Personal Growth — Wisdom — Elizabeth Hayes

What New Age Spirituality Gets Right and What it Doesn’t

New Age spirituality isn’t really new anymore. In fact, it’s been around for a few decades, so these days it’s really just branded spirituality. Yet, ask anyone what spirituality or New Age spirituality really is, and the answers will likely be all over the place. New Age spirituality has given rise to so many different modalities, ideas, theories, truths/half-truths, pseudo-sciences, and feel-good totems, it’s become a kitchen sink of spirituality. From body and wellness to astrology, mindfulness and meditation, energy healing, channeling, chanting, sweating, Tarot, Angels, Star seeds, crystals and so on, there’s seemingly no end. With such an exhaustive list, it’s no wonder that New Age spirituality is difficult to really encapsulate, which feeds a common perception that it’s wishy-washy and lacks any true identity.

Virtual Insanity

At the beginning of every dystopian film, there’s always a story about how a society or civilization reached its breaking point. We have now entered our own dystopian reality. Our lives have been upended, although for many, our daily demands of family, work, school and other responsibilities continue. The world as we know it appears more or less like it had on the surface, yet it has now become an empty shell waiting to be filled.

Into the Unknown

2020 is giving us one huge wake-up call after another. It’s telling us it’s time to confront our fears. As a society, we’ve become adept at not facing reality, seeking out virtual realities in order to escape the painful one and developing detrimental coping mechanisms. It had to be something big like the Coronavirus pandemic to shake us from the somnolence of our complacency.

Fear Factor: Why We Need to Stop Using Fear to Motivate Us

The more conscious we become, the more we can see how fear has been used to manipulate, enslave, suppress, control, and even destroy us. How our primal need for safety and survival has led to our own demise, like lambs to the slaughter. Even if it doesn’t kill us, fear kills our spirit, numbs us to our purpose, and forces us to surrender our power.

Ignoring the Labels: Looking Within to Discover our Self-Worth

So much of today’s world runs on validation, with people seeking it in the number of likes, thumbs-up, friends, followers, subscribers, applause, swipes, matches and media engagements. We’ve been conditioned to believe that our individual worth can be measured by any of these, that such external validation ultimately justifies our very existence.

The “Complete” Truth: Realizing Your Own Power

Not a single being is greater than we are because we are all the SAME. Our differences on the outside do not erase the fact that underneath it all, under that thin layer of skin, we are truly the same human beings. At our very core, we are perfect, complete, whole and infinite.