If people can use, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” as an excuse to burn people at the stake, people can ruin anything. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” seems fairly unambiguous to me. It does not come with an asterisk. This command from Jesus does not say, “Love people who are easy to love, people just like you, but go ahead and hate people who are different. Go ahead and blow them up, cover them with stones and let them be crushed to death.”
So if we can ruin something so simple and so clear, we flawed human beings can ruin anything.
For example, one would think people who do yoga regularly, would be living in the flow. Yet I have known yoga teachers who were anxiety ridden, perfectionistic, full of self-hate, and yoga bullies. Doing yoga regularly does not inoculate us against life.
Let me be clear: I love doing yoga. Yoga loves me. I even wrote a song about yoga: “Yoga makes me feel alive. Yoga improves my muscle tone. When I’m breathing doing yoga, I am in my body and completely at home.”
I have recently discovered EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique. Jack Canfield calls it psychological acupuncture. I’ve been a therapist for over 20 years, and EFT is one of the best techniques I have ever used. Brad Yates, whose EFT videos I watch regularly, says that EFT is like taking an emotional shower every morning. We brush our teeth, we wash our hair, but we don’t regularly clear out our emotions. EFT is great for keeping our emotions soft and flowing. I’ve been comparing EFT to rust-removing spray. Using EFT regularly keeps our emotions soft and easy to wash off. Otherwise, we get rusty and it is more difficult to get to our shiny greatness underneath. (Okay, I was a literature major. I love metaphors.)
But just as with anything else, we can ruin the EFT. If people are afraid to feel their emotions, they can use EFT as an escape from the messiness of grieving and loss. Instead of using EFT as a tool we can use to help ourselves free ourselves from emotional patterns that keep us trapped, people can ruin the EFT by seeing it as a way to avoid dealing with the ephemeral nature of our lives, the fragility of our lives, and the big truth we want to avoid: we are all going to die.
And lastly, people can even ruin the Law of Attraction. Just as religion is corrupted into a form of control, using fear to manipulate people to vote for who they want, the Law of Attraction can be corrupted into a way of controlling our future and everyone around us. Nothing is impossible according to the Law of Attraction. But have you seen anyone regenerating any arms lately? Have you seen anyone flying around the world without a plane? Of course not.
The Law of Attraction can be misused as a way to try to be perfect, to try to avoid the messy work of grieving and loss, a way to control everything. Just as when we use religion to bargain our way to safety, getting mad at God when we lose the game, or when we get cancer, we are disappointed when we cannot manipulate the world with the Law of Attraction.
Let me be clear: I believe the Law of Attraction works. I just believe that surrendering is better than trying to control everything. I believe that Divine Right Action is at work. I believe that my having a rare genetic disease, a disease which they can trace back to the family in Ireland that first mutated the gene, a disease for which the genetic marker was discovered from research on my family — I don’t believe my getting this disease was any kind of mistake.
I don’t believe I am being punished because I do not want to see the truth in my life. I believe glib formulas of “Oh, you broke your foot, then I know that means you are afraid to step out into the world,” are ways for the speaker to feel he or she has a control that does not exist for human beings. It might be true that you broke your foot because you are afraid to step out into the world. But let’s have a little more humility and a little less arrogance around this phenomenon, shall we?
Joseph Campbell said that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. I much prefer the surprise and delight and struggle of learning to live the mystery of my life. I much prefer to believe that when the challenge comes my way it is a gift ready for me to unwrap and discover. It is not a punishment.
I am not saying that people who talk about the Law of Attraction are corrupt. I am not saying that the Law of Attraction is corrupt. I am saying we can ruin anything. Our need to be perfect, which is really our need to be safe and loved, corrupts everything it touches.
Wow! What now? So if we could ruin anything, what are we to do now? That’s easy: laugh at ourselves. We are very funny, we human beings. Aren’t we just hilarious in the way we try to control everything and then give it a spiritual face? We are hysterically funny! Let’s forgive ourselves immediately. Let’s forgive each other immediately. Let’s not take ourselves so seriously.
I, for example, am committed to finding where the rubber chicken meets the road.
Blessings,
Vicki