This is 100% spot on. Thank you, Lissa Rankin!
Over many years now, I have explored, researched, tried on new ideas, beliefs, and practices. Some of these led me down the harmful rabbit hole of spiritual bypassing. Deepest gratitude to John Welwood who, among others, helped me to see, understand, and define spiritual bypassing as using “spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional ‘unfinished business,’ to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.” The goal of such practices, he claimed, was enlightenment.
Over time, I came to recognize this to be true with Eckhart Tolle and others who I once worshipped as holding absolute truths. I was wrong. And I can clearly see today how I was vulnerable to these faux teachers, some of whom continue to be harmful but idealized gurus today.
That said, there are many New Age ideas which never felt quite right and which I was suspicious of from the start — including the laws of attraction and manifestation, that we carry contracts with others from previous lifetimes, that everything is okay and unfolding as it is supposed to, and more. I questioned how and why the laws of attraction might work when all around me and within myself there had been so much suffering and trauma. Surely we don't contract with others from other lifetimes to come back to Earth now to work things out when we so obviously carry layer upon layer of unaddressed ancestral and collective trauma. Unhealed trauma in anyone is not the safe, compassionate, and loving ground upon which we can heal ourselves and unburden generations of trauma. No. Instead, what too often gets passed on is more and more trauma.
This is why naming the road blocks and obstacles to true and deep healing, unburdening, awareness, and transformation is so deeply important to me. There is so much that I have learned the hard way through turning to voices and teachers who have not done the deep and transformative work related to their own trauma. And no one can help facilitate and empower us to unburden the legacy burdens we carry if they have not first engaged in their own journey of deep healing and unburdening.
Thank you to Lissa Rankin, Richard Schwartz, Thomas Hübl, Gabor Mate, my therapist Doug Pullin, and countless others who are excellent trauma informed resources because they have first engaged in the ongoing courageous journey of shedding layer upon layer of the ancestral and collective legacy burdens that they themselves have carried. 🙏 Molly
Are Your Spiritual Beliefs Making You Mean?
In the last installation of LOVE BIGGER, we began to discuss the law of attraction and how it’s not really a law and how our manifestation skills might have more to do with unearned privileges than actual spiritual power. Let’s continue unpacking some of the damaging aspects of law of attraction and manifestation teachings.
While our intentions might be good, the law of attraction can nevertheless get us in trouble in a variety of ways. After all, if your thoughts create your reality, then you have to carry that through to both positive and negative manifestations. If your positive thoughts create a big paycheck, for example, then you take credit for your abundant thinking and attribute all the money coming in to your spiritual power and positive thoughts.
But if you believe that you manifested that money, then what story do you make up when something bad happens to you or to someone else? What happens if you get held up at gunpoint like I was in my twenties, when I was driving through Pike’s Peak in Colorado Springs with my cousin? Did I manifest that criminal victimization with my negative thoughts? I was having a perfectly lovely day, going up to Inspiration Point for the sunset, laughing and singing to show tunes with my cousin. And then we were victims of a random act of violence. So did we really “manifest” that terrifying event?
If you lose your shirt to a corrupt con artist, was it your lack of abundant thoughts that was responsible for your bankruptcy or was it that you fell prey to an abusive narcissist who took advantage of your vulnerability? What if someone gets raped? Did they manifest their rape? What if an unarmed Black teenager is pulled over by the cops on trumped up charges and that cop then puts his knee on that kid’s neck and kills him? Did that boy manifest his murder with his negative thoughts? If he repeated more affirmations or put more blessings on his vision board, would he have been spared his victimization at the mercy of police brutality? And what about all of those Africans that were brought into the United States and enslaved? Did they manifest being enslaved because their thoughts weren’t positive or free enough? What about the Native Americans? Did they manifest colonization, land theft and genocide with their negative thoughts? What about the immigrant children stripped from their parents at the United States border? You can see how ugly it gets if you start going down this victim blaming rabbit hole.
One of the most destructive ways this belief system causes damage regards health and illness. For over a decade, I’ve been teaching about trauma and mind-body-spirit medicine and the impact of our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and traumas on our nervous systems. I’ve taught about the physiology of how when our nervous systems are in the homeostatic, self-healing relaxation response, the body has a greater capacity to heal. By contrast, when our nervous systems are chronically dysregulated and stuck in repetitive “fight, flight, freeze, or fawn” stress responses, usually because of trauma, it’s more difficult for our bodies to heal. That’s physiologically and scientifically true.
But even those teachings can get twisted. What happens if someone gets cancer or long Covid symptoms? Is it their fault that their thoughts weren’t positive enough or their vibe wasn’t high enough? Of course not. Yet I’ve seen people distort the teachings of Mind Over Medicine, imposing the science from that book to blame sick people for their illness, shame them for not getting cured, and insult them for being spiritually inferior. It may feel empowering to understand that our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and the regulation or dysregulation of our nervous systems can impact our health, and therefore we can be proactive about improving outcomes- through trauma therapy, for example. But it’s just the opposite to mistakenly slide into blaming somebody for their cancer, their financial hardship, their rape, their oppression, or their murder.
I’ve also seen law of attraction devotees become quite paranoid. If something traumatic happens, and they’re in the rush of genuine, legitimate human emotions that come in the face of a shocking trauma, they tend to get frightened. Instead of allowing themselves to feel normal emotions like sadness, fear, anger, grief, disappointment, rage, jealousy, or whatever is coming up, they’re terrified that if they indulge these feelings, they’ll manifest more trauma. So it’s a catch 22- and it’s an egregious and damaging spiritual bypass.
