As Karen’s obvious biological sister I will be the first person to agree with you about your comments on cultural appropriation and white washed spirituality. I have been making these comments to her about her work for years and have always wished she would make particular shifts in her behavior and image. I will acknowledge that you make some really excellent points about the exalt work and I furthermore appreciate your calls to action in the white spiritual community, and your comments on consent in spiritual culture, but so much about this article is incredibly inappropriate, inflammatory, and professionally insulting to these women.

First of all, you had a professional relationship with Karen and you were seeking you engage in professional relationships with the Exalt leaders. You made many suggestions to them that they implemented on a professional level. Karen was a client of yours and in this article you share parts of your client-adviser communications and personal information in this email that should have been protected under client confidentiality. Furthermore, it is clear that you have taken a significant amount of intimate details out of context.

I have no doubt that you struggled with psychological spiritual abuse as it is rampant in white dominated spaces. There is so much to be said about how white “spiritual” leaders can stand up in solidarity and be better leaders and weave actual anti-racism and decolonization into their work, but my question is why call out this small community? Why write THIS article which demonstrates a conflicting vendetta against these two women and a clear message to white spiritual leaders? Why not call out Gabrielle Bernstein, why not others? Why THESE girls? Why not call out white spiritual leaders as a whole? This article comes across and vindictive and aggressive.

The exalt community is not that large. This is an inflammatory, dramatic, petty “she said- she said” article that covers up the real point that I think you are trying to make. I know that you tried to offer your professional services to the exalt community and they took your suggestions seriously, and frankly they probably should have taken them more seriously and yes, sat with antiracism education before trying to weave it into their work, but regardless, this is a breach of client confidentiality. I suggest you take the article down, re-write it without the call-out accountability abuse and make your point stronger. Fixing the exalt community is not the Front Line of Anti-Racism work.

I would like to note that literally no one is saying that you did not experience what you experienced and that the problems you listed in this article are not problems that exist within the larger system where white supremacy and spirituality meet.

But the lines between your professional consultation work and your spiritual relationship with these women have been blurred. You are a trauma informed therapist which suggests that you understand professional boundaries and you crossed them here. What you don’t include in this article is that you were engaged in a professional consulting relationship with Karen and tried to take Luna on as a client. As a participant of their work, these women often took your advice and implemented it as much as they could. This comment isn’t suggesting that the exalt community doesn’t have big work to do, or that all of your comments about consent, cultural appropriation, lineage, etc. aren’t completely valid, but some of the things that triggered you are 1) not universal triggers and 2) are taken very out of context for this article.

Your relationship with these women was more significant than that. That makes this article strongly inflammatory and strangely vindictive, as I said before. I just want to be sure that people understand that your relationship with these women was more complicated than you layout here, that at least Karen for sure often took your suggestions and guidance to heart, and that she was a client of yours as well, making a portion of what you share here a breach of client confidentiality, and further discredits her professionalism, her beliefs, and her ability to create compassionate space for healing.

As an actual sister, I am grateful to engage more in this conversation with a person that I love, but I am also offended on her behalf, especially as I know she has been making significant personal transitions through the work that you and her did professionally, and beyond.

As a woman who aspires to unwind the layers of colonization and white supremacy, I agree with almost 100% of the points you are saying here and I don’t wish to discount how you feel you should say it.

As a fellow writer, this should not have been your published draft and an editor should have guided you in a different direction because your message could be incredibly impactful, not just to tear down the exalt community, but to create actual change in a lot of white spiritual circles who are trying to do this deeper alignment work.