Spiritual Gaslighting is a thing.

You see it a lot these days when someone enjoying perfect health says that the secret to good health is just to “BE” healthy.

“Oh, you’re sick? Well, you just need to stop BE-ing sick and start BE-ing healthy.”

“Oh, you’re broke? Well, you just need to stop BE-ing poor and start BE-ing someone who has millions in the bank.”

“Oh, you’re unhappy?”

“Oh, you’re in a bad relationship?”

“Oh, you’re overweight?”

“Oh, you don’t like your height? Well, you just need to stop BE-ing short and BE someone who is a lot taller.”

Ok, you probably don’t hear that last one all that much, but the thing is, they’re right, sort of.
There’s a thing in shamanism called shapeshifting. An experienced shaman could let go of their identity as a human being and simply BE-come an animal. They could change their form and literally become someone or something else.

Whether you believe these tales or not, it’s important to realize that these were experienced shamans who had spent a lifetime doing the inner work of dissolving the energetic ties that anchored them to the human experience. They had spent decades building up personal power and accessing places of energy and frequency incomprehensible to the human mind.

These shamans and yogis could do amazing things. They could walk on water. They could manifest things out of thin air. They could heal, levitate, or transform into animals.

And when you asked them how they turned into an animal, they’d just laugh and say, “It’s easy. You just stop BE-ing a person and start BE-ing the animal.”

That’s it. That’s all there is to it. But the thing to realize is that the trick of having enough personal power to actually do it took them DECADES of hard work. They’re not expecting you to turn into a jaguar on the spot. Nor are they hoping to sell you into a their new, 2-week Shapeshifting Mastery Program.

It’s true that every now and then, a student will meet one of these masters and let go of everything and enter into enlightenment. The seeming spiritual beginner will take a leap of faith and soar past everyone else into the mystical realms of wisdom and power.

But these stories in the literature are exceedingly rare.

So perfect health, wealth, happiness, love, peace, and joy are available to you right now. You can absolutely dive into these states and just BE-come them now. But get that for 99.99999% of the people, it’s going to be a journey. You’re going to make a little progress each day. Some days you’ll slip backwards. Some days you’ll completely forget about it. But if you can make a little progress each day, you’ll be surprised at how far you can get as the days, weeks, and months start adding up.
When you see the perfectly curated Instagram post, it’s so easy to think you’re not doing it right. It’s easy to believe that there’s something wrong with you or maybe you’re not good enough / worthy enough / or simply enough to magically teleport into a new timeline that’s extremely far removed from your current one. You look at the shiny Instagram post and you feel less than.

It's very popular, especially in the spiritual and coaching industry, for people to promise you the world when you just take “the last business / coaching / personal development course you’ll ever need.” People want you to believe they have the magic pill, and if you follow their advice, you’ll have instant, miraculous results.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s totally possible. But it’s rare.

For most people, the transformation is going to take time. It’s going to be one step at a time.
Everyone is on a journey. Honor yours. Honor where you’re at.

Take responsibility for where you’re at, absolutely. Be open to going on the journey, but realize that it may take time. And for every spiritual influencer with a 6-week course to infinite health, wealth, and happiness, there’s a 20- or 30-year journey they probably didn’t tell you about.

If they have a message for you, listen. Apply it. Do the work. They could save you years and years of struggle. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. But if you can’t magically shapeshift into a new you, be okay with going at your own pace.

Most people don’t have the personal power to magically transform. Instead, they go through a series of stages. There’s a stage of healing and surrender where you realize that you’ve been in resistance. You realize that the old way of doing things isn’t working. And so you let go of what no longer serves you. Now you’re free to open up to more and more possibility, more and more Source.

Unburdened, your meditations take you to new heights. You start embracing a little more of your True Nature each day. And with that comes intuition. A little bit at first. But you trust it. You’re not sure. It’s scary. But as you do more work, as you start seeing small results, you gain confidence. You trust it more and more. You let it guide you. You’re only changing a little each day, but when you look back after a month or two, you’re amazed at how far you’ve come. You surrender more. You open more. You trust more. And one day, you realize, you’re someone new. You’re in a new reality. You’re the person you’ve always wanted to be. It just took some time. It took some consistency, dedication, and hard work. You had upsets. Things didn’t always go the way you wanted or as quickly as you wanted. You took detours. You found shortcuts, you went the wrong way sometimes. And once you finally arrived, you realized, the journey didn’t end. It’s still going.

But to the people who weren’t there for it all, it looks like you jumped timelines. It looks like you became someone entirely new.

“What’s your secret?” your friends ask you. “How did you get so happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise?”
You’re tempted to say, “Well, I just BE-came that way.”

But you recognize where they’re at. You know what worked for you, and you let them know your secret…

“I figured out where I wanted to go. Then I just took it one day at a time.”

If you can’t yet shapeshift into any reality you want, there’s nothing wrong with that. And there’s nothing wrong with you.

You’re not broken.

You’re just on a journey. You’re surrendering, healing, letting go, learning to connect more fully to Source, learning to trust your intuition, and learning to venture further and further outside your comfort zone. And that’s perfectly okay.

There’s no rush. We’re all on a journey.

Instead of worrying about how soon we’ll get there and why we’re not there yet, what if we just focused on making it the most epic journey possible?

I don’t know about you, but to me, that sounds WAY more fun.

Much love on your journey,

Nagendra