Not only Hollywood, but also the New Age community has its own celebrities aka “guru’s” or ‘spiritual teachers/healers’. It seems like certain personality traits are deemed admirable amongst the new agers and therefore reason to put a person who exhibits those qualities, on a pedestal and turn them into a star. Most people in the spiritual community will deny that is what they do: putting another person on a pedestal, but when thousands of people give constant praise, show their love and admiration to a specific person when those who are giving the praise are not treated with the same level of respect and admiration, not only in treatment but not by thousands of people simultaneously, an imbalance in power is created.
Since there is a lot of awareness in these communities about abuse in general and personality disorders such as narcissism, psychopathy and so on, people in spiritual communities are very apt to hide anything that is associated with ego and will be keen on projecting an image of themselves as being humble, very empathetic, caring and showcase an attitude of service-to-other as they call it. I recently came across a prime example of what is known as covert narcissism (basically, narcissism that is hidden and pretends to be the opposite) in the astrology world.
Her name is Elsa Panizzon / Giacoman and on her website elsaelsa.com her sister Annalisa had written an article praising Elsa for her supposed talent, brilliance, excellent way of communicating, unique writing style, specialness, fashion style, great taste, great smile, great skin color, great hair, beauty, bravery, cuteness, funniness, giftedness and overall greatness. The whole list of compliments are said to make Elsa feel oh so uncomfortable because apparently, she is humble as humble pie and utterly unaware of her “gifts”, therefore her sister had to highlight them or was it perhaps Elsa all along who had ghostwritten this piece of self-aggrandizing cringeworthy drivel posing as Annalisa to hide her humongous ego?
I suspect it to be so, not only because the compliments are so over the top alongside the inhumane level of humility attributed to miss Panizzon, but also because of the fact I saw an interesting review posted on Amazon.com under her memoir she published and entitled ‘Heaven, I mean circle K’ where a person called Annalisa who says to be her sister isn’t so impressed with Elsa.
In her 1 star review, Annalisa writes that she is falsely quoted and falsely represented, causing her pain and anxiety to read about situations she supposedly took part in which never happened. She is also considering taking action and says her sister’s memoir is pure fiction and that Elsa has not touched upon her real childhood. She also says that her blog contains false stories and “facts” as well. I assume she is referring to those false articles Elsa posted about herself as Annalisa.
In a way, Elsa already gave it away by ending the glorifying blogpost with the phrase Ha! We’ll see if she’ll print this! alluding to the idea that her sister passed on the article to Elsa so that she could post it on her own website, yet doubting whether she would do it to make her look embarrassed and humble for receiving all those accolades. However, the article itself was posted by the username Annalisa, so if this was the real account of Annalisa then Elsa wouldn’t need to post her sisters’s article, but she did, she just forgot she was posting as her sister Annalisa. Apparently, Elsa’s “brilliant mind” didn’t think of that.
Her “memoir” also resembles the blogpost about herself since it depicts Elsa as an extraordinary woman with high intelligence as ” she tells the tale of hustling grown men at the poker table at 13.” Elsa also loves to project an image of herself as being ‘gutsy’ and ‘brave’ by inventing yet another storyline as she claims to be one of the first women to file a class action lawsuit against a disgusting boss at the tender age of 17. And last but not least, she finds work as a bartender at 15 to escape a murderous father. To ensure she gets all the admiration she can get, she gives herself another superhuman trait : she remains lighthearted despite her abusive upbringing, topped off with the admirable trait of unselfishly being of service to others to help them find peace in their life.
Before having even read her sister’s review on Amazon, my instincts already told me there is no such human who is that humble, neither are there sisters that naive to put their sibling on such a high pedestal (above themselves). Moreover, if someone would be so uncomfortable being in the spotlight and being complimented on their looks, I wonder why they put up a picture of themselves that is constantly visible for anyone visiting their website on every single page, not just their ‘about ‘ page? It would only make sense that such a person would rather want to be anonymous and not showing their face allover their website, neither would they pick their own name as the domain name for an astrology website and highlight to be the ‘first astrology blog ever‘ if they’d prefer to be in the shadows so much as she pretends to be.
The truth is, when it comes to compliments, praise and admiration, everyone enjoys that. Even the shy ones, deep down, like it. It’s not natural to be that humble. Everyone has an ego and the more it is praised, the bigger it will grow and the more it will enjoy to bask in admiration and be in need of such constant praise. And that is what her fans give her. It’s also another red flag when I see someone being applauded left and right, they can’t possibly not enjoy the ego boosting effects of such attention geared at them. Surprisingly, her readers don’t seem to notice the obvious fake humility.
Her made-up story of having magically survived an abusive childhood, using real life people but adding a false narrative to make herself look like she’s this extraordinary, heroic woman with nothing but admirable traits that is here to help people and is most empathetic and free of selfishness, reminds me of another celebrity in the spiritual community you might have already heard of and is known as Teal Swan. If you don’t know her, I suggest you to visit this site to know more about her made-up abuse story and the way she hurts people behind the scenes but has been able to maintain a large crowd of minions aka Tealers.
As we can see, both these women are able to make many people believe they are good, kind hearted people but that doesn’t seem to mesh with those who know them personally and who are closest to them like Elsa’s sister and Teal’s ex-lovers and friends.
Of course, because of this belief in the New Age world that once someone is free of ego or has a much reduced ego compared to others, it is considered a sign of great spiritual advancement to have transcended the ego, broken free from the illusion of duality and therefore experience oneness. New agers see this as the ultimate and highest goal one can reach in human life existence and therefore admire those who have arrived at this stage. This however results in people who frequent these communities to get stuck in the habitual (subconscious) tendency to project an image of themselves as ‘free of ego‘ or at least intending to be less ‘egoic’ in an attempt to gain admiration and respect from others, ironically with the purpose to feed their own ego. All this talk about ego and the attempt to hide it, merely has the effect on these people in becoming very adept in their manipulation skills and puts them in a constant habit of spiritual bypassing which prevents people from being emotionally frank and ironically makes them regress spiritually instead of progressing.
In their minds however, they are spiritually advancing when they can make themselves and others believe they are less egoic and more caring towards others, but it is just a thought, a belief which boosts their spiritual ego. To progress spiritually one should focus on experience which happens through our emotions and as you know, the devil is aligned with lies, ‘God’ /Divinity is aligned with truth, so spiritual blockages are created when people become emotionally dishonest. It is true what Teal Swan *says* about authenticity, but does she actually walks the talk? Her fans will excuse any of her behavior because she is not perfect and she doesn’t have to be, but why then is she treated as more than others and why is she not judged by her followers just like any other when inappropriate behavior of hers is noticed?
It is not a matter of trying to differentiate the real guru’s from the fake guru’s but realizing that there is never a good reason to think of someone else as higher than yourself. Whenever that occurs when people behave that way, power imbalance IS created, regardless of the spiritual awareness of the “guru” since the person who is admiring the other as higher than themselves has disempowered themselves and therefore my advice is: be your own guru.
be your own guru 