Okay, people, it’s time to clear this up. What the eff is “New Age ” anyway? Chanting om all day? Wearing patchouli and letting your armpits go European? Yoga? Crystals? Tantric sex?

Nah.

New Age is the catchall term some fuckwad started applying to the idea that Old = Bad and New = Good, sometime around the Harmonic Convergence. Remember that? That was the day in 1987 when we were all going to get aligned and shit and life was going to be awesome afterward. Seems like somebody forgot about some of the un-awesome stuff that’s happened since then, like George W. Bush and orange alerts.

(Apologies, by the way, to the before-his-time William Blake, who applied the term “New Age” in the preface to a long-ass poem about John Milton, in which Milton battles Satan and Blake merges with a twelve-year old girl who’s really him. Awesome stuff. But Blake’s New Age didn’t have patchouli’d armpits in it.)

Old = Bad

Dogmatic religions, for example. They’re definitely bad. New Age devotees shun religion like it’s raw liver left out on a hot sidewalk (which used to be a part of many ritual ceremonies, but that’s beside the point), preferring to replace their Catholic rosary with a Buddhist mala.

(Hint: those are both prayer beads.)

See? Old is bad. New is good. Repeat after me.

Some old religions are allowed. Buddhism is a must, because it’s way cool and hip. Also Buddhism is often confused with  vegetarianism, which is favored by New Agers who hate eating anything with a face.

Hinduism presents more of a problem for most New Agers.  While it scores points for vegetarianism (good), it had a lot of gods, which is confusing (bad). New Agers like the idea in concept of multiple gods (some with lots of arms! some are animals! they have sex!) which is a big fuck-you to the Big White Dude in the sky with a long white beard and a long white robe, but the whole thing gets tiring after a while (bad). New Agers can’t tell one god from another, except that one is an elephant and one is a monkey. Aside from them, the gods sound to New Agers like a big feuding family who all has sex with one another, and that just hits too close to home.

Speaking of everyone in the family having sex with one another, New Agers also don’t like the idea of multiple spouses as in some fundamentalist religions like extreme Mormonism and Islam. Ew! They say, How positively medieval! Yet, call it polyamory and everybody’s okay with it — it even gets its own HBO show.

New = Good

New, like crystals. You know, rocks? That have been in the ground for centuries? Yeah. Those are new. Nobody ever thought to pick one up before the Harmonic Convergence, when we all wore quartz crystals on our foreheads to raise our vibration.

New also means yoga, preferably in a hot sweaty room. Like before there was air conditioning. See, new!

New also means music, preferably using instruments that have been around for thousands of years. Drums and flutes. (The electronic barfplosion that was New Age music in the 1980’s doesn’t count.)

Oh come off it, who am I kidding? There’s nothing new. It’s really about getting back to what’s old-old. Old = Bad but Really Fucking Old = Good. See?

Examples:

1. Tree worshiping. Or hugging. Same thing.

2. Sustainable living. Didn’t ALL living used to be sustainable? Because if it wasn’t sustainable, you just starved?

3. Astrology. Cuz the stars and stuff have only been around a few gazillion years or whatever.

4. Vegetarians, vegans, and fasting. In the old-old days, if you had meat you ate it. if not you didn’t. If you didn’t have food you fasted. Simple, eh? How spiritual.

5. Worshiping the feminine. As if pole-dancing wasn’t evidence of this?

And the granddaddy of them all:

Book sales and workshops. Because where would we be if we didn’t have people telling us where to go?

There you have it. The Bitch’s Guide to the New Age. You’re welcome. Now go grow out your patchouli pits.

We all have a friend like this. You know the one. Ditsy, big watery eyes, forever gazing up at the sky and sighing with apparent lack of brain function. And then looking at you earnestly, telling you that in order to be happy, you have to forgive yourself.

Excuse me? And WTF?

Forgive MYSELF? Dude. You don’t know who you’re dealing with here.

I have forever banned from my inbox one such chirpy optimist who sends out delightful email missives all too frequently, each one containing nuggets like, “As we bring our fears to the Light, to Source, fear cannot be sustained and it dissolves in the intensity of Love.”

