The Spiritual Business World Has A Conspirituality Problem
I Thought I'd Left Conspirituality Behind. I Hadn't.
There's a word for what happens when wellness culture and conspiratorial thinking collide. Conspirituality. Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker have been documenting it on their podcast since 2020, tracing the pipeline from yoga studios and wellness communities into the fever swamps of QAnon and vaccine misinformation. Then in 2023 they formally published a book on the same topic.
I discovered their work in this field through lived experience. Prior to 2020 I was an active member of a yoga community, one that I deeply loved and trusted. But, during COVID, I watched nearly everyone in it radicalize in real time. People I had practiced with, breathed with and built community with became strangers to me. Their feeds transformed overnight and so did their way of thinking. The green smoothie recipes gave way to conspiracy theories. The language of healing became the language of paranoia. It was one of the most disorienting things I have ever witnessed.
When I discovered their podcast, Beres, Remski, and Walker gave me a framework for understanding what I had experienced. They named the pipeline. They documented the most extreme version of what happens when spiritual community gets weaponized. And through it all, they made me feel less alone.
But that's not actually what I'm here to talk about today.
I’ve recently been noticing something new emerging in spiritual spaces. Something quieter. Something covert. And, in my opinion, something just as insidious.
I've watched this phenomenon seep into the spiritual creative business world in a way that hasn't been named yet. It’s not operating as antivaxx memes or QAnon rabbit holes, but as beautifully written Substacks about ethics. Brands built on reciprocity and anti-capitalism. Businesses that claim to do good in the world right up until the moment doing good would cost them something.
That's when the mask comes off.
And that's what nobody is talking about yet.
The Energy Exchange
Almost a year ago to the day, I found myself drawn to a networking event called the Energy Exchange. I had just moved to a new city and was eager to connect with new people. The name alone pulled me in. It felt like an invitation rather than an obligation, the kind of thing you show up to because something in you just knows.
I'm glad I listened.
That night I made connections that still feel rich and alive in my life today. I met several people that I consider my friends, colleagues and community now. One of these women stood out immediately. She was magnetic in the way that certain people just are. Open. Fully herself. The kind of person who lets themselves be seen without apology, and in doing so makes everyone around them feel like they can too. I was drawn to her immediately.
And then she mentioned she was looking for someone to help her with a project. Something directly tied to my wheelhouse. It felt serendipitous. It felt aligned. I was immediately drawn in.
The client and I met after the event to discuss the project further. And as the vision came into focus, it became clear that bringing it to life would require additional support. My mind immediately started working. Who did I know that was talented enough to help make this project the absolute best it could be? Who shared that same devotion to the work?
One person came to mind immediately.
I was in community with an illustrator and designer I had known for over seven years. Someone insanely creative, deeply skilled, and already fluent in client work. Someone I had collaborated with before without a single issue. Someone I considered, genuinely, a friend. Every signal was green. I made the introduction, explained my enthusiasm, and arranged for them to meet.
I believed in this team. I believed in this project. And I believed that we were all there for the same reason—to make something extraordinary.
For a while, everything confirmed that belief. What I didn't fully account for was what happens when that dynamic shifts. When you go from working alongside someone in one capacity to standing beside them as an equal. It turns out that changes things. Not always. But sometimes. And this time, it did.
Our project seemed full of creative possibility at the beginning…and then it didn’t.
The Creative Mismatch
At the start, everything felt aligned. The client would channel the vision. The illustrator would bring it to life visually. I would manage the process, holding space between both until my own hands-on phase of the project began. We were a team. We had a plan.
And then the first illustrations came in.
The client wasn't happy. Something felt off. She couldn't fully articulate it yet, but she knew. She shared her feedback with me and I relayed it to the illustrator. That's what I was there for. That was my role.
The illustrator didn't like it. Not just the feedback, but the fact that there was feedback at all. And she didn't like that it had come through me. She wanted a direct line to the client to implement revisions, and so a direct line was created. I thought nothing of it at the time, but now I can see that this act quietly moved me out of the middle of a process I had been specifically brought in to manage.
Rounds of refinement followed. The same issues kept resurfacing. And as they did, something else became apparent. The illustrator seemed to expect a certain deference to her work, as though the client should have been grateful for whatever was delivered rather than an active participant in shaping her own creative vision. The feedback wasn't being received as information. It was being received as an affront.
