same thing in my own local pagan/witchcraft community. There was a sense of collective desire to support each other and to share our skills and passions. New healers and herbalists and crafters emerged with home businesses, happy to be doing something with their hobbies and knowledge and having the rest of the communty enthusiastically consume what they offered.

I got swept up in the optimism of it, too. I finally wrote the book I’d been thinking about for years, started my podcast, basically started looking at all the ways I could finally lean in and turn my practice into my livelihood.

I honestly felt that we might, collectively, be at some kind of turning point, that maybe a transition to a more sustainable and community-minded way of living was underway.

But here’s where the problem emerged…

It wasn’t ever actually about transformation. It was about desperation. And desperation is dangerous.

Little by little, I watched everyone around me shift out of the golden glow of mutual empowerment once the economic bounty didn’t fall on everyone equally. When we were all in the throes of lockdowns and shutdowns, chasing our dreams and wrapping ourselves in spiritual optimism suddenly seemed downright practical and logical… until it wasn’t anymore. Until everyone’s savings ran out and it became obvious how much it costs to be an entrepreneur, no matter how passionate or skilled you are. Until the system started to crack under the pressure of turning everyone into potential entrepreneurs and draining the client pool dry.

I watched those who had quickly built successful businesses, my boss included, crash out when client counts plateaued or fluctuated. I watched those who hadn’t yet found their footing get angry and resentful. I watched bad decision after bad decision get made out of desperation and panic, and felt the uplifting optimism and community spirit evaporate completely.

I watched the tarot readers and spiritual advisers and healers give into scammy behavior and manipulation tactics to stay afloat. Online witch spaces filled up with rage bait, call outs, and low effort slop once paid content became a thing. The spirit of mutual community support disappeared and it started to feel like every witch or pagan you met was hoping to start their own little cult for profit.

It took me longer than it should have for me to clock what was happening and step away from my own obsessive hustle-and-grind and give myself a reality check.

But this isn’t a piece on the perils of money or greed, per se. Or even offering spiritual services and products for profit.

It’s about how easily we start seeing the people around us not as a community, but as a resource, and what that does to us as spiritual people, no matter what flavor our spirituality. And what it does to our communities.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re now in a crisis of disconnection. That people want to have friends and be part of communities, but they struggle to find and connect. We decimated our communities, and those who didn’t somehow get sucked into the vortex of exploitation via over-commercialization and the enshitification of social media are more protective than ever of whatever little core remains alive.

One of the things that has become very very clear to me over my practice is how directly tied human spirituality is to community and culture. And not just in the sense that spirituality is PART of a group’s culture. It’s part of a group’s culture because it’s a REFLECTION of that culture. What we believe and what we hold important as a group is the seed that grows into a group’s spiritual beliefs and practices. Our spirituality is what it is because of who we are as a culture, not so much the other way around.

And while it seemed through that shiny, golden period of faux connection and optimism that we were building and supporting our communities, what was really happening was that we were pulling away from those communities and creating new ones centered on competition for attention, engagement, sales, and profits. The communities many people are connected to now aren’t the ones they think they’re part of. They’re just circle-jerks of mutual exploitation, and the forms of spirituality that come out of those communities are predictably devoid of actual substance.

When we treat our spiritual communities as resources, especially as resources that are only valuable to us to the extent that they can support us financially, we separate ourselves from the roots of what makes our spirituality what it is. Wanting to benefit from spirituality while shitting on the culture which sustains it is like sawing off a branch of a tree and then being angry at the tree itself when the dead branch just lays bare on the ground and no longer offers shade or fruit.

But we can so easily be fooled into thinking we can do that, at least for a while. Just like you CAN saw a branch off a tree and prop it up somewhere and continue to enjoy the shade from the leaves and the fruit that was on that branch for a little while. But eventually you won’t be able to deny that the branch is dead, and you can’t revive it. You have to actually nurture the tree and stay close to it. The benefits have to go both ways. It’s a mutual thing – a RELATIONSHIP.

We can’t treat our spiritual communities like machines that dispense support if we’re not willing to actually, actively, genuinely be part of them. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making a living with our skills and talents and knowledge, even those tied to our spiritual practices. But once we do so in a way that makes us look at people as resources, our integrity and connection to our spirituality itself is harmed.

In retrospect, I don’t think there was ever any real potential for the giddy optimism of the entrepreneurial spirit in 2020 to go anywhere good, simply because our connections to our communities weren’t healthy BEFORE that, so they were never going to magically heal and thrive under the pressure of economic instability. We got excited that there seemed to be branches for everyone, but there was never widespread respect for the trees themselves. And in the aftermath we were left with a lot of damaged, overpruned trees.

(Yeah, I’m gonna keep running with this metaphor…)

The problem now is that everyone wants community, but a lot of people are trying to figure out how to put the branch back on the tree instead of going back to the tree and nurturing it so new branches can grow (that we will hopefully leave in place next time). Or even planting new trees to replace those we killed.

It’s always possible to find and build community, but it takes time. And it takes unlearning the impulses we have to look at our communities as exploitable. We have to stop fantasizing about rising above the people around us and becoming successful and revered and wealthy off their support. We can’t build community through commerce, and we can’t reconnect to our communities if we don’t actually have any interest in contributing to the health of the entire community as a whole before anything else.

And, okay, maybe this is a little bit about the evils of money and greed. It’s pretty much impossible to be profit-driven without seeing people (and everything else, to be fair) as exploitable, and to see exploitation as something smart people do.

Oh, and yeah, the online coaching world is, ultimately, inherently exploitative. It’s built on a foundation of pyramid-scheme bullshit where everyone is coaching everyone else to coach everyone into becoming coaches, and there’s basically no way for someone who honestly wants to just make a living on their skills and knowledge to avoid being exploited except by getting sucked into the machine and becoming just another perpetrator.

But that’s fodder for a different blog altogether….