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In a wide-ranging interview on the Jimmy Dore Show, filmmaker Mikki Willis launched one of the most pointed insider attacks on the New Age movement in recent memory. Willis, who describes himself as having been “all in” and “as woo woo as it can get,” draws on years of personal immersion to dismantle what he sees as a spiritually bankrupt subculture. His criticisms are sharp, personal, and occasionally compelling, but they also reveal blind spots, generalizations, and leaps that deserve serious scrutiny.
The Ego’s Favourite Hiding Place
Willis anchors his critique in a warning from a mentor: “The New Age movement is the ego’s favourite place to hide.” After years of unpacking this, he concluded that the movement allows people to adopt a “false persona” built on superficial markers: loose-fitting white clothing, uncomfortably long eye contact, and a specific spiritual dialect. Rather than doing the hard internal work of genuine transformation, practitioners simply rebrand old behaviours. What used to be called hooking up or womanizing gets softened into “sacred sexuality and tantra.” The game stays the same; only the vocabulary changes.
There is undeniable truth here.
Spiritual bypassing, the tendency to use spiritual practices to avoid confronting difficult emotions or unresolved psychological issues, is a well-documented phenomenon. Psychologist John Welwood coined the term back in 1984, and it remains one of the most valid criticisms of New Age culture. Willis is right that a community built on “vibes” can easily become a refuge for people who want the appearance of growth without the discomfort.
However, Willis paints with an extraordinarily broad brush. The existence of spiritual charlatans does not invalidate the practices themselves any more than the existence of corrupt doctors invalidates medicine. Millions of people have found genuine value in meditation, mindfulness, breathwork, and contemplative inquiry, and many of them would readily agree that performative spirituality is a problem. Willis acknowledges this briefly, saying he does not want to “trash it all,” but the caveat gets drowned out by the force of his attack. It would be more honest to distinguish between the movement’s shallow edges and its substantive core.
And here is the deeper irony Willis never addresses: the original “New Ager” was arguably Jesus of Nazareth himself. A wandering teacher in loose robes who rejected materialism, preached radical love, hung out with outcasts, spoke in parables about consciousness and the kingdom within, and told people to give away their possessions. By Willis’s own criteria, Jesus was the ultimate hippie. He taught forgiveness over force, inner transformation over external authority, and love as the highest law. If the New Age movement is merely the ego’s hiding place, then Willis needs to reckon with the fact that its foundational impulses are as old as the Sermon on the Mount. The problem was never the teachings. The problem, as it has always been, is what people do with them.
The War on Masculinity and “Conscious Parenting”
Willis devotes significant energy to what he sees as the New Age movement’s assault on masculinity. He describes a culture that encouraged men to adopt a philosophy of “no force, no strength,” urging them to “Tai Chi through it all.” He shares an anecdote from Ojai, California, where a mother allowed her young son to pummel her face while she tried to calmly talk through his emotions. He then recounts his own turning point: when he “scrapped all this bullsh*t,” embraced a more traditional masculine posture, and laid down a clear pecking order in his household, his children felt safer and more grounded.
This resonates with many parents who have seen the excesses of permissive parenting. There is legitimate developmental psychology supporting the idea that children need clear boundaries and that a complete absence of authority can create anxiety rather than freedom. Willis is touching on a real tension within progressive parenting circles.
But his framing is reductive. The choice he presents, between spineless passivity and old-fashioned toughness, is a false binary. Developmental research consistently supports authoritative parenting, which combines warmth with firm boundaries, as the most effective model. This is not the same as authoritarian rule or “laying into” a pecking order. The conscious parenting movement, while it has its excesses, was born from a genuine attempt to break cycles of punitive discipline that caused real harm across generations. Willis treats its worst caricature as its defining feature, which is neither fair nor intellectually rigorous.
His broader claim that the New Age world is conducting a “war on masculinity” also conflates healthy emotional intelligence with weakness. The ability to process emotions, communicate vulnerably, and regulate aggression are not signs of diminished manhood. They are skills that psychological research links to better outcomes in relationships, parenting, and leadership. Equating all of this with being “soft” says more about Willis’s reaction to his own experience than about masculinity itself.
Feelings Over Facts and the Incubator of Wokeism
Willis explicitly identifies the New Age movement as “the incubator for the woke movement,” tracing the connection to a culture where feelings take precedence over facts. His signature example involves a community member requesting the word “deadline” be changed to “lifeline” because the word “dead” was too triggering. He sees this as the beginning of a dangerous trend: reshaping the physical world to accommodate emotional fragility rather than building the resilience to face reality.