I stayed close, managing emotions, trying to hold the container together.
The client had hired the illustrator under the assumption that she could channel the work. She had communicated that clearly with me from the start. I had assumed the same, I had trusted that this was within the illustrator’s capability. But through months of illustrations and rounds of revision, it became clear that wasn't the case. The process was too rigid. The client was too involved in the construction of each image for anything resembling channeling to actually happen. There was no magic in it. No essence moving through.
Eventually the client made the hard decision to let them go.
When Boundaries Hurt
It was a Monday morning when I opened my inbox and found the email. I was shocked, but not surprised.
The project had been at a standstill for months, making no forward progress. When I read the email I understood why she had made this decision. The client was clear and kind in how she communicated her decision. She was direct, measured, and fair. Her request for a partial refund was bold, but not unreasonable. Not given the circumstances of the project.
So I sat back and waited.
And then the illustrator replied.
Before they responded formally, they texted me. The message was blunt. They were not giving the client anything back. Not a conversation, not a consideration, just a hard line drawn immediately. I understood why ending a project feels personal. But the intensity of the reaction caught me off guard. The project hadn't been enjoyable for anyone. I had half expected relief. Instead I got rage.
And then came the formal response to the client. Same position. No refund.
When the threat of legal action entered the picture, I did what any reasonable person protecting their business would do. I stepped back. This was not my contract being disputed. So I communicated clearly to the client that I couldn’t take on that legal exposure.
The client understood. She respected it.
Then the illustrator reached out. They wanted me involved. They were building a paper trail and they wanted me in it. I drew the same boundary I had drawn with the client. Same words. Same reasoning. This wasn't my legal situation to enter.
The illustrator did not receive it the same way.
What followed was a series of messages that made clear just how differently we saw the situation. They felt abandoned. Betrayed. They framed my professional boundary as a personal failure, as evidence that I didn't value our friendship. They claimed that I was choosing money over loyalty, and that I wasn't showing up as a true community member.
I sat with that for a long time. Because it hurt. Not because it was true, but because it came from someone I had trusted for seven years. Someone I had considered a real friend. Someone whose work I had believed in enough to bring into a project I cared about.
I even reached out to try to repair it. To explain. To be vulnerable in the way that feels hardest for me.
It didn't matter. The friendship ended anyway.
Ethics As Aesthetic
One of the main reasons I trusted the illustrator was because of their values. They had built a brand around anti-capitalism, ethics, and reciprocity. I wholeheartedly believe in those values myself. They are not just words to me. They shape how I run my business, how I show up for my clients, and how I move through my creative community. So when I brought this person into a project I cared about, part of what gave me confidence was believing we shared the same ethical foundation.
What unfolded over the following months though eroded that belief.
And when the project ended what I witnessed was not reciprocity. The client had invested thousands of dollars for work that never fully delivered. They kindly and reasonably asked for a partial refund. And they were met with hostility. A resounding no. And, to me, this is not ethics in action.
It was a contract. Just the contract. Pulled out as a shield the moment accountability arrived.
Here's what I want to be clear about: having a contract is not wrong. Enforcing a contract is not inherently wrong. I have contracts too. But there is a profound contradiction in building your entire brand around anti-capitalism and reciprocity, and then reaching for a capitalist legal document as your first and only response when things get hard. Because contracts are a tool of capitalism. They exist to protect parties in a transaction. There is nothing wrong with that. But if you are publicly positioning yourself as a different kind of business owner, one who operates from values rather than policy, then the contract cannot be where your humanity ends.
What the situation revealed was how performative it all actually was. Ethics as aesthetic. Values as brand voice. Integrity as content. Shiny and convincing on the surface. Nothing underneath when it counted. It was smoke and mirrors, plain and simple.
I realized, sitting with all of it, that I had seen this before. Not in this industry. Not in this form. But the mechanism, the gap between what someone claims and what they do when it costs them something, was familiar. It has a name. And it is more widespread than any of us want to admit.
A Pattern, Not A Coincidence
As a business owner who is also deeply embedded in spiritual spaces, I have a particular vantage point that not everyone has. I exist in both worlds simultaneously: the world of creative business and the world of spirituality. That dual perspective has given me a window into something I don't think gets talked about enough.