Gag.

And this chirpy optimist (hey, nothing wrong with optimism — I practice it every time I exhale, trusting that I’m going to breathe in again) chirps about the beauty of forgiveness. As if this forgiveness is a magical state of enlightenment that we must all strive to attain.

Oh. That’s what you thought forgiveness was too, isn’t it? Something magical. That will solve all your problems.

Well, get over it. It’s not.

Forgiveness, simply put, is the act of releasing an energetic hold placed on another. This energetic hold arises when you look outside yourself for the source of pain or discomfort you feel inside. In other words, it starts with blame.

Hoo hah.

Oh, I forgot. You’re really good at blame.

In fact, 50% of you are really really good at blaming yourselves. For everything. And everything receives the same amount of blame. Burn the toast? “Oh, how horrible, my toastmaking skills suck, I FAIL!”  Encounter a red light on the way to work? “OMG I suck at driving, I’m going to be late, I should have taken a different street, I FAIL!” You’re a brain surgeon and you lose a patient? “I SUCK! I don’t have brains in my fingers! I should have been an electrician! I FAIL!”

And while that’s entertaining — watching people self-flagellate and cry Glenn Beck-style Vicks Vaporub-enhanced crocodile tears while tearing out their hair and gouging their eyes out with a spork — it’s nowhere near as fun as what the other 50% of you do, which I call The Dance of Blame. Burn the toast? “You SUCK! Why’d you buy this toaster anyhow! What a stupid toaster! Who the fuck wants toast anyhow!” Red light on the way to work? “STUPID LIGHT! Hey! Fuckhead! Yeah, you! If you actually drove the fucking SPEED LIMIT we would not all be here waiting at this fucking LIGHT!” Failed brain surgeon? “STUPID FUCK! He just HAD to go in for fucking surgery, the asshole, and then STOP BREATHING on my table! HOW DARE HE DIE! Doesn’t deserve to live!”

And while blame can be really really entertaining (a national pastime, really), let’s not forget it’s just one piece of this forgiveness bullshit. That’s right, in order to “forgive” yourself you first have to go into Blame Mode and get all weepy and berate yourself for not taking enough Me Time.

Ew. That just feels crappy, doesn’t it?

And in order to forgive OTHERS — well, seriously, why would you want to? If you’re a blame-everyone-else kind of person, then releasing your hold on that blame isn’t going to be easy. You LIKE blaming. It’s part of the empty shell of identity you’ve crafted around yourself. Think you’ll give that up easily, just because some New Age shithead tells you that you won’t be happy until you forgive everyone on a very long list of people you’ve ever known? Hardly.

So now what?

The Bitch has the answer.

To start off, own your shit.

That’s right, own it. You’re a blamer? Do it loud and proud. But don’t take yourself too seriously, because everyone around you knows you’re full of shit. Blame yourself continually? Then go over the top with it. “OH MY GOD THE TOAST IS BURNED! MY LIFE IS OVER! KILL ME NOW!” People will also know you’re full of shit and begin to ignore you, as they should, instead of rushing to your aid. Owning your self-blame is actually more difficult than owning your blaming of others, because socially, we reward self-blamers. But get over it and just be dramatic. Enjoy it.

Next step. After you totally own your blame, ask yourself this question:

Can I, at least for right now, let go of this stupid-ass grudge I’ve been holding for the past 8 years and pretend it never happened? Just for now?

If the answer in your head comes back “Yes,” then do it. Let it go. You’re not obligating yourself to forever. It’s just for that moment.

If the answer in your head comes back “No,” ask it why the fuck not! Ask it why you’re insisting on being a total douche, and remind that fucking voice that we’re talking about just for a moment — a nanosecond — and what the fuck is so scary about that? And then challenge that fucking voice to a face fish-slapping duel if it won’t listen and fucking let go for like a SECOND.

And forget about forgiving. And get on with your life.

Ah, 1997. Remember Teh Internets back then*? Prodigy. AOL. Dial-up! The height of technology was the Hamster Dance, one of a horrific endless plague of cute little tiny animated GIFs. Remember them? Those little suckers were everywhere, at least until somebody discovered they cause the mass repeated application of a fork to the eyeball.

