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It took me a long time to realize that there are other types of intelligences, other ways of seeing the world and valuing it than mine. Non-dual. Heart-centered. About feelings, love, sparking of joy, the soft animal underbelly of the human soul.
So, to catch up, I once spent part of a week making merry with a wonderful gaggle of psychics, mediums, and healers. We sang, we danced, we shook that thang, often simultaneously. Talk about balancing your energy field! The joy this kind of energy creates is good for what ails you, and for what don’t.
And yet I felt different, even among my people. My energy felt funny, I felt off, unrelatable and unrelated. They wanted to talk about spiritual things 24-7, and many of them had given up caffein, flour, sugar, and red meat in order to raise their vibration, man. Me, I don’t hear/see Spirit all the time, and it doesn’t communicate with me continuously (thank Jeebus), and definitely doesn’t say anything to do with veganism or wearing certain colors like purple and stuff. Maybe I’m not listening, maybe my intuitive abilities suck, I thought. But some real talk: it’s far too distracting to me to be in that space during my workaday life.
And frankly it annoys the living fuck right out of me.
Working on it. I try very hard to stay open and present to ways of being attuned to Spirit that are radically different than mine, and it’s definitely an area where I have a lot of room to grow.
There has been a shit-ton of New Thought books out in the last 15-20 years or so that ignore the shadow aspect of the self, that exhort the reader to transform the painful parts of their lives or raw parts of themselves into sweetness and light. I’m not going to name names, but even a cursory sweep through a New Age or metaphysical bookstore will reveal these trends. The reader or student is encouraged to only focus on the positive, to the exclusion of the negative in their lives.
This is, to put it in technical terms, utter bullshit.
While I think where we place our thoughts we tend to place our actions, and that this informs our character and eventually influences our destiny, I do not believe that Keeping It 100% Positive 24/7 and Turning It All Over To My Angels To Fix or Getting Rid Of My Ego are viable long-term strategies. It’s a pretty slick way of abandoning the real self, which is chock-full of humanity and imperfections, and getting into something called spiritual bypassing, which I will discuss in another post soon.
We don’t heal and grow by spiritualizing the psychological. We heal and grow when we do the work, the real work of acknowleging our tender spots, our painful pasts, of staying emotionally present to ourselves, even when it hurts to do so. Especially when it hurts to do so. And sometimes it sucks, and let me tell you, it looks nothing like the zip-zip-zap kinds of quick fixes promised by so many New Thought authors.
I’m a realist, a former prison psychologist who worked in maximum-security penitentaries when I worked inside the walls. Please trust me when I say there are people on this planet who should never see the light of day, period. Even outside prisons and jails, there are malignant narcissists on a less dramatic level, but who can still commit soul murder - but that’s a post for another day. Please trust me when I say there is the potential for real bad mojo within the human psyche right alongside the potential for good juju, folks. In all of us. While I believe we are all called to live in our highest self, not everyone will, and moreover, some will seek to actively poison the lives of others. It ain’t all beer and skittles. Lock your doors. Don’t befriend assholes. Keep your guard up when your spidey-sense starts tingling. Pay attention to your inner life - all of it, not just the sweetness and light.
When we ignore the dark and potentially harmful aspects of other’s personalities, we place ourselves in danger. And so it follows that when the dimmer corners of our own souls remain willfully unexamined or shoved aside, what is dark within can fester, and grow strong. This also places us in danger.
That’s just reality, as viewed by someone who has been brushed by the wings of human evil, who has sat with its victims, trying to Scotch-tape them back together long enough to do the work of therapy.
I have much, much more to say on this topic, but that’s it for now. I’ll end with this paraphrased thought by the great Swiss psychoanalyst and psychonaut, Carl Jung:
She who looks outside, dreams. She who looks within, awakens.
