New Age Blues

“You got affirmations you practice patience you visualize and you chant

but down beneath like a little thief the belief still says, ‘I can’t.’”

New Age Blues, 1986

The above is the first verse of my comedy song about the hyper-happy New Age movement…and the things it preferred to cover up with wishful thinking rather than delve into consciously.

A few years later, in 1990, I created my Standing in Spirit program (aka Consciousness Awareness Workshop), the focus of which is to consciously uncover and transmute the limiting underlying issues, problems, patterns and beliefs – of which we are usually unconscious – that are controlling our behavior.

Who’s In Charge Here?

In one of Bruce Lipton’s video clips he clearly explains how the subconscious runs these programs, which run us. He also speaks about how children up to the age of six aren’t experiencing and thinking in the same way as adults or older children.

In my own process of self-discovery, I had come to the conclusion that most of the underlying, usually unconsciously held core beliefs that tend to inhibit and run us were taken on during this early childhood period. I concluded that many of these patterns began as defensive reactions to perceived or actual traumatic situations in which we first experienced a break from feeling unconditionally loved.

The unintentional traumas could be things like being suddenly yelled at for unknowingly putting yourself in danger, i.e. as you were about to touch a hot stove or fire, walk into traffic, pick up broken glass, etc. The parent or caregiver would react in a forceful, shocking manner to protect us but since we weren’t at the stage of being able to reason, we perceived that there was something wrong…with us.

We tried to protect ourselves not only from further outside abrasiveness and assaults on our psyches, etc., but from the equally, or even greater, emotional pain that reinforced our insecurity, self-blame, confusion, etc. We may have compounded our difficulties by dutifully carrying our suppressed hurts out of a mistaken loyalty to a parent who we needed to also not make wrong by rejecting our misperception of their intentions.

The underlying sense of being unlovable was so devastating that many people became hyper-vigilant, automatically contracting inwardly and reacting with inappropriate feelings and behaviors to internal or external stimuli that are not at all related to the original trauma. In other words, we built and constantly reinforced defenses around us, which instead of actually protecting us, further reinforced and stimulated these bad, unsettling feelings and erroneous beliefs about ourselves.

Neutral-Positive Thinking

Bruce Lipton correctly says that thinking positive thoughts alone won’t change these underlying patterns. But utilizing neutral-positive thinking in a step-wise manner can first enable us to identify the underlying beliefs and associated thoughts. Then, through specific steps, we can dissipate the “charge” that they hold, which leads us to ultimately having conscious choice over how we respond to the formerly disempowering stimuli should they reappear externally, or arise internally. This is simply to acknowledge that while we can do a lot to clear these patterns we can’t expect the formerly triggering stimuli to not ever appear again. Nor can we expect to be completely free of any lingering elements within us. But we can through the might of our thoughts create and develop preferred responses to them.

Because the process incorporates attention to the usually simultaneously existing physiological elements related to mental-emotional issues, in my workshop I also show how you can test yourself by deliberately reintroducing the pattern to see if you have indeed dissipated the charge and are no longer unconsciously compelled to react in a habitual way to it. I introduce you to the three steps by which one can gauge their mastery over the issue.

Global Considerations

However one goes about it, once we are consciously monitoring and controlling our thoughts we may become aware that so much of the grief of the world is because the mass of humanity doesn’t value introspection to begin with. Indeed there seems to be no interest in consciously knowing exactly what one is thinking, feeling and consequently doing, moment by moment. Could we have gotten so far down the abysmally wrong road if we had been taught from the earliest age that every cause had an effect and that it all began in our inner world? If we had learned that chaotic actions were the “offspring” of irresponsibly propagating unbalanced thoughts and feelings, perhaps we also wouldn’t have overpopulated the outer world without regard for how to care for it and all the human progeny.

Of course we’d have to understand what real, true love is in order to value such self-responsibility and see the connection between the thoughts we nurture and the wellbeing of what Billy Meier refers to as “everything in everything” *.

* “What you call love is everything but love, because true love is the deepest spiritual-fine-sensitive-feeling-based

connectedness, and love is the absolute certainty of oneself living together and coexisting with everything in

everything, thus, in all that exists; in fauna and flora, in the fellow human being, in every material and spiritual

life form irrespective of its kind, and in the existence of the entire universe and much more (laws and recommendations).”

The Goblet of the Truth

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New Age Blues originally appeared on They Fly Blog on October 27, 2014.