Ow.

But 1997 was the year The Bitch discovered the concept of Ascension. That’s right, Ascension! It’s The Rapture, except with patchouli! What, you’re unfamiliar with The Rapture? Not to be confused with the raptor (although they’re alarmingly similar and both involve lizards!), The Rapture is the concept that Jaysus is returning amid the noise of a zillion celestial trumpets, and when He does he’s taking a bunch of deserving folks with him, beaming them right up into heaven from their cars on the freeway or from digging in their fridges for a midnight snack or from whatever other clean and holy daily activity (not sex) the 144,000 super-special Chosen might be engaged in.

You just can’t make this stuff up. People believe this.

But hello, the New Age has sprouted its own can of woo-woo. So let’s talk about the Year 2012, shall we? People pay good money to hear The Bitch talk about this stuff all the time. Here’s what she has to deal with:

1. The Mayan Calendar ends! In 2012! OMG!

2. And look! The solstice! DECEMBER FREAKING 21st — THAT CAN’T BE A COINCIDENCE! THE WORLD IS FUCKING ENDING!!!!!!!!!!

3. Those Mayans, they were onto something! So! Freaking! Wise! They predicted the internet!

Back in 1997, the year 2012 seemed a million zillion years away. It was safe to scoff. And The Bitch was sitting there hunched over her dusky purple Sony Vaio PC, madly Googling (Google didn’t exist yet but whatever, The Bitch cleverly thwarted this problem by 1) knowing the future and 2) using the simultaneous nature of time to simply transport herself ahead a few years to 2006 by when Google The Trusty Search Engine That Could had become Google The Omniscient and All-Powerful, and 3) the Vulcan Mind Meld) the word “ascension” and coming up with things like “Ascended Masters.”

Woo-woo alert.

This is a test. This is only a test. If this had been an actual case of woo-woo, the signal you just heard would be followed by instructions telling you how to access the 5th Dimension and to dematerialize your body into its crystalline form.

Oooo, Ascended Masters? Just so you get this straight, there is no concept of “up” or “better” when it comes to human spiritual evolution. In fact, using the word “evolution” implies that there’s some sort of linear action going on. Humans learning lessons and advancing to the next class in the next lifetime. And while that’s a semi-useful analogy that allows people to grasp the fact that HEY PEOPLE, LIFE IS ABOUT HAVING EXPERIENCES AND MAYBE LEARNING FROM THEM, the whole thing of “older is better” is a load of crap. Old soul? Sounds awesome, right? Old souls are, like, enlightened, right? Not fucked up. They meditate every day. They’re so pure! OMG I EVEN TOUCHED THE HAND OF AN OLD SOUL, I’M HEALED!!!!

(However, I’m just better than you, let’s face it.)

So, What Up, Bitch? What about the ascension thing? People want to know! And is the world ending or not? Because I need to know whether these tightie whities I just bought are gonna last me for the duration or if it’s safe to buy some new ones between now and 2012, you know what I mean? (Men buy less underwear during a recession, you just can’t make this stuff up, people!)

So here’s the deal.

Humans, we are a-changing. You think evolution was a thing to get us to HERE and then stop? Why, how egotistical of you! Can’t you imagine something DIFFERENT or maybe even BETTER, genetically-speaking, than what greets you in the mirror every morning? (The Bitch sure can, she’s SEEN your ass in the mornings, and it is NOT PRETTY) So yeah. DNA and all. It’s changing, ever so slightly, all the time. Into what is your best guess but The Bitch votes for the power of flight. Also the elimination of farting (hey, if you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big) and maybe also grammatical errors, although without those The Bitch will have one thing fewer to mock people about, so we may be rethinking our Evolutionary Wish List.

2012 is just a year, sort of. Hello, who came up with this year-numbering thing, anyway? Oh, oops, the Chinese don’t use the same number format, do they? Also the Hebrews. Is their world ending in a different year? Or not at all? So numbering is arbitrary. In fact