On Repeating the Same Old Spiritual Advice

Clichés do not equal counsel

I don’t like to write unless I’ve got something to say.

That might be because I’ve worked in marketing for so long and the push for SEO and evergreen content (regardless of the industry) makes it so you repeat yourself over and over again in hopes of attracting people who are coming across your brand for the first time. Repeating yourself is valuable in marketing and branding, but in spiritual and creative writing?

Meh.

I’m thinking about this as I peruse my many Substack subscriptions. I like to support fellow spiritualists, but sometimes, all the content sounds the same.

I’m guilty of this (I work in spiritual marketing, after all) so this isn’t coming from a place of judgment, just boredom.

Why does this happen? I think it’s the pressure to constantly perform and stay relevant. You can say this about any industry, but it’s especially evident in the spiritual community.

Right now, my gripe is about creating generic spiritual content, but I still think about literal performances. Take Sylvia Browne for example. She was a psychic medium who wrote books, and made TV and radio show appearances. Audience members would ask her questions live and she would provide them with psychic messages.

And sometimes, she was wrong. Very wrong.

In 2002, Browne told the parents of missing 11-year-old Shawn Hornbeck, that he had been kidnapped by a dark-skinned Hispanic man with dreadlocks and was deceased. Hornbeck was found alive in 2007. His kidnapper was Caucasian with short hair.

In November 2004, Browne told the mother of kidnapping victim Amanda Berry, that her daughter wasn’t alive. Berry’s mother died two years later believing her daughter was dead. She was found alive in 2013.

And yet, from the little that I know about Sylvia Browne, I do believe she was a gifted psychic medium. Her book, “End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies About the End of the World,” was published in 2009. It became popular during 2020 because she had included a spot-on prediction about the pandemic.

While I do believe that intuition, mediumship, and psychic abilities are muscles that strengthen with deliberate exercise, they cannot be flexed 100% of the time with 100% accuracy. The arm of the strongest man alive will eventually grow tired of holding a 20lb-weight. The mind will be unable to process messages for hundreds of audience members day after day.

Sylvia Browne either didn’t share this opinion or she simply fell into the trap of constantly performing. To use my own intuition here…I would say she had a raw, flimsily trained gift. She had been right enough times to assume that she would be right 100% of the time. This led to real-world commitments. Books to sell. Tours to sell out. Radio shows. TV shows. Money to make.

I believe she would’ve been more accurate if she had only shared predictions that she had mulled over for days. If she had meditated on specific visions for hours at a time. But getting on stage and tossing out predictions at random only diluted anything meaningful she had to say.

Diviners today are not so different. Browne telling grieving parents that their missing kids were dead does not feel dissimilar to tarot readers dispensing disappointing messages in cruel tones over TikTok Live “because that’s what the cards say and my cards don’t play around.” It’s a way to brand yourself as someone who isn’t scared to “say it like it is,” because the implication to everyone else is that you will always tell the truth. (That’s not what it means…it just means you’re using cruelty to grow an audience.)

Today, professional diviners (tarot readers, astrologers, psychic mediums) are up against an algorithmic and saturated landscape. Astrologers need to have predictions ready to go for every celestial shimmy across a constellation.

Most of their audiences are uneducated about the practice and expect the same information from all astrologers. They don’t know that Natal, Predictive, Relationship, Medical, Horary, Electional, Mundane, and Evolutionary astrology are all different branches of study. What’s worse, many astrologers won’t correct their audience because they don’t want to turn away potential clients. So they corner themselves into making the predictions their audiences ask for.

If the people suddenly care about politics, or about a particular politician, diviners (I’ll throw in tarot readers and mediums here, too) trap themselves into giving insight about that topic, even if they don’t have a political science background. Before we had a vaccine for COVID, they were making predictions about it without understanding how vaccines are made, how the scientific community works, and what industrial changes were relevant. It was a mess. But it’s what the people wanted, and if diviners wanted clients, they needed to get online and start talking.

The same pressure to perform is what weakens spiritual advice, which is technically different from predictions. There’s an understanding that if you’re going to make predictions, you need to tell people what to do with it. That’s the spiritual advice component. But just because you’ve learned to read a natal chart, doesn’t mean you have the slightest idea of how to guide people in spiritual matters.

Think about Christianity for a quick second. The biblical scholar is not a pastor. Biblical scholars conduct academic research. They publish peer-reviewed articles, provide interpretations and historical context for scripture. But the pastor leads people. He preaches. He counsels. He comforts.

I love my fellow diviners, but very few of them have learned how to lead others and provide genuine counsel. In my opinion, this is why the spiritual advice that follows their predictions feel so empty.

For example, this is the kind of spiritual advice I’m seeing in my inbox today:

• Leave behind what no longer serves you
• Practice gratitude daily
• Your thoughts shape your reality (tell that to people in ICE detention, I dare you)
• Accept what you cannot change (convenient)
• Be here now
• Find the sacred in the ordinary
• Honor your own path
• Speak your truth
• Trust your journey
• This is a time to focus on growth and renewal

Again, I don’t mean to be judgemental. It is my spiritual belief that life is a series of cycles overlapping each other. There are seasons for focusing on growth and seasons for shedding what we don’t need. It’s annual. It’s constant. It’s forever.

But when you’ve been doing this for a while, this sort of generic spiritual advice begins to feel like “Yeah, no shit. What else can you tell me?”

Personally, I can tell you to shut up until you’ve got something real to say.

But that wouldn’t be very professional of me.

I know that all of this ended up in my inbox because they had to publish something. Anything. Otherwise they would risk losing hungry followers. Which means losing income. My marketing brain would tell them that they need to hone in on what makes them unique as a diviner. Ironically, I would default to the generic (we’ll say foundational) marketing advice of “finding your own voice.” Maybe make less, but more impactful, content. The audience may be smaller, but more engaging.

But my real advice is to figure out how to lead a community. Diviners, look around. This is not the time for platitudes, it’s time for action. You’re not a Magic 8 Ball with 20 predetermined answers. Your audience deserves better. And you deserve the growth. Take initiative in other areas of your life so you’re forced to develop these skills. Take an online leadership course. Or better yet, approach an elder in your spiritual community for formal mentorship.

My wish for diviners, and my inbox, is that they leave behind the platitudes that don’t serve them (ha!) and are instead blessed with thought-provoking, scroll-stopping wisdom to share with the rest of us. Guide more. Perform less.

ObviouslyInATimelyMannerSoThisChangeDoesn’tNegativelyAffectTheirIncome. :)

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