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As you know, I exist to enlighten you heathens from the bullshit that lies amid the fucked-up swill that is the New Age and self-help movement. (Doesn’t the phrase “New Age” make you want to throw up a little? I can barely type it without losing my breakfast into my laptop. Ditto “self-help.” Fuck that.) My modus operandi is a little like decorating a golden brick with lotus flowers and then smashing your brains out with it. Whatever works, that’s my motto, even if it requires reconstructive brain surgery afterward. Whatever. It’s your brain, not mine. You asked for enlightenment, right?

Today’s topic: your thoughts create your reality. Change your thoughts, change your life!

If there wasn’t some truth to this, why would you be reading a bitch like me?

But here’s the problem: far more often than creating something empowering from this concept, people use it to punish themselves.  They say, “Oh, well, this shitty dumbass thing happened to me, so I must have created it.  I am a bad person for creating this bad thing in my life!”  Or they say, “I had a desire to slip an overdose of laxatives into that arrogant prick’s morning coffee today, so I must not be a loving person. Oh no! I must control my thoughts!”   Or, “I’m feeling shitty, and I had all these bad thoughts about myself, so I need to clench my butt cheeks and think only happy-Oprah* thoughts!”

Notice a thread here?  Control.   It’s all about control, people.

Yes, your thoughts do have an effect on you and on your life. But you can’t control them. You can’t control your emotions, either. Most of the time we can’t even control our bodies. I know how my body reacts when a spandex-clad** aging crooner starts singing “Feelings.”  Can’t control it.  And it isn’t pretty. (That sound you’re hearing now?  Ever hear a cat about to throw up?  ulp.ulp.ulp.ulp.  You hear it and you know what’s coming and there’s no way in hell to stop it.  Splat!  It’s a little like that, times about a thousand.)

Here’s an experiment to show you that you can’t control your thoughts.  Ready?  Okay:  do not think about red monkeys.  Do. Not. Think about red monkeys.

You can’t think about anything BUT red monkeys right now, can you?  There’s fucking red monkeys ALL OVER THE PLACE.  See?  And trying to NOT think about something only makes that thing more present.  Go play this with someone else and have some fun.

Do you know why you like The Bitch? Because I don’t try to control my thoughts. They are the same thoughts that you have and don’t admit to having—and you laugh because you’re seeing that they’re not so bad after all. (Though hopefully you’re not thinking about spandex men singing “Feelings”. Then you’d really be kind of fucked up and I’m not sure I want to know you.)

This isn’t to say that we’re helpless peons at the unholy mercy of our fucked-up thoughts and feelings. Of course there is choice and free will and all that.

But you want to know a secret?  Lean in a little closer.

If someone tells you to control yourself – or your thoughts – they are trying to control you.

Oh fuck, I don’t mean the Vulcan Mind Meld or anything.  No one is trying to turn you into a fucking robot.  But asking you, expecting you, to change your thoughts is a subtle form of control.

It’s brainwashing, people. Wipe you clean, ma’am?  If you can get people to try to do something impossible, like controlling the uncontrollable, of course they’ll come back time and again asking for more help and advice. Side of fries with that brainwash?  And you give them your power, willingly, because you feel like a failure.  You buy into the idea that you need to put away a part of yourself in order to feel accepted.  You try and you try and you try, failing every time (because you’re trying to do the impossible), and every time wondering what more you could have done.  You give away more and more of your own power every time you do this.

The bitch does not want your power. I totally deserve your worship, but only because I’m helping you become enlightened. No one deserves your power.  No one except you.  I help you find your own inner Bitch, and for that I of course have your undying endless gratitude.  Also you can send money.

Back to the whole “you create your own reality” thing. Does the Bitch disagree with that concept? Of course not. Look at the reality I’m creating for you right here. No spandex, for one thing.  Freedom of thought and expression.  Feel how good it is to call me a bitch?  Go on, say it.  You know you want to.  And then say “fuck.”  Right out loud.  And then say, “I am perfect.”  (Because you know I am.)(And more importantly, I know I am.)

But even though my words say something else, the Bitch isn’t about ego. The Bitch is about honesty, about calling things for what they are, and about having fun at the same time. That’s my reality.

What’s yours?

*That’s the thin Oprah, obviously.

**Yet another type of control.  And while a nice pair of Spanx cures a lot of ills, nothing can make “Feelings” palatable.

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Oprah totally screwed me over once.  Damn her.

