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Eleven Signs that Spiritual Consumerism has Got You Trapped

Garima Roy
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Eleven Signs that Spiritual Consumerism has Got You Trapped

Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy. ~ Guillaume Apollinaire

The confusion around spirituality is higher than ever which has led to an increasing number of people confiding in spiritual bypassing while indulging in spiritual consumerism.

With so many mixed messages floating around the internet combined with the glamour of the spiritual products, it is easier for one to get trapped in the more “accepted” form of consumerism: spiritual consumerism.11

Here are 11 signs that the trends of spiritual consumerism have caught hold of you:

 

spiritual consumerism1) You Yoga Slay by the Bay for the Instant Gram

Yoga is the union of the mind, body, and soul. To derive the complete benefits of yoga, one has to move beyond the “Yoga Babe” and “Yoga Dude” phase.

It can’t be emphasized enough how Yoga has been reduced to an exercise form to get that beach body worldwide. Move beyond hashtags and try exploring the “Yoga Bliss” in the genuine sense.

2. You are trying to Spark the Kundalini the Consumdalini Way

The sacred energy sitting at the base of the spine won’t categorically break open by indulging in Kundalini Yoga or by applying that sacred Kundalini oil. This is because for every human being the course of awakening the kundalini can be an entirely different process and can occur in an entirely different moment.

Kundalini awakening is an amalgamation of the psyche, emotion, and the physical body. A painter may awaken his Kundalini by finally expressing his true emotion in a painting while a surgeon may awaken her Kundalini while trying to save a life of a human being.

3) You like the Sanskrit (fied) Version of Every Product

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Knowing the Sanskrit word for every word is definitely not your gateway to being spiritual. Knowing a new language is of course, very special, and Sanskrit indeed is a very special language just like Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, Icelandic, etc.

The ultimate realization is that the spirit comprehends no language and all the language at the same time. The appropriation of one particular language for profit and spiritual business is inherently confusing.

4) Your life holds no meaning without a spiritual tattoo

Tattoos are beautiful and are a unique expression of art. But imagine every part of your body covered with a tattoo to remind you of your value and connection to the universe. And one day, you want to add more meaning but you run out of skin. It doesn’t have to be this way when you realize that your eternity isn’t confined to tattoos on your body.

5) You are Retreating yourself to escape the reality

5Retreats and wellness hotels are a full-fledged profit-making industry now and they’re more about creating a space to escape than going deeper into your psyche to meet your true self.

Some retreat centers also advertise themselves as “Escape From Your Reality.” The automatic assumption is that a retreat is your direct ticket to the universe. (once you have ignored all your real issues) If you have anything like “Retreat Withdrawal Symptom” then you know, your retreat wasn’t really a retreat.

6) You are sacralising meaningless goods

The true magic ritual lies in the innate power of your focus. No magic sister candle is going to connect you to the source within yourself the way you and only, you can. The rampant production of products through sacralization of meaningless goods with holy texts is another version of branded spirituality.

7) You buy products corresponding to your zodiac sign

The trend of drinking power shots according to one’s zodiac sign isn’t something that makes sense to the cosmos.

Astrology is powerful but it isn’t a field that asks one to revel in one’s astrological sign in an obsessive manner. It is an aspect to understand ourselves from a planetary point of view, which is not the only point of view.  Also, here is a fact: we have all the sun and moon signs within us.

88) You go to any event that promises “tantric sex”

The commercialization of Tantra or Mantra is harming the same way the commercialization of Yoga and Meditation is, the true wisdom is getting lost in the process of glamorization.

The “Tantra Massage” and “Mantra Magic” stalls at the so-called spiritual festivals devoid people of the real essence of spirituality.

9) You need Self-Help from all the Self-Help

The ultimate goal of self-help is to help you in developing a mindset where you know how to decode your thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

You learn to help yourself through your inner wisdom. Any sort of co-dependency to a book, speaker, or a teacher is rewiring your brain for an addiction in a way no different than addiction to drugs.

10) You feel crippled without crystals

spiritualabuse davidhaywardCrystals are beautiful and their presence is certainly healing. They exist in nature to teach us how to tune in with all the healing vibration within ourselves.

The new age culture is using crystals as a clutch while reinforcing the belief that all things good exist outside of us and not within us. So, re-examine your relationship with  crystals.