The anecdote is amusing and makes a fair point about the excesses of linguistic policing. Most reasonable people would agree that demanding others change the word “deadline” crosses a line from sensitivity into absurdity. Willis effectively captures the frustration many people feel when language reform becomes an end in itself rather than a tool for genuine inclusion.
But the leap from “some New Agers are overly sensitive about language” to “the New Age movement incubated wokeism” is a massive logical stretch. The social justice movements Willis groups under “woke” have roots in civil rights activism, critical theory, labour movements, and feminist scholarship stretching back decades. The idea that it all traces back to drum circles in Ojai is historically illiterate, however satisfying it may feel as a narrative. Correlation is not causation, and the fact that some overlap exists between progressive spiritual communities and progressive politics does not make one the parent of the other.
The Hypocrisy of Spiritual Icons and the Epstein Connection
The most explosive section of Willis’s critique targets the Dalai Lama and Deepak Chopra. Willis recounts spending ten days filming with the Dalai Lama in 2008 and discovering that disciples would drink the spiritual leader’s urine from his toilet bowl. He describes Chopra as cold, arrogant, and surrounded by fearful staff, a far cry from the loving guru his public image suggests. Willis then connects both figures to the Jeffrey Epstein files, citing emails that appear to show Chopra encouraging Epstein to “bring your girls” on a trip and referring to him as “God in drag,” all after Epstein’s initial conviction.
If the Epstein connections are as documented as Willis claims, they are deeply troubling and deserve serious investigation. No spiritual leader is above scrutiny, and the public has every right to demand accountability. Willis is right that the behaviour of these figures should not be excused simply because of their spiritual status.
But there is a more uncomfortable question lurking beneath the surface that Willis never engages with. Anyone familiar with the Law of One material or similar esoteric frameworks will recognise a pattern here: the idea that beings who rise to positions of spiritual influence become targets for what Ra would describe as negative interference. The higher someone climbs in service to others, the more intensely the negatively oriented forces work to compromise them. This is not an excuse; it is a cosmological observation about the nature of polarity on this planet. Under enough sustained psychic, social, and institutional pressure, virtually any human being is vulnerable to moral failure. The question is not whether a figure can be broken, but whether we reduce the totality of their contribution to the moment they fell.
And this is precisely what humanity tends to do. We love the arc of the fallen hero. It satisfies something deep in us, perhaps our own discomfort with the idea that someone might actually be further along the path than we are. Willis frames his revelations as proof that these leaders are “big phonies,” but that framing assumes a binary: either someone is perfectly enlightened or they are a fraud. Real spiritual development does not work that way. A person can produce genuinely transformative teachings and still carry unresolved shadow material. Chopra’s “Seven Spiritual Laws of Success” does not become less useful because its author turned out to be unkind to his staff. The Dalai Lama’s teachings on compassion are not erased by whatever darkness may surround his private world.
This leads to the real question Willis’s attack inadvertently raises: how do we select our role models? If the standard is moral perfection, then every teacher in human history fails the test. If the standard is that their teachings must produce fruit in the listener’s life regardless of the teacher’s personal failings, then we are on much firmer ground. The wisest approach may be to honour the teaching while releasing the teacher from the impossible burden of being a god. Take what serves your awakening, discard what does not, and never outsource your sovereignty to another human being. That, ironically, is one of the New Age movement’s core teachings, and it is the one Willis seems to have learned best, even as he condemns the classroom where he learned it.
The Simple Life as the Answer
Willis concludes by rejecting the entire self-help industrial complex in favour of what he calls a “simple life”: putting hands in the soil, being good to one’s spouse, raising children with boundaries. He frames his journey as one of “remembering the stuff I forgot,” the natural instincts he believes the New Age movement drilled out of his psyche.
It is a seductive conclusion, and there is genuine wisdom in the idea that we sometimes overcomplicate what should be straightforward. But the irony is hard to miss. Willis spent years inside a movement, extracted the lessons he found valuable (mindfulness, meditation, self-examination), and now dismisses the entire framework that introduced him to those practices. His “simple life” philosophy is itself a product of the very journey he now condemns. The New Age movement may have been his ego’s hiding place, but it was also, by his own account, the classroom where he learned to see the ego at all.
