In recent weeks, as renewed attention to the Epstein files has included the naming of figures such as Deepak Chopra, and as thoughtful responses have emerged across the healing community, I have found myself quietly reflecting. Not only about individuals, but about us. What do these moments stir within our own field? For me, they feel less like scandal and more like invitation: a call toward maturation, toward embodied values, accountability, and psychological adulthood within the healing professions.
Our Ethical Values
As EFT practitioners and therapists, we work within ethical frameworks that guide and protect both practitioners and clients. These codes are essential foundations, yet compliance alone is not enough for navigating a world marked by power imbalances, inequality, and ecological crisis. Beyond ethics lies the lived embodiment of our values, expressed not only in the therapy room but in how we live.
Do we know what our values are? Have we examined them honestly enough to recognise when we drift? And are we willing to look at the places where blind spots, power, or comfort quietly shape our choices?
Working With Shadow
Recent events highlight a familiar tension within spiritual and therapeutic communities: aspiration alongside shadow. Drawing on Bill Plotkin’s perspective in Nature and the Human Soul, I wonder whether many challenges reflect a difficulty with maturation, where unresolved patterns around authority, belonging, or validation continue beneath adult roles. The identity of “healer” carries genuine commitment, yet also the risk of idealisation. The question is not whether we have shadow, but whether we are willing to work with it.
Working with shadow asks for humility and relationship: trusted mirrors, honest feedback, and accountability understood not as punishment but as care for the whole. Alongside personal shadow sit systemic realities; sexism, racism, ageism, classism, and other biases that shape perception whether we intend them to or not. Training in therapeutic presence does not exempt us; it invites ongoing inquiry.
Another question concerns our relationship with privilege. Many therapists occupy positions of relative advantage with access to education, autonomy, and meaningful work. These are gifts that carry responsibility. In a world marked by disparity, we might gently ask: what is enough for a life of dignity and integrity? Not as a call to austerity, but as an invitation to balance sustainability with service.
Beyond human relationships lies our relationship with the earth. Living in alignment with healing values may include reflecting on how we inhabit the planet, our consumption, travel, and participation in harmful systems. None of us can step fully outside them, yet awareness invites intentionality and reciprocity. Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that ethical relationship involves gratitude, restraint, and offering.
Maturing as Therapists
Perhaps, rather than viewing public exposures as scandals to be consumed or individuals to be cancelled, we might understand them as catalysts, even fertiliser for our own discernment. Rachel Cannard, in her reflections on When Gurus Fall, suggests that the collapse of idealised figures can invite slower, more conscious leadership, one that resists reactive judgment and turns instead toward reflection and maturation. The invitation may be to pause and ask not only what has happened out there, but what is being asked of us here.
If we are part of a larger relational field shaped by interactions, silences, values, and choices, each of us contributes to its tone. As nervous systems co‑regulate in therapy, our professional culture is shaped collectively through what we tolerate, question, idealise, or challenge.
What if moments like these invite us not into outrage alone, but into deeper self‑examination? Not into distancing ourselves from those who fall, but into asking where similar dynamics may live, however subtly, within us and within our communities. In this way, even painful revelations can become compost, material that, when honestly metabolised, nourishes growth toward greater clarity, humility, and alignment with the highest and best good of all.
Perhaps the real question is not whether we have values, but whether we are willing to live in ongoing self‑discernment, returning to them again and again, allowing that practice to shape how we show up with one another, how we serve, and how we walk, as best we can, gently on this earth.
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Kathy Adams is an Accredited, Certified Advanced EFT Practitioner, EFTi Mentor and Chair of the EFTi Research Committee.
Photo by Kevin Tucios on Unsplash.
Eleni Vardaki says
Great read – well put, Kathy! Thought provoking and insightful. I love how you gently but clearly help us focus on what we can control. To remember to reconnect to our personal agency and ongoing responsibility as professionals and community leaders to do our own work, which requires genuine humility and being honest with ourselves and others.
Eleni says
Great read – well put, Kathy! Thought provoking and insightful. I love how you gently but clearly help us focus on what we can control. To remember to reconnect to our personal agency and ongoing responsibility as professionals and community leaders to do our own work, which requires genuine humility and being honest with ourselves and others.