Marketing Divinity
Gurupreneurs strike again
There have been many surprised reactions to discovering that America’s beloved guru, Deepak Chopra, is among many others on Epstein’s list. My recent doomscrolling on Instagram, an app notorious for spiritual entrepreneur-influencer content and satires of them, has been filled with analyses of the email exchanges between Chopra and Epstein, exposing his sleaze. He offered a public non-apology that framed his actions with women as justified, revealing how easily authority is preserved even when behaviour is exposed. This also exposed a familiar pattern of spiritual narcissism, where moral language is used to preserve status rather than cultivate character. The public lament that followed, upon discovering their beloved parasocial teacher can’t walk his talk, reminded me how poor people’s discernment of genuine authority often is.
Of course, one can argue that his work contributed a great deal of good to people’s lives, and that we should divorce the personality from the impact. But that argument no longer holds when spirituality and sacred knowledge, intended to cultivate character, are instead used to further a career while engaging in exploitative activities that feed the already inflated ego.
I was exposed to some of Chopra’s “teachings” many years ago while I was a cancer biologist, and they struck me as diluted spiritual quackery. Since then, I’ve walked past his books in stores and scrolled past content connected to him online. I was able to discern a fake spiritual authority, despite later ending up in a moderate spiritual cult myself. I joined because I believed it was superior to anything else I’d encountered, though to its credit, I did learn a genuinely useful healing modality. Like many such spaces, it was a cobbling together of borrowed practices, which I still draw on today.
Chopra aside, I’ve consistently criticised the use of self-anointed spiritual authority as gurupreneurship among the spiritually inclined and accountability averse. I come across countless posts that follow the same marketing strategy, designed to bedazzle people with ideals of a spiritual life while quietly centring profit. The delivery is familiar: blonde, white, boho-chic women with prayer mudras in their profile pictures, implying that you too can be this blessed if you choose their three-month program.
What’s striking now is how this tactic has mutated. Chopra’s authority was built by cherry-picking science and cloaking metaphysical claims in academic language, which gave his work the appearance of intellectual legitimacy. Today’s gurupreneur no longer needs science at all. Authority is generated through feeling, intuition, and divine instruction, with scepticism reframed as resistance. The mechanism is the same, but the delivery is more intimate, more affective, and harder to contest. Instead of telling you what to think, the modern guru tells you how to interpret your inner sensations, then positions themselves as the authority over what those sensations mean.
Today’s reel was no different. I decided to unpack the marketing strategy being used (you’ll see the irony of that), alongside the appeal to position oneself as the authority over your thoughts and choices.
Below is the script from a reel on Instagram. I’m not sharing the reel itself because there’s one degree of separation. My goal is to expose the trickery that people with less discernment fall for, so they can see the spellcasting in writing and choose to resist.
The transcript with key gurupreneur moves selectively highlighted:
I had a plan for this reel, but I am going to throw it out the window because it feels interesting.
I am in an interesting place building this business at the moment because I have taken on a really high-end business coach, actually a team of business coaches. They are applying very traditional marketing strategies that are highly effective for our business. But it is such a fine line because of the nature of what I do, and what the divine does through me.
I just want to say that the work that comes through me produces an incredible experience for people.
One of my students messaged me and said, “I want everybody to know this magic. I want everyone to know this magic.” She wanted me to share her story because of all the richness it has created in her life. The deep inner connection to community, to love, to devotion that it has created for her.
It is so hard to package that up and market it.
Because until you experience it for yourself, you are never going to understand the depth of it.
All I can say is this: if you feel something in here, if you feel something in your heart, that is the start.
Every single person who has come through this work with me, and as a result had their entire life transformed, started with that tiny little feeling.
And so many of them had resistance. Resistance like, “Maybe I cannot afford it,” or “I do not have time,” or “I am saving up for something else,” or “It is not my priority right now.”
I really want you to pay attention to that feeling in the heart, because that is the divine giving you instructions.
Anytime resistance shows up in your life, anytime resistance creates a limitation, it is giving you an opportunity to transcend.
It is giving you an opportunity to choose freedom.
So with that, I had a plan for this reel, but I did not want to throw it out.
What’s actually happening in this reel
The highlighted lines in the reel reveal a familiar gurupreneur marketing structure, one that has become almost standard in spiritually inclined, accountability averse online spaces. Here are the tactics used:
Self-anointed spiritual authority. By framing her work as something “the divine does through me,” the speaker positions herself as a conduit rather than a practitioner. Once authority is attributed to a divine source, the human intermediary is shielded from scrutiny while simultaneously elevated above normal standards of evaluation. The work is no longer something you can assess because it’s something you either submit to or misunderstand.
Delayed understanding as a consent tactic. The insistence that “until you experience it for yourself, you’re never going to understand the depth of it” explicitly reverses the order of consent. You’re told that you must commit first and only then will comprehension follow. Only insiders are granted epistemic authority, while outsiders are positioned as unqualified to judge.
Replacement of thinking with feeling. The repeated instruction to pay attention to a sensation “in the heart” treats feeling as guidance rather than information. That feeling is framed as coming from a higher source that knows better than you do. This is a powerful move because it trains people to mistrust cognition and elevate affect instead. If you feel something, the feeling itself is treated as sufficient.
Pathologising scepticism. Practical, ordinary considerations like affordability, time, or competing priorities are explicitly named and then reclassified as “resistance.” In this framework, doubt and hesitation are not functions of discernment and self-protection. Instead, they are treated as spiritual blockages that no one would want. Resistance is then reframed as an opportunity to “transcend” and “choose freedom.” In other words, the mechanisms people use to avoid being duped, pressured, or financially overextended are recoded as the reason they should override themselves.
This is coercion. Once resistance is pathologised, saying no is no longer a neutral choice. It becomes evidence of a poverty mindset and a deficit consciousness. Consent is the moral choice and participation is elevated into a spiritual virtue. Opting out becomes almost impossible without interpreting oneself as having failed a test and deliberately depriving yourself of divinity.
Taken together, these moves constitute gurupreneurship whereby spiritual language is being used to dissolve psychological boundaries, vilify scepticism, and position the speaker as the final authority over your inner signals. This ignores that spirituality is used to cultivate the very attributes necessary to thwart coercive attempts, like discernment. The transaction is no longer framed as a program you might or might not want and is instead framed as a response to divine instruction.
People with discernment can see the transparent manipulation. For those still learning how spiritual authority is performed rather than earned, it is spellbinding. That is precisely why it needs to be seen in writing.
In this context, resistance is the skill.
