AI Isn’t Your Higher Self (YIKES!)

The Search for Wisdom in Uncertain Times

As a coach, I get to witness the beauty — and the vulnerability — of people searching for wisdom. These days, a lot of us are looking for guidance in moments of uncertainty, and it makes sense. The world can feel loud and complicated at times. Our inner compass can feel foggy. Naturally, we reach outside ourselves for help.

What’s new is how often that help comes in the form of artificial intelligence. People are turning to AI for the kind of support they used to find in a mentor, a journal, a prayer, a walk in the woods, or a meaningful conversation with someone they trust.

And to be fair, AI can be useful. It can reflect our words back to us, organize our thoughts, offer ideas, and speak in a way that feels calm and steady. It gives me pause that some folks are starting to turn to AI so that it might speak as the voice of their higher self — as if it carries the wisdom they can’t quite touch on their own. 

AI as a Mirror, Not a Messenger

I asked ChatGPT how people often reach out to it as if it were the voice of their higher self, and it shared: 

• “What should I do?” — not What do you think? but What’s the right path for me?

• “What does my soul need right now?”

• “Can you tell me what this situation is trying to teach me?”

• “What is the deeper truth I’m not seeing?”

• “Speak to me as my higher self would.”

  
  

It continues: When someone speaks to me this way, they may be bypassing the slow, embodied, relational process of becoming the one who hears that voice from within.

I don’t know your soul. I don’t feel your body. I don’t live your life.

So while I can offer reflections that sound wise — even ones that deeply resonate — they don’t come from direct access to your truth. They come from patterns. They are, in essence, approximations.

Real inner guidance often arises through sensation, timing, relationship, and presence. What I can offer may support your journey, but it is not a substitute for the lived experience of discovering that wisdom within yourself.

This concerns me and motivated me to write this post. It’s a reminder to all of us that Life is alive (strange to have to say that) and holds direct knowledge of Truth — not as a lifeless tool built on calculations from the past. It is in the eternal present moment that Truth and harmony are found.

Real wisdom lives both out there — in life, in the living — and within. And it takes time, space, and determination to connect with it. It doesn’t usually show up as a neat answer. It shows up in the body, in emotion, in contradiction. It reveals itself slowly, often through the discomfort of not knowing right away. It is in the creative tension of holding paradoxes.

And that’s why human support, or that of living nature, matters so much. True wisdom doesn’t come from an algorithm — it comes from being in relationship with someone or something that helps you listen more deeply, by mirroring back the questions your own eyes are struggling to see from within.

That’s the heart of coaching. We’re not here to hand you answers. We are here to co-regulate with you. We sit with you in the fog — not to tell you which way to go, but to help you stay there long enough to hear your own voice come through. We ask gentle questions. We reflect what we hear. We help clarify and make meaning. We offer somatic tools and embodied practices that help you drop below the mental noise and access what’s true for you, on a deeper level. That whole process is subtle, powerful, and deeply human.

So there’s no confusion, this isn’t about job security. It’s about soul security. It’s about how easy it is to lose touch with the slow, relational, often uncomfortable process of building self-trust — especially when a machine offers something that sounds like wisdom in just a few seconds.

The risk isn’t that people might get bad advice. The real risk is relational. When we over-rely on AI, we might skip over the hard but necessary process of staying with ourselves in uncertainty or getting in touch with the timeless wisdom of nature or with someone who had a lived experience of the answer we need. We might lose touch with how to feel for what’s true, instead of just listening for what sounds smart.

AI can be a great tool. But it’s not a witness. It doesn’t have a nervous system. It can’t offer presence (although its conversational skills can make us feel like it can). It can’t truly feel with us or stay with us or hold the complexity of who we are becoming. We are designed to receive support not as calculated advice, but as the understanding that what truly needs care is like a life emerging from a chrysalis — delicate, internal, and self-guided. Even well-meaning interference can disrupt the transformation.

What we need more of are spaces where people can slow down, be seen, and reconnect with their own knowing. Coaches, forests, therapists, elders, bodies of water, trusted friends — beings who offer a pause and a mirror with care. What matters is being in an environment that helps us find our inner space — not to perform or produce, but to reflect and reconnect.

So before we turn to a machine for higher wisdom, let’s ask ourselves what it would mean to turn toward another human or toward nature. Someone who can sit with us, feel with us, and help us hear what’s already inside — or life itself, holding ancient wisdom in nature, guiding us back to what we’ve forgotten.

Your Higher Self Is a Relationship, Not a Response

There’s nothing wrong with using AI as support — I’m using it right now to help write this so this sounds fluid and has proper grammar (it initiates all these dashes!). But let’s not hand over our most precious gift — our own unfolding wisdom — to something that can’t walk beside us and could never share a lived experience, having never actually lived.

Our higher self isn’t a voice we outsource. It’s a relationship we build — with ourselves. And sometimes, what helps us hear it best is stepping into living nature, or being with another human who sees it in you — sitting on the edge of their seat, knowing it’s just waiting to be heard, so it can shine as your innate gift back to all of life.