The New Deception: The "Sexy, Spiritual, Successful, Goddess"

These days women are not only haunted by the usual Matrix images in the media telling them what to look like, what to eat, and how to live (lifestyle porn) but even in the spiritual community women are now being programmed through the whole “spiritual goddess” and “vegan yogi” culture-trends to be another thing: sexy, successful, perfect and of course, ultra-spiritual, demi-gods who are “manifestors of abundance” (who can teach you how to be like them!) along with a whole other bunch of New Age catchphrases that present a new certain stereotype of how the “spiritual woman” should look like, act like, and be like.

Every course, teacher, article, retreat who promises others how to be a “conscious man” or “conscious woman” or tells others how to be the “divine feminine” or “divine masculine” and then lists a certain set of attributes for others to emulate in order to embody that ideal is basically a manipulation strategy, spiritualizing “the game” wherein the sexes are pitted against one another by trying to be an ‘ideal’ of what they feel the other wants in order to gain more love/attention/affection from them.

There seems to be an idea amongst these communities that to be a goddess is to present yourself in a flowing dress, modestly to overtly sexualizing yourself, in order to show the world how you have embodied the “divine feminine”.  Everywhere we are now bombarded with images of this “sexy spiritual woman” and told that this an aspect of “empowered” marketing. But the trap of using the sexualized female image to sell a product is nothing new, it is a classic media ploy wherein quite simply “sex sells”.

Peruse Instagram these days and you will see many women posting excessive selfies with quotes from enlightened masters as a caption, showing how beautiful and also how spiritual they are, with their perfect yoga body, and somehow always on vacation or in some minimalist home. This pattern I vaguely bought into as well. Yet as time went on, even if I posted a selfie that got a thousand likes, I could see that the mere act of doing so was still feeding into my need to be ‘validated’ for an appearance. I was also selling myself short by using my image more than I was using my gifts, and as time went on something felt very “off” to me in the energy I would get from the excessive predatorial and “thirsty” comments from men. Many of the people who were drawn to my image didn’t seem to care much about what I said… which I couldn’t complain about either, because I was feeding on the attention with my own narcissism.

Let’s also look at this image of the Goddess and how we’ve begun to distort this inner essence by attributing it to certain sets of external imagery. I feel that once we travel along far enough in our journey, we begin to discover that true beauty is in fact, mostly internal. There are older women who are strong in themselves and have been through an immense amount of internal transformation and simply Radiate; grey hair, wrinkles, and all. There are also younger women who have not done any inner work and still mainly depend on their beauty in the world and use it as an excuse to be vain, cruel, and self-centered. The most powerful archetypes of “goddesses” I have met have been elder women; women who can demonstrate strength, compassion, wisdom, love, sensitivity, receptiveness, and most importantly – self-respect with a simple look in their eyes. I believe the true ‘divine feminine’ has little to nothing to do with an image but has to do with an ability to carry sensitivity, strength, and receptivity into the body so much so that the mere presence of women like this can heal.

“The dark feminine”, which I have also witnessed in myself, had a lot to do with deluding oneself and manipulating others, especially through using sexuality to do so. When we use sexual manipulation to get others “attention”, when we use our image to lure others in so that people will be distracted by aesthetics instead of the inner aspects of ourselves, when we attempt to hypnotize by this image so that others treat us with a certain way, we are using power of the lower vital urges to draw people in. Our lower self, insecure and never satisfied, continuously feeds off the energy that this attention gets us. We use this cheap form of power and perpetuate the collective abuse of reptilian-like hypersexualization that is plastered all over mainstream advertising. And in ‘spirituality’, many women now sell their own image in this same way as these Matrix programs and dress it up as something “enlightened”. But when we objectify the female image by looking at it as something we can sexualize and sell, we perpetuate this toxic pattern by using our own bodies against our soul.

