Why I Defected from the White Light

Dear New Age Movement,

We both know this has been a long time coming, but I will say it anyway: I am leaving you. We have had some really good times, and I thank you for all you have taught me. In so many ways, I grew up and found my place in the world with you by my side.

But lately your narcissism and magical thinking have left me feeling empty and exhausted. I feel there is no room for me as I mature and encounter the limitations of my own humanity.  I am certain you will not be alone for long. There are countless sweet young things as eager to worship you as I once was.

Meanwhile, I believe I have found an intelligent spirituality to partner with, one that includes everyday people with the courage to face realities like illness, financial hardship, disabled children and sagging breasts - realities which affirmations and prosperity prayers somehow don't instantly fix. One wish I have for you is that you can find a place in your heart for such people and stop blaming them for their frailties and foibles. Many of them really are great people, even if they don't look as polished as you and your bleached front teeth.

I wish you well as we go our separate ways. Namaste, you charming bastard, you.

Sincerely,

DF

It's not like I actually planned to join the New Age movement.  Not the way someone might plan, for instance, to register as a Democrat or relocate for a job in Des Moines.

What drew me inadvertently into what I call the Crystal Blue Persuasion in the late 1980s was an interest in recovery from mental illness beyond what traditional psychiatry offered at that time.  I was fascinated by approaches like body-centered therapies and acupuncture and yogic breathing for managing moods, reducing symptoms and increasing a sense of well-being for the kind of people who used to get sent away to someplace unspeakably scary or sent home grotesquely tranquilized for, like, a really long time.  People like a great aunt who suicided just before the FDA approved the use of lithium as a psychiatric medication.  People like me, who received a PTSD diagnosis during my senior year in high school in 1988, when many Americans still equivocated that condition with post-Vietnam Syndrome.

Please understand that this was a good 10 years or so before downward dog became a household word or anyone had ever even heard of kale.  Quality-of-life pharmaceuticals like Prozac, which could alleviate symptoms without completely tranquilizing patients, were just barely making their entrance on the treatment scene.  I simply refused to believe that people with mental disorders like PTSD were doomed to a life of either emotional torment or Mother's Little Helper coma.  There just weren't a heck of a lot of treatment options at that time.  Either you were in a hospital, in decades-long analysis, in a Skinner box, or hopelessly unstable with emotional issues that none of the above could alleviate.

I started exploring alternative psychotherapies like Gestalt and Bioenergetics, first as a client and later as a therapist-in-training.  Initially, these approaches grew out of the humanistic psychology model and took hold amid the counterculture of the 1960s.  I thought they were cool and a little rebellious.  There was so much creativity and inspiration going on, and sometimes downright heroics.  People's lives were bravely turning around before my eyes as they confronted their demons with unfathomable pluck.  The methods were a little out there, but still practical and in many cases effective where talk therapy interventions fell short.

I'm not entirely clear on how the practicality of techniques that relaxed and restored the nervous system morphed into an inclination toward metaphysics.  Something to do with Ram Dass and acid, I'm told.  Also, in the absence of today's unprecedented advances in neuroscience and brain scanning technologies, the benefits of these therapies seemed magical.  Even miraculous.  There was no doubt to me that there was a strong spiritual component to this kind of emotional healing.  I had always had mystical proclivities anyway.  In fact, I discovered my own spirituality in those types of somatic processes and continue those practices as my form of private worship to this day.  What I did not find inside myself was the wacky superficial theology that began to spring up around these holistic healing communities like mushrooms after a rain.  I did not drink the Kool-Aid.

Well, maybe a sip.  There was a phase of my own trauma recovery that was so brutal that I began buying into the magical thinking.  I began to believe that my thoughts could control outcomes (and incomes) and that imagining myself in a bubble of white light would exempt me from the human condition.  And I would secretly praise myself when this worked and chastise myself when it didn't.  I lived in what amounted to a spiritual meritocracy whose basic tenants echoed the wish fulfillment fantasies of a seven year old.

Until a dear friend got sick and much of our healing community either blamed her (for taking on bad karma) or blamed themselves (for giving her negative vibes).  This woman was on her death bed.  Her family was planning her funeral.  And our so-called spiritual group was morbidly preoccupied with who was to blame energetically?  I knew then it had to stop.  This was not a mature spirituality.

Yet I also knew there were some grains of truth amid all the hype and how-to gurus.  True, I could no longer emotionally afford to believe that we humans completely "create our own reality" like mythical sorcerers of destiny.  If we were that powerful, no one would ever be poor or sick or homely or heartbroken, ever.  I understood that deep acceptance of life as it is, without judgment, was key to happiness and mental health. But what I did draw from the movement was that how we choose to view reality - what we focus on, what narrative we attribute to events, how we organize ourselves around what happens to us - does impact our experience of life.  And, because of a whole bunch of cool, complicated neurological shit like mirror neurons, the world responds in kind.  (More on that later.)  Try this: wherever you are currently located while reading this, look around for as many red things as you can possibly find.  Red is freakin' everywhere, right?  Now look for green.  Wait, the whole entire world is totally green!  And so on.  But there is no way that you can make red not red, or green anything other than green, without a can of spray paint for which you will have to show some i.d. to purchase at Ace.

Fast forward a few years, and you'll find me a snarky veteran of the experiential workshop.  If, like me, you have been to countless touchy feely psychotherapy trainings, you have no doubt encountered the "What kind of animal is most like your personality and why?" group icebreaker.

And no doubt you've borne witness to such cosmic pearls as "wild gazelle," "winter swan" or "sparkly vampire."

And if you happened to be in that same workshop with me in recent years, you might have heard me say "billy goat - friendly, curious, stubborn, playful, naughty, bold and sometimes ornery just for the fun of it."

Because, Sparkle Pony, no one shits magic dust.