11. You cannot live without a self-help guru

All self-help, in totality, is self-help and any guru or spiritual teacher that doesn’t echo this in their teaching isn’t healthy for your holistic growth and development. Above all, your inner being waits for your true attention to its existence so that it can take you to the world of your personal inner wisdom.

Any teacher that says their teachings are extremely special and that their teaching is a special piece of cake you have been waiting for your entire life and no other teacher is serving that cake, then you know you’ve gotten yourself into another marketing gimmick.

“A free spirit is not bound by this, that, matter, materialism or opinion. They sing, dance and flow on the wind – for they are at one with it. They are nothing and everything – void and expanse. Even space and time does not confine or define them. For they are pure energy itself.”

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

Are we too Materialistic?

Image Sources:

  1. Yoga Apprentice 
  2. Yoga Meme
  3. Kundalini Meme
  4. More Spiritual 
  5. You Only Live Once 
  6. Zodiac
  7. Zodiac Body 
  8. Tantra Burning Man 
  9. Bestselling Book 
  10. Spiritual Discipline
  11. Self- Guru 

Channeling the Dark Side: The Secret to Getting into The Zone

Gary Z McGee
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Channeling the Dark Side: The Secret to Getting into The Zone

“Bottom line: if you want success of any kind, you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.” ~ Tim S. Grover

Everyone has a dark side. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Or they’ve repressed their shadow. Or both.

As far as discovering that part of you that’s superior, that’s relentless, that’s capable of getting you into the Zone or into Flow, your dark side is a crucial ingredient. That’s where the fire is. That’s where the hunger is. That’s where the ability to think outside the box is. That’s where love for the game (whatever your game may be) resides.

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Image source:

Citizen by Oddly Spliced
Peace by Oddly Spliced

3 Ways to Use the Illusion of Time to Your Benefit

Nikki Sapp
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3 Ways to Use the Illusion of Time to Your Benefit

“Time is not a linear flow as we think it is, into past, present and future. Time is an indivisible whole, a great pool in which all events are eternally embodied and still have their meaningful flash of super-normal or extra-sensory perception and glimpse of something that happened long ago in our linear time.” ~ Frank Waters

The idea that time is not linear, but that all moments in time exist simultaneously is one that can be very difficult to comprehend, and even more difficult to explain. You may have heard this subject touched on quite a bit in metaphysical circles, but nonetheless it’s one that I myself, am still learning and expanding upon to this day.

As my spiritual journey has gone on over time, I have found that my expanded perspective has allowed me touch upon this concept innately within my being vs. something I have just read about.

It is no coincidence that as the ego mind begins to lose hold of it’s illusion of control that also the ability to think conceptually rather than solely linear becomes more embodied and understood on a deeper level, and with this understanding comes also the understanding of how this theory can actually help us in our journey.

Before we can know the benefits, we must first understand a little bit more of how it works.

Albert Einstein, touched on this idea when he said, “The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Or you may have heard self help teachers talk about the idea that by replaying a scenario from the past in our mind over and over our body feels the energetic reaction as if it was happening in the present.

Although this short synopsis doesn’t do any justice to this idea, it at least can give you an idea of how energy works and how one could transport themselves to past or even future event (conceptually) just by imagining it.

Don’t worry if you keep coming to the thought block that says, “yeah I can imagine it, but that doesn’t mean the past didn’t happen the way it did and when it did.” This is a completely normal reaction.

The human brain is not designed to understand this, but as with many things in the metaphysical realm, it is something we have to “innerstand” vs. understand, so have an open mind if you can.

Can you come to the point where that even though you don’t fully understand this theory right now, it is in fact a possibility? If yes, perfect! An openness to the possibility is the first step.

How transcending time can help us

“Our unique journeys draw attention to the underlying choice we all have every moment; to live in a fear-based world of time or, a loving world beyond time.” from the book Mastering Time (February 2018) by Dr. Liara Covert

Before I go into the ways this idea can help us along, it is important to remember that time has it’s place in our reality, a huge place. Your soul signed up to experience an energetic transformation of sorts that takes place over what “appears to be” a span of years.

To fully experience this process and truly savor it, we come here knowing the “rules” so to speak, and time is one of those “agreed upon” rules.

illusion of time 2 So please, do not attempt to use this theory as a means of showing up to work five days late and tell your boss, “well time doesn’t really exist, soo….”

