Wait, Are We Talking About “Love and Light” Spirituality or White Supremacy?
What does love and light really mean?
What is the meaning of love and light?
“Love and light” pairs two shorthand ideas—love as compassion or goodwill toward others, and light as clarity, healing, or guiding energy—and is commonly used as a benediction in spiritual contexts. You’ll hear it in New Age and online spiritual communities, in ritual send-offs, in entire ideological tenets, and as a quick way to offer positive intent. Its true meaning depends on usage and user: for some it’s a sincere invocation, for others a polite, albeit vague phrase.
When the phrase turns from offering into an instruction or lacks concrete care or practice, it can function as an avoidance of reality, insisting on a performance of positivity that erases pain, shadow, imbalance, and systemic injustice. It becomes a tool of spiritual bypassing, often wielded by those with social advantage to shame or silence expressions of anger, grief, or truth: be high-vibe or be silent.
Part of why this is effective is how love is commonly misunderstood: as a pleasant feeling for the speaker. When love is reduced to an entitled good feeling, it distracts from love as a verb, the sometimes difficult or inconvenient work of doing what is right. That slippage makes it easy to substitute surface sentiment for embodied responsibility.
Beneath glowing language and curated aesthetics, “love and light” can therefore mask a host of things. Bigotry, exclusion, and exploitation are dressed up in affirmations and soft words, while the emotions and voices needed for repair including frustration, rage, sorrow, discomfort, a demand for accountability are dismissed as “negative energy.”
This runs counter to ancient spiritual wisdom. Across traditions, shadow and destruction are recognized as agents of renewal: Kali in Hindu cosmology, the Yin force in Daoism, and caveats when death rituals are not heeded in countless folk myths. Transformation has never been only about illumination; attempts to sanitize spirituality erase that truth.
“Love and Light” is sounding a lot like white supremacy
Much of contemporary wellness and New Age culture elevates positivity as a commodity, marketing it as both remedy and aspiration, while quietly stigmatizing the necessary currents of radical honesty, grief, rage, and shadow work. The oft-repeated platitude of “higher consciousness” and the accompanying injunction to “hold things in the highest light” (an example Yvette of @innerflow_somatics recently raised, which resonated with my own critiques) is less an invitation to transcendence than a mechanism of self righteousness, cultural division, and control. It’s frequently weaponized to silence critics such as those who call out spiritual bypassing, “us vs them” thinking, or spiritual consumerism, all by reframing their concerns as failures of vibe rather than legitimate critique.
This is not to say that love or light are without value. But when invoked as an universal sole spiritual truth, “love and light” becomes disingenuous. It rests on the false premise of a level spiritual field for all, one in which suffering can be overcome simply by recalibrating thought, as though history, power, and embodied reality could be dissolved by affirmation alone, by ‘good’ intentions alone, by external performances, by nice language.
“Love and light” rhetoric uses the same mechanisms that are hallmarks of white supremacist culture:
prioritizing comfort for the dominant group;
avoiding conflict that would expose bad actors at any cost;
weaponizing politeness to suppress dissent;
claiming to be the “victim” of aggression when someone bluntly calls out harm, shifting attention from the wrongdoer to the caller’s tone;
framing oneself as the benevolent healer or saviour, such as “raising the planet’s vibration” while ignoring or exploiting the communities one claims to serve;
appropriating spiritual language from other cultures out of context (for example, tacking “namaste” or “you’re the yin to my yang” or other similar phrases onto generic platitudes), which adulterates meaning and erases the originating practices;
dressing up colour-blindness as spiritual unity (“we are all one”) to evade questions of race and power;
mistaking commodities and performance for real work (a Buddha statue as proof of Buddhism, white parents/guardians or other non-Indigenous folks posting photos of their white children in orange shirts on Truth and Reconciliation Day and believing the labour of justice is done).
In this frame, surface harmony is valued more than justice, appearance more than truth, image more than integrity. Demands for “love and light” function much like demands for “civility” in political life. Both work to neutralize the disruptive but necessary force of those asking questions or naming harm and demanding change. Love and light spirituality can become about staging a farce of wellness that insists everything is fine.
As an imposed standard, “love and light” is revealed as delusional at best. It flattens human experience, silences those navigating rupture and injustice, and mistakes denial for transcendence. A practice worthy of being called spiritual must include the luminous and shadowy, joy and anger, death and renewal. To demand only light is to collude with harm while disguising it beneath a glittery aura.
Following the spirits,
Mimi
Spirit medium and occultist