I have found one of the biggest barriers in me being able to be authentically me is caring about being ‘popular’ and about what others think, and believing I had some kind of ‘image’ to maintain. In 2015, over the course of a year my Instagram blew up to over 30k followers, I also signed a contract with a publisher (one of my so-called ‘dreams’ at the time) and during those couple years that followed I saw myself buying into the image that I was projecting. I felt I had to maintain this “spiritual” “mystical” image because that’s the image that people were projecting upon me. I wanted to be seen as something otherworldly, something that was not my messy, human, normal and quite frankly, kind of boring self.

Over the course of a couple of years, I became an avatar of my own destruction, a creation based on a fantasy I had on what the spiritual journey looked like and of what others wanted it to look like too. I began catering what I shared with what people seemed to like – believing that the more popular I got, the better I was doing, the more opportunities it would make for my “career” in the long term. It became less about my own process but how I could Monetize Spirituality. I even deluded myself into believing that through this curated image I was actually helping people.

Looking back now, I see how many things I posted were drenched in my own inauthenticity of wanting to be more popular, to be seen as sexual, spiritual, and awake. This felt even more wrong because a lot of people went along with it, but my true self knew and felt how I was lying to myself. I saw people buying into the manipulated image that I created and I was caught in another Matrix trapping of thinking I had to be this thin, perfect, vegan yogi, to present this certain image to the world, and at the end of the day no matter how popular I got – I still never felt good enough.

When I faced my own narcissistic wounding, I went through an intense disillusionment process. I had to give up everything I was “trying” to be to become who I was again. In doing this, I also had to give up my ambition to turn any part of my spiritual path into a “career”. I made a deeper commitment to my journey – where I would put seeking truth and the process of my own awakening above EVERYTHING else in my life; especially these petty concerns of being popular, being liked, or being “successful”; otherwise, I was about to sacrifice all the wisdom I gained and turn it around into another form of self-deception.

I saw how through lying to myself, by creating this false image of a “spiritual person” I was lying to others, creating more karmic entanglements, and it was great misdeed towards humanity and WOMEN especially – one which I could not bear the weight of. My publishing deal fell through, a blessing in disguise, which gave me the freedom to truly not give a f *ck anymore. I could be me again as I felt I had nothing to “lose”. I stopped focusing on my image and started focusing mainly on my writing. I lost a lot of “followers” who were mainly focused on this false image and I was grateful for it. This experience grounded me into a deeper level of commitment towards the path and reminded me why I even started this journey.

The benevolent forces of the universe and my internal guidance system wouldn’t allow me to get away with “selling my spiritual journey” or a “spiritual image” and I got right back onto the true path of honoring my self and my heart. I was brought me back to the aspirations that started me on this path to begin with. My soul knew that in my small human life there is no other option but to awaken, and awaken, and awaken deeper, and that we are all here to expand our own shallow understandings of who we think we are. In that expansion, all the lies, the delusions, the ambitions, all the plans we had for ourselves need to disintegrate so we can reveal the larger plan of what God has planned for us. In order to stay in integrity, we need to identify when the ego tries to hijack our experiences, take credit for them, and attach more of a false identity to ourselves because of it.

These Divine forces have much better plans for our soul than any diversion our small self tries to architect, and whatever falsities the ego tries to build the higher self will take no mercy is demolishing.

We live in a “selfie” generation where narcissism and propping up our self-image is the norm, however, this does not mean that this trend should be continued or bought into for the sake of gaining more followers, clients, etc. When we are in alignment with our true purpose, invisible forces will assist in having the right people find us – we will not have to use seduction or deception to draw them in.

Using female sexuality to sell a product is one of the number one matrix marketing tools and if the content is good then it won’t be necessary. As women, if we feel the need to seduce someone in to buy our services we are selling our souls to the system that treats our body as objects and commodities. This is very important. Our seeing the feminine as a commodity to be used, bought, sold, is the main driving attitude towards the mindless destruction of the resources of the Earth itself. If you want to sell high-quality organic food do you need a beautiful woman wearing a bikini holding it in order to sell it? If our gifts are valuable we will not need to “market” ourselves in a way which objectifies the body at a cost of the soul. This is not “body shaming” anyone, but I see too many women using their images to seduce people in order to buy their services.