The laws of the universe are not tools to serve your egoic agenda. It simply won’t work that way.

That being said, below are 3 ways to Use the Illusion of Time to Your Benefit:

1) Heal the past

Within our bodies are trillions of cells, and you may have heard the concept of what we “feed” these cells energetically with our thoughts and beliefs actually creates the conditions by which we exist.

If we have a traumatic event happen to us that we store deep in our subconscious, and never truly heal, this energetic “imprint” begins to manifest in the memory of our cells. Until fully healed, the cells will carry this memory within them which could be the cause for all sorts of physical ailments and disease.

By visiting the past in meditation and taking ourselves back to the time of the event, offering ourselves the support or love or compassion that was absent from the event, we are actually able to heal “core wounds” and emotional blocks.

Loving the emotions, or attempting to see a situation from the other person’s perspective (which can create understanding and then forgiveness), can create huge shifts in our current moment.

Imagine being able to get rid of old hurts and resentments in an instant. Healing the cellular debris leftover from traumatic situations can actually prevent or heal diseases, aches and pains in our body that is the outcome of those initial situation.

IMG 3793 52) Align with your desires/alter the future

This concept has been touched on by countless law of attraction teachers. It is the notion that by “feeling” how it feels to already be the person that has x, y, z, (whatever you are desiring or attempting to manifest for yourself) we are able to set in motion a chain of events that leads you directly into that desired reality.

Because what you are truly craving is not the actual thing or person itself when you have a desired manifestation, but rather the feeling you will have by getting this thing/person. It is quite possible to energetically trick yourself/your body into believing it already has it, just by imagining it and adding the emotional component.

The feeling most law of attraction teachers say is the ultimate “yes I finally got what I wanted” feeling, is gratitude. Which let’s face it, even if none of this sounds believable to you, you can’t argue that bringing yourself to a place where you feel gratitude more and more won’t hurt anything, right?

3) Become the parent you needed

This is another huge one that can have healing benefits. Similar to the first point, this one involves revisiting our past to identify situations that have had a lasting negative effect on your psyche. So many therapists and spiritual teachers stress the importance of doing “inner child” work, meaning healing the wounds accrued from childhood.

Because the first 7 years of life have been deemed the most formative in terms of how we react to things or how we “feel” internally, being able to go back in time and becoming the caregiver we needed at the time for our own selves will prove to be perhaps the most important thing you will do in your spiritual journey.

Taking ourselves back to childhood, talking to ourselves from a more loving, supportive and compassionate place, energetically embracing the wounded and neglected child is the precursor to not only our heart chakra feeling safe to open completely, but also our inner child feeling safe enough to start letting in the blessings life has in store for us but our core fears and limiting beliefs have been keeping away.

Image Sources

Time is an Illusion
art pic clocktime bubbles/ abstract pic
woman running up stairs towards clock
quote pic made by: Nikki Sapp

Kidmaste: The Philosophy of Honoring Your Inner Child

Gary Z McGee
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Kidmaste: The Philosophy of Honoring Your Inner Child

“The desire to play is fundamentally the desire to be.” ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Kidmaste: the inner child within me honors the inner child within you.

Kidmaste is the art of being a mature adult while maintaining a healthy relationship with one’s inner child.

It’s also having the ability to proactively recognize and honor the inner child of other adults who may or may not have a healthy relationship with their own inner child.

Kidmaste, as a philosophy, is based in sacred play. It’s a deep tragicomic expression of sincere jest and frolicking amusement. It’s a creative leveling mechanism par excellence. As Vladimir Nabokov said, “Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!” Kidmaste sets the stage for epic art through deep play.

Play is greatly underrated in our culture. And yet it is self-evidently vital to human flourishing. It is a fundamental aspect of Eudaimonia. A sense of play turns the volume down on seriousness and turns the volume up on sincere adaptation and improvisation. The ego’s attempt to make us a tool to its agenda gets put in check and is then transformed into a tool for leveraging creativity, invention and lightheartedness.

When it comes down to it, a person who cannot play cannot innovate. Without play one is merely a cog in the clockwork, a deadhead on the assembly line. Those who cannot play find that their inner child is a kid in a sweatshop just going through the outdated motions of the old. There must be a sense of play if there is to be a creative process at all. Kidmaste is our inner child giving our too-serious adult self a much-needed wakeup call.