It was the Gratitude Journal.  Are you familiar with this concept?  Let me tell you how it works.  Every day, before you go to bed, you write down in a special little book all the stuff you are grateful for that day.  You write and write and write every day, filling page after page with all the stuff that happens to you each and every day that you are grateful for.  If you do this, the idea is that you’ll be concentrating on all the “good” stuff in your life. Your friend Mr. Law of Attraction says that as ye sow, so shall ye reap (which loosely translated means “you get what you put out”), so if you are squinching your eyes tight shut and repeating “I am grateful for my shitty life I am grateful for my shitty life I am grateful for my shitty life” then guess what?  You get exactly what you ask for.  Yes!  More shitty life for you!

When you finally gather the strength to admit to yourself that you’re not really all that happy about some of the elements of your shitty life, and you’re not particularly grateful for your shitty life (in fact you might even be a little pissed off about it), then all you really have left is to feel guilt for not feeling grateful for your shitty life.  Not only are you forced to admit to yourself that you indeed have a shitty life, but you now get to feel guilty about not feeling gratitude for your own shit.

Double whammy.

Thanks, Oprah.  Here’s a double dish of my shitty life* for you.

The Bitch made it through two pages of her own personal Gratitude Journal, pages which still reek of denial and hypocrisy even today, years and years later.  Two pages before she gave it up.

Gratitude.  It’s great in concept, but it really sucks when it’s used as something to create even more guilt.  Like you need more guilt.

The thing is, we get sucked into feeling like we should be grateful for the stuff in our lives, even the stuff we’re sort of on the fence about.  Maybe it’s not outright shitty, but it smells a little.  We trick ourselves into thinking that if only we felt grateful enough for it, this ambivalence would magically clear itself up and we could feel good about this maybe-shitty-maybe-not stuff in our lives.

“But Bitch,” I can hear you whining in the background, a persistent little drone of uncertainty, “I really DO feel grateful for a lot of the stuff in my life, really I do!  Maybe not all of it, but some!  Can’t I be grateful for that?  Don’t I get Jebus Points for all my good stuff that I really feel good about?”

Sure you do.

But how do you know the difference between the truly good stuff and all that other stuff that you’ve been training yourself to feel good about?

How do you tell the difference? Especially when you’ve taught yourself to feel guilty when you doubt your own inner voice?

Yo.  I told you before that The Bitch has access to the Eternal Book of Everything, so here’s a little wee page from that book, just for you:

If it feels good, it is good.

See?  Simple.

The trick (and there’s always a trick, isn’t there?) is knowing what is “good.”

Here’s what good is not:

1.  Good is not what your mother told you it was.

2.  Good is not what you read in a book.

3.  Good is not what your friend told you.

4.  Good is not what the Dead Ghost of Baby Jebus rose up from the foot of your bed one night and told you.

5.  Good is what you yourself know it to be.  What you examine inside and out, what you doubt all the ways you know how, what you take a good hard look at any way you can just inside yourself and consulting no one else, not even The Bitch, and come out the other side still feeling really good about.

That is good.

And you are, each of you, capable of knowing what good is, and what to be grateful for, and what not to be.  Each of you knows this if you only stop asking around, asking Oprah and asking your next-door neighbor who you suspect may be getting Oxycontin in the mail and asking your dentist with the slightly oniony breath and smooth firm fingers and asking your spouse lying there making an impression on the pillow next to you and asking your kids your dog your brother your shaman your Eckhart Tolle your Twitter your reflection in the mirror asking anybody except you. Because you are the only one who knows what good is and what to be grateful for.

So fucking trust yourself.

The end.

P.S. When and if you are truly sure that there is something in your life that is good and you feel truly good about feeling grateful for that thing, go ahead and write it down if you still feel like you need to.  Frankly, though, after getting to that point of knowing what’s good, you’ve already done all the “work” and a silly little Gratitude Journal isn’t going to make it any better than you’ve already made it all by yourself.

You didn’t need Oprah after all.

*The Bitch does not have a shitty life.  Not any more.  Matter of perspective.  The Bitch has created every inch and centimeter of her life and it’s very, very good except when dealing with a technical crisis, in which case The Bitch allows a slight tinge of whine to come into her voice before consulting her cat.

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Much of what’s included in the vast umbrella of woo-woo loosely called the New Age movement is actually a thinly-veiled attempt at making people feel crappy about themselves.  And it’s pissing me off.  Let’s talk about one now, shall we?