Because I am a business owner, I am constantly observing how other business owners operate. Online, in person, through the clients who find me, through the communities I'm part of. And because I am naturally drawn to spiritual spaces, not as a trend, but as a genuine part of who I am, I am also embedded in those communities in a real way.
What I've been noticing, at the intersection of both, is a pattern.
Not all business owners are the same. An obvious observation, I know, but one worth naming nonetheless. And at the root of this observation is that not all business owners share the same values. Even if they claim to out loud publicly, that isn't always the case behind closed doors.
I've witnessed this firsthand outside of my own client relationships. Years ago I watched it unfold between two podcast hosts I followed closely. They ran a wildly popular spiritual podcast that, seemingly overnight, fell apart. What eventually came out was that one host had been privately pushing the other out of the show they had built together.
The irony? Both had built their brands around the values of anti-capitalism, witchcraft, ethics, and community. They claimed to be dismantling oppressive systems in real time through their work in the world. But through this situation it became clear that only one of them actually meant it. The podcaster being pushed out came forward publicly, naming the deceit the other was putting them through. They knew that the only way their audience would be able to see the truth was by showing what both parties looked like behind closed doors, when the cameras were off and the brand voice went quiet. Through their brave testimony, it became clear that the other party lacked integrity.
The situation left me deeply unsettled in a way I couldn't immediately name. Now, years later, I can. It was the same gap I have witnessed up close in my own professional life. The same integrity deficit hiding behind the right language.
I've seen it again and again, though often from a further vantage point, through the clients who eventually find their way to me. What strikes me most is how they arrive. They’re not angry. They’re not certain they were wronged. Often, they come feeling apologetic. They wonder if their expectations of running a business were too high. Maybe running a business, even a spiritual one, is more difficult than they realized. Maybe this is just the way the world works.
They often don't realize they were misled. They don't realize that someone they paid to support them— someone with a duty, if they had any integrity, to actually do that well—failed them on purpose or through negligence. They don't realize they were grifted.
And that's exactly what makes this so insidious. The harm lands so quietly that the people experiencing it don't even know it happened.
Values As A Weapon
Ultimately, this is why the situation with the illustrator left me so shaken. It was the closest I've ever come to experiencing this phenomenon firsthand. And I'll be honest, I consider myself an intelligent person, someone who has been watching this pattern long enough to recognize it. And yet I was still manipulated by it. It brought something into sharp focus for me: that even with the purest of intentions, even with eyes wide open, you can be deceived. Grifting is exceptionally powerful precisely because it can happen to anyone. No one is above it.
What these people are doing, at its core, is predatory. They use values language as a trust builder and a signal of safety to people who are actively looking for a better way to do business. And then they exploit that trust for financial gain. Ultimately, they are preying on spiritually led business owners who are trusting them to hold their vision with care.
And here is the part that keeps me up at night. This is not just a personal harm, it’s a systemic one. Because every time someone gets burned by a values grifter, they don't just lose money. They lose faith. In community. In collaboration. In the possibility that business can actually be done differently. They retreat. They go back to the shadows. They stop believing.
And in doing so, in driving people back into isolation and cynicism, these grifters are doing the exact opposite of what they claim. They are not dismantling capitalism. They are upholding it. They are keeping the broken system intact by destroying the trust that real alternatives depend on.
That is the covert version of conspirituality. Not QAnon yogis. Not vaccine misinformation. But values as a weapon. Ethics as bait. Community as a con.
And it is happening right now, in your industry, to people you probably know.
Eyes Wide Open
If you've been here before, if you've invested in someone who promised to hold your vision with care and walked away with less than you came with, I want you to know something. It was not your fault.
We live in a world that has mastered the performance of values. From the highest levels of politics to the smallest corners of the spiritual business world, smoke and mirrors is everywhere. It is the water we swim in. And when you are a person who actually means what you say, who genuinely believes in community, in reciprocity, in building something better, it can be disorienting to discover that not everyone around you does too.
But here's what I know. The answer is not cynicism. The answer is not closing yourself off or abandoning the dream of doing business differently. The world needs people like you, people who actually mean it, more than ever.
The path forward is discernment. Eyes wide open. Knowing what to look for. Trusting yourself when something feels off. And surrounding yourself with people whose private behavior matches their public values.
That is the world worth building. And it is absolutely possible.
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