This concept is fundamental to practicing a philosophy of high humor. The philosophy that doesn’t honor the inner child is a dead thing. It is stale and dry, weighed down by the heavy rust and outdated dust of parochial reasoning. Humorless and lacking in humility, desiccated and uncouth, it shrivels up on itself.

Honoring the child within allows for a playful space. Playfulness is the acting out of a good sense of humor.

As Khalil Gibran wisely stated, “Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.”

Kidmaste is the epitome of bowing before children. It is the conscious act of honoring the inner child within each other through deep laughter and high humor. It puts the cosmic joke in check, leading to a humorous stalemate rather than an all-too-serious checkmate.

Kidmaste asks that we stop being overly dutiful and unimaginatively rigid. Rather than being overly serious and excessively telic (job-oriented) let’s be nonserious and atelic (play-oriented). Let’s work hard but play harder. Let’s be playfully nonchalant rather than compliant and rigid.

As Luther Gulick surmised, “The individual is more completely revealed in play than in any one other way, and play has a greater shaping power over the character and nature of man than has any one other activity.”

burning man festival adults babies love aleksandr milov ukraine 3Lest we become a tool to our work, we must not give into the bureaucracy of instrumentality. Instead, we should use the instrumental as a tool to create intrinsic value. Invert the standard model.

Flip the ordinary dynamic. Turn the tables on the inner critic. By taking a leap of courage despite our risk-averse, play-it-safe, comfort-zone-clinging heart we reinvent the world.

Creativity is intimately related to risk-taking and play. Our inner child knows this. It’s begging us to update our dull habits and boring routines with courageous Beginner’s Mind. That’s why our inner child is often the voice behind the call to adventure.

It’s pleading with us to discover infinity despite finitude, to inject meaning despite meaninglessness, to introduce laughter despite pain, nihilism and death.

As Ian Bogost stated, “Anyone can treat anything with the deliberate attention that produces fun.”

Attention is what it’s all about. Kidmaste is paying attention to the playful kid hidden within. No matter how old we get, no matter how mature we grow, no matter how rigid and stuck in our ways we become, we will always just be a little kid from somewhere. In the grand scheme of things, we live relatively short lives. Really, we’re not that far removed from that little kid we once were.

The mask is that we’ve “grown up.” Remove the mask and the insecure yet innocent, naïve yet curious, scared yet playful inner child is there curled up around the warm center of what it means to be a mortal human in an unfathomably ancient universe.

Against such a backdrop, we’re all just little babies fumbling and floundering around this thing called life. The illusion is that we’ve “grown up.” The reality is that we are always growing.

As Dr Seuss said, “Adults are just obsolete children.”

In the end, honoring our inner child is a strategy for regaining a state of curiosity, playfulness, and sensitivity so that we can remain young at heart despite the hardening hearts of others.

It’s a method for deep empathy that shoves our overly-serious adult self out of the way so that we can see past the overly-serious adult self of others and rediscover connection through humility, humor, vulnerability, compassion and love.

Image source:

Inner Child by Tyleen
Child heart
“Love” by Alexander Milov

Has New Age Spiritualism Gotten You Trapped?

Garima Roy
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Has New Age Spiritualism Gotten You Trapped?

Let’s take a moment to acknowledge the amount of information and confusion spreading around spirituality, personal growth, and manifestation.

And let’s begin by saying that there is no shame or pride associated with being spiritual. Secondly, let’s understand that “spiritual” is not a label and that it is, definitely, not a lifestyle. In 2012, there was a huge wave of a shift in consciousness which insentiently, got termed as the “new age.”

The “New Age Group” was identifying with chakra-exploring, yoga-dipping, crystal-cleansing while being synonymous with love, peace, and orgasms. We know how ancient the knowledge of chakras, yoga, and crystals is; spirituality is as old as the spirit itself.

However, in the era of capitalism, spirituality is getting lost in translation and is also, misguiding many of us.

