On Purity in Self-Help & Therapy
Recently, I was listening to Manifest Your Destiny by Wayne Dyer on Audible and I was brought straight back to the same feeling of overwhelm and potential failure I had while listening to the same recording when I was in my twenties. I have paid a lot of attention to self-help resources for a long time on my mission to figure out what was wrong with me.
This is where the self-help industry (because let’s be real, it is an industry, too; just one of the more well meaning ones) and religion fail followers and alienate potential believers, in my humble opinion. Manifest Your Destiny has lots of useful pointers on how to foster spirituality through meditation, important discussion of the ego and it’s disruptive presence in our lives, and even a generous description of God that no doubt has influenced my own understanding of God (or Good) in the Universe.
But it’s also full of language about how easily we can BLEEP up getting what we want and need in our lives. There is a lot of discussion about ways we can disconnect from spirit or prevent manifestation, which is tantamount to: Follow these rules exactly or you won’t get what you want. Make sure you’re doing all of these things or you will block everything. The implied message is also that you will continue to be miserable if you also fail at this.
I felt like that for a long time - that I was preventing my own success or that I wasn’t being positive enough to build a life I dreamed of. It made me less willing to participate or pray or meditate or intend on anything, because I am well aware that I am not perfect. The fact that I have never been perfect has been a major stressor all my life, and then I would encounter self-help or therapy that expected me to just be a new or different kind of perfect than the one I was currently obsessing over. Anyone else ever been through the same thing? Lemme guess.
A lot has changed since my younger, more impressionable days and I am grateful for a different perspective. I’m grateful that I’ve read enough self-help to see how others are practicing their version of faith. I’m also grateful that I kept experimenting despite strong fears of failure and despite the cynicism of my atheist brethren.
For me, “manifesting” or “intention” is just about focusing on Good (God) as best we can. It is about being well aware of our flaws, failures, and trauma, and knowing we are still worthy of the best in life, too. All that trauma that brought us to a place of fear comes from the actions of someone else who also lacked faith, and therefore made terrible choices that deeply affected us. So why compound the problem? Why also believe that Good (or God) doesn’t exist and act accordingly, casting more trauma around?
So much of hardship is about poor choices or self-sabotage, which in my view are a symptom of a lack of faith. Acquiring the best things in life is possible for all of us, every single one of us, particularly when we start to believe we are worthy and begin to pray for it. The act of prayer holds specific meaning, in that it is an active gesture in asking for what we want as if we are worthy of it, no matter what we’ve done or what mistakes we think we’ve made. That willingness to believe reframes our present, our future, and even our past if we let it. It makes us reconsider our choices, expect more of ourselves and each other, and gives us more patience to work toward our dreams.
I’m not sure how or why but the act of asking and getting specific about what we want and need leads to answered prayers. Maybe God (or Good) really is just acting in our lives. Maybe the energy of the universe really is willing to build what we want as long as we focus on it and have faith with intention. If that’s the case, God bless it (you see what I did there? ha!). Or maybe it’s just our wonderful, malleable brains reframing things because we have given ourselves permission to think differently.
I keep coming back to this important point in my mission to bring more and more people to a very basic faith in Good (or God). It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if God really is answering our prayers or our powerful, potent brains are just reframing certain problems with more positive solutions. What matters is we start building self-fulfilling prophecies looking up, rather than down.