To repress the flood of feelings that are supposed to arise in the face of traumatic events, you have to quickly push them aside, bullying the parts that feel intense emotions and rushing to a sickeningly fake kind of toxic positivity. Of course, the nervous system is still stressed- because the emotions have not moved through you the way they’re meant to. They get stuck in the body, and paradoxically, this can make you even sicker than if you simply let yourself feel what naturally arises in response to human life experiences.
I’ve seen people get into destructive downward spirals when life gets hard, as it did for so many in 2020. We saw very clearly in 2020 that this belief system simply wasn’t robust enough to survive the back to back traumas associated with our pandemic era. As a result, some were psychologically shattered, even to the point of psychotic symptoms, such as the delusions of the QAnon indoctrination, a right wing, racist, anti-Semitic, fascist cult that so many law of attraction practitioners succumbed to because they were radicalized by coercively controlling narcissists when the starkness and fear of reality was apparently too hard to face.
At its root, the law of attraction lacks empathy for the marginalized and oppressed. Hard core law of attraction believers also tend to lack empathy for themselves. The belief system simply doesn’t give people the space to just be with our genuine and authentic human emotions when life’s inevitable and uncontrollable struggles hit. It makes sense that if believers can’t extend empathy to themselves when they’re suffering, they’ll be unable to extend empathy to others when they’re hurting.
The whole belief system is actually quite narcissistic and grandiose. If things are going your way and you’re getting what you want in the world- money, sex, power, accomplishments, material possessions, romance, good health- and if you think you caused those good things to happen because of your superior spiritual power or being the recipient of God’s special favor, this can lead to inflation, grandiosity, false empowerment, feeling unusually special, and judging yourself as better than other people who are not manifesting blessings to the same degree you seem to be.
This is also a common pattern in the Christian nationalists, where the law of attraction is packaged as “the prosperity gospel,” the belief that wealth and material blessings are the result of your superior piety, that God shines on the righteous, and that if you’re poor, it’s not because of systemic racism, unrestrained capitalism, or other social injustices; it’s because you’re not as favored by God.
Both the law of attraction and the Christian prosperity gospel can be a cover for white privilege, justifying insensitive treatment of those who are oppressed by social inequity and getting a hit of grandiosity from blessings you didn’t earn but claim to have manifested. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of bathwater we need to toss out in such teachings.
Is There A Baby In This Bathwater?
So what’s the baby we might want to keep? Well, sometimes thoughts do create things and visions are the seeds of our future reality. Those who launched the #OccupyWallStreet movement envisioned a more financially equitable society. Those who birthed #BlackLivesMatter dreamed of manifesting a more racially equitable culture. Those who created the #MeToo movement wanted to attract less unwanted sexual attention and more gender equality in the workplace and hold perpetrators of sexual violence accountable. These are examples of how thoughts can create actual policy changes at the systemic level.
The way I see it, the baby in the law of attraction is a sense of empowerment and agency to bring desires into form. This kind of agency can benefit all people, but especially those who have historically lacked power, such as survivors of severe childhood trauma or those marginalized by systemic racism or colonization, who often grow up feeling disempowered. As long as we feel like disempowered victims at the mercy of traumas, systems, and circumstances beyond our control, it’s hard to assert ourselves in ways that might help us be the change we wish to see in the world.
When we recognize that we are powerful co-creators who can influence our reality, not only with our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, but also with grounded, guided, inspired action and activism, when we tend gently to the traumatized parts of ourselves that feel helpless, powerless, and victimized, we step into our full-throttled participation with the world. Now, more than ever, the world needs you to be the change you wish to see in a world in need of your love.
HEALING PRACTICE: Planting Seeds
Let’s take advantage of the baby in the bathwater and bring awareness to the seeds you might wish to plant so you can assess them realistically and determine where you have agency, what you can control, how you might assert yourself in an empowered way to impact your reality and the reality of the culture in which we live, and when it’s time to let go, loosen your grip, and surrender to the flow of life, even if things aren’t going your way. Take a moment to consider where you need to let go of the idea that you are 100% responsible for the good or bad outcomes in your life, but don’t give up on changing what is within your power to change. So what are your private and most tender yearnings? Allowing yourself to be truly vulnerable in your desire, what seeds do you wish to plant, even at risk of being disappointed and never seeing them flower? What might you wish to change in yourself or the world? What longings in your deepest heart do you wish to fulfill? Is there anything proactive you might do to bring that vision closer to reality?
For example, if you are passionate about an activist cause, how might you get involved in a social justice group that also cares about that cause? If you are dreaming of meeting your soulmate, it might be time to try online dating. If you’re yearning to bring a creative idea into being, maybe you feel called to take an art, music, or writing class. If there’s something you really, really want, try telling people. You have no idea how quickly you might “manifest” something by vulnerably expressing your wants and needs on social media!
If what you dream of creating does appear, don’t forget to be effusively grateful. Resist the temptation to ever take granted wishes for granted. Bow to the mercy of the Universe- and then pay it forward in whatever way you can to keep the bounty of sacred reciprocity flowing.
For more support deconstructing toxic spiritual belief systems and whittling down what beliefs are supportive for you to keep, please consider becoming a paid subscriber so you can read my unpublished manuscript LOVE BIGGER, about spirituality without spiritual bypassing, from a social justice conscious and IFS-informed lens. You can also learn more from my online program Spiritual Bypassing Recovery 101, which I co-taught with the spiritual leaders and trauma therapists who I trust not to mislead us with spiritual bypassing belief systems.
Please go here for the original article: https://lissarankinmd.substack.com/p/the-hidden-cruelty-in-the-law-of
No comments:
Post a Comment