Spirituality has become a product that every lifestyle brand glamorizes to no extent, and there is no looking back. This obviously has led to a new division of consumer called the spiritual consumer.

wallpaper 2427141The spiritual consumer can’t imagine their lives without trendy yoga pants and products which help them escape to an instant feel-good mode including festivals where the spiritual person can exhibit their style of spirituality. If a t-shirt imitating a print of cosmos would have been enough for alignment and enlightenment, we would all be enlightened by now.

There is a big issue with the consumerization of spirituality because it is perpetuating limiting beliefs by giving an image to the “spiritual” one. It is glamorizing yoga as a tool to further objectify the human body while prescribing it as a “drug of the new age.”

It gets seriously ironical when a spiritual person wears his spirituality as an excuse to avoid looking at the reality or truth thereby developing a spiritual ego. The thought process involved in spiritual ego sounds like, “I’m a spiritual person hence, I can’t have biases,” and “I believe in oneness, it’s okay if my actions don’t echo my beliefs. At least, my social media image does.”

“Good Vibes Only” and “I’m a Yoga Bitch” may read well on T-shirts and Instagram posts, but in reality, its effect on the mind, body, and soul is a caging one. Because it is creating a culture of forced positivity where one feels obliged to think and feel good thoughts.

A person feels scared to share their innermost emotions because they fear the judgment that comes with it in the form of statements such as, “You manifested this reality for yourself,” thus reinforcing the shaming cycle in an, already, embedded shame-based society.

In a collective, no reality is manifested by an individual alone. The glamor of spiritual world ignores the synergetic nature of the universe, and the spiritual glamour, in fact, is yet another comfortable mask.

6440a89abe84d15af026b47ee363f88f lsd art art isBranding oneself as spiritual goes against the essence of knowing that all living beings, in fact, are spiritual. A spiritual person who has awareness of his/her spirit realizes that the same life-force and energy moves through every being.

There is no need for a label that, anyway, is limited to the language and time-based realties. There is no need to validate or invalidate because the spirit realizes the eternal synchronization of the cosmos.

There is nothing inferior or superior about the “spiritual one.”

“Everybody has a little bit of the sun and moon in them. Everybody has a little bit of man, woman, and animal in them. Darks and lights in them. Everyone is part of a connected cosmic system. Part earth and sea, wind and fire, with some salt and dust swimming in them. We have a universe within ourselves that mimics the universe outside. None of us are just black or white, or never wrong and always right. No one. No one exists without polarities. Everybody has good and bad forces working with them, against them, and within them.” ~ Suzy Kassem

The spirit is inherently free from any kind of classification or categorization. In fact, all the identification process takes place in the physical plane where an increased emphasis is laid upon “self-expression” as a means of “identification.”

When one begins to see the recurring themes, patterns, and colors in nature; all the labels, judgments, and identifications fall apart. The centeredness of a being that revels in the joy of pure awareness realizes the illusion behind the need to attain enlightenment or even exhibit that one is on their way to enlightenment.

my soul is awakenedAlignment is not a competition, and it, definitely, is not judged by an enhanced capacity to manifest realities. One can’t judge the alignment process by keeping the ability to manifest a huge bank balance as a parameter for abundance.

There are millions of people who have manifested a great amount of bank balance but they clearly aren’t aligned and this can be described by observing their hunger for control and extreme fear of losing which forces them to indulge in low vibration acts such as cheating, thievery, and manipulation.

We’ve reached a point as a collective where we, really, shouldn’t layer ourselves with any more false sense of protection disguised under the consumption of “spirituality” as a relief.

Because, spirituality, is not a relief of the “modern age.”

If one needs relief, then, it still means that one is in “pain.”  One is still projecting that the world is too chaotic, therefore, we must cling to our spirit. In such a process, “spirituality” is again being used in another trigger, action, and reward cycle. It is just that this time it is in the more acceptable form as one is trying to attain the status of “holy” or “enlightened.”

The knowledge of the inner being is eternal and ever-present, to tap into it you don’t have to resort to a product, lifestyle, or a trigger-relief mechanism.

Our spirit yearns for the realization of our connectedness with the animate. There is no greater sense of abundance than the one where a being feels a profound sense of association with all that is aware in the universe. Here, all the desire to escape or protect oneself vanishes. One is One with the One.

What is a problem? | J. Krishnamurti

Image Sources:

  1. Trapped in a Bulb
  2. Spirit Awakens 
  3. Inner Eye
  4. My Soul is Awakened 
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