The Old Soul

“Oh, you’re such an old soul!”  or “He knows SO much, he HAS to be an old soul!”

kajsfkfkef,.llkkkkk  (that was the sound of me retching with contempt)

You’ve heard this before.  Old = Better.  Old = Wise.

Strictly and reincarnationally speaking, an “old” soul is someone who’s been around the reincarnational block a few dozen times, with multiple lifetimes to show for it.  But age doesn’t correlate with wisdom, at least not in a linear fashion.  Sure, most chronologically older people, in order to survive that long, have acquired at least some basic common sense skills, but there ARE 60-year old retards out there.  Old people come in all shapes, size, and IQ levels, just as anyone does.

Ergo, old souls = same fucking thing.  NOT necessarily better.  They just have more experience.  Sure, they COULD know better about certain life experiences, having done them before, but all of us are stuck in this same earth-plane funhouse illusion-factory where nothing makes sense and we’re not given any fucking rules or even a map so we have to make up our own.  Every time.

So yeah, I’m [hypothetically] an old soul, but I’m [hypothetically] just as fucked up as you are.

But the thing is, we’re ALL of us pieces of the Same.Thing.  The same universal energy source that is All That Is.  Not only that, but we’re not even pieces!  We just have conveniently fooled ourselves into thinking we’re separate from anything else around us because we’re in these bodies wearing skin that separates us from one another in our minds, but REALLY we are EXACTLY the same as the gum on the soles of our shoes.

So not only is there no separation between any of us but there is no difference, really in soul age.  Old soul, young soul, fuck that.  Time doesn’t exist except in our limited human perception so there’s really no such thing as Old-anything.  ALL souls are equally wise, ALL souls have equal access to the universal energy source that is All That Is, and ALL souls have equal access to whatever rules there are down here, the rules of being human.

There’s no better.

There are just different ways of perceiving.

And just because you can’t truly grasp anybody else’s way of perceiving things, and they can’t truly grasp yours, does not make theirs better.  Or yours.  Just … different.

(Except for me, of course, because I’ve got everything figured out.  But you knew that already.)

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A regular feature here at New Age Bitch is the blasting of New Age stereotypes.  Pretty much every post chips away at them, but from time to time we’ll take on some woo-woo concept and make sense of it all.

Today’s topic?  Vibration.

I hear this word and it makes my eyelids want to turn inside out.  Vibration.  There it is again!  What does it mean?

“Raise” your vibration. (Huh?  What is my vibration anyway?  How do I get one?  Raise it?  How?!  WTF?)

One thing at a time here.  Vibration refers to how the particles of matter that make up your physical being are connected with one another.  Everything vibrates. Everything is vibration.  Nothing is truly solid; everything you can touch, taste, smell, see, or hear is made of particles with spaces between them.  And those particles are always moving.  The rate at which they move and interact with one another is vibration.

You with me so far?  Good.  Keep going.

Again, everything vibrates.  You do, your clothes do, the chair your ass is glued to does, and so does what you had for dinner, the air you breathe, your computer, the window you stare vacantly through from time to time, everything. Even thoughts, intentions, etc.  But we’ll get to that later.

(Oh, who am I kidding?  You don’t care a fat fuck about vibration.  What you really want to talk about are vibrators)

Too bad.  Get your hand out of your pants and stay with me here.

To raise your vibration you make changes in your own rate of energetic self-movement to match what’s vibrating around you.  Most people do this without realizing it. It’s … just part of life.  You sense what’s around you energetically and you naturally want to be closer to that.  If it’s a forest of tall buildings and busy people milling about, you match that.  If it’s a forest of quiet eternal tall trees, you match that.  Easy stuff here.

The thing to remember though is that your vibration is just as strong/important/present as the vibration of what’s around you.  So just as you strive to make sweet non-dissonant hum with what’s around you, everything around you is matching you at the same time.

The thing that’s wrong about the phrase Raise your vibration is the implication that there’s something wrong with yours and that you must change.

The First Rule of Bitch is that You Are Never Wrong.

Seriously.  What have I told you before about your Inner Bitch?  If you constantly send out little vibrator-thought-waves of oh-I-must-be-wrong and everyone-else-is-better, then people will respond to that and help you make it true. But if instead you just say what-the-fuck and hold your head up high and send out vibrations (there’s that word again! my eyelids!) of I-totally-rock-and by-the-way-fuck-you-asshole then that’s what people will respond to.

Trust me.  If you want to be something, then stop focusing on what you are NOT and start just being what it is you want. It’s as simple as that.

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