Emotional Dysregulation: It’s You, Not Them 🧘🏻‍♀️

A doodle of yogi surrounded by other yoginis who share the complementary energetic field.

There’s no shame in having our shamans, gurus, and channelers on speed dial.

AI-spiritual bots have also joined the mission of saving humanity from their own deepest, darkest thoughts.

As the world becomes smaller and ancient wisdom transforms into Instagrammable quotes accompanied by emotional music, we gain unprecedented access to a vast array of healing modalities and the therapists and practitioners who promote them.

The wellness, mental health, and spiritual coaching industries have worked diligently to convince us of how damaged and in dire need of healing we are. Despite my increased skepticism, I acknowledge that this is a critical chapter in our human evolutionary consciousness. There is a purpose, meaning, and a reason why humanity must go through this phase.

Why we seek out gurus on demand

We seek teachers due to the awakening of our inner consciousness and our desire to learn. Many of us are feeling our way through the dark hallways of our childhood traumas and a lifetime of unhealthy relationships with our family, society, and bodies. We seek teachers and mentors to help us navigate through life’s sticky situations.

And, of course, wise teachers, gurus, and shamans are blessings. They opened portals, channelled spirits and multi-dimensional past lives, and administered cleansing rituals. From Vedic astrology in the East to indigenous ceremonies in the Americas, we can curate our personalized medicine menu for each month. Our teachers have come in the form of posthumous Sufi poets, yoga teachers, astrologers, writers, YouTube gurus, and wellness retreat owners. 

I’ve personally benefited profoundly from the depth and breadth of this wisdom, for they all have a place in our multidimensional existence. They have helped me move past theoretical knowledge to embodied living. This concept is one of the main reasons I started Yogadelics. I don’t think people need more mystical experiences and inspirations. What people need more of are ways to achieve embodied living, which reflects our wisdom in how we navigate the mundane aspects of everyday life.

Is this approach helpful or merely a crutch?

There is an emerging addiction to healing because these modalities can sometimes be perceived as the magic dose that cures all of our problems. We WhatsApp every single life problem to our appointed healers, as if we have no personal agency to make conscious choices. We rely on them to validate our emotions and inability to make beneficial choices in life. We seek them out for support in moments of loneliness, vulnerability, and fear. We seek healing retreat after retreat to help us change something inside us we’re not yet ready to confront on our own.

These are all very understandable human reactions. Our modern life creates a spiritual drought, which often leads many people to feel disconnected from the meaning of life. These shamans, monks, spiritual gurus, and teachers become wise guides who help us through difficult times by providing us with context and possible causes of our pain. And for those few moments, these are salves that really soothe our parched souls.

Integration is a personal dedication and accountability.

But these teachers are not meant to be our personal assistants in life. They are there to provide embodied tools and practices to help us navigate challenges, not to solve our poor choices with three rounds of flower baths or sage purification. Suppose you’re speed-dialing or texting them every other week with a new personal crisis. In that case, it’s possible that you have not truly integrated the lessons or that the relationships you have built with your teachers are not conducive to developing personal authority and independence.

Understand me. It is fantastic to have mentors that you catch up with from time to time, especially for regular dharma talks, philosophical discourse, emotional support, and deep reflective studies. Podcasts are also excellent resources for this purpose. But these should be supplementary, not dependencies.

What I’d like to say is that even without the support of your teachers and mentors, you should still lead a sovereign life, making difficult choices, even if you sometimes get it wrong. At the end of the day, your path is uniquely yours, and only you can walk through it. Your teachers cannot walk your path for you. 

Great teachers hold space for deep reflection and polarity, with the purpose that you will identify your own unique way to complete your life’s journey (whatever that might be) with courage. They do not serve as crutches or magic wands that allow you to escape from life or avoid its messy experiences entirely.

You are your own greatest healer.

You are ultimately your own best teacher. Whether or not you have a physical guru or teacher, you will grow as long as you engage in deep and sometimes uncomfortable self-enquiry and create space for both your dark and light aspects. This is the most complex and important part of our journey: taking responsibility for ourselves and making difficult decisions.

And for myself, my most excellent teachers are my cats. 

Mooxie and Sasha show me what it means to detach with trust, to rest in the moment and not fret, to love without giving away our personal agency, to sit in chaos without reacting, to love unconditionally, to forgive easily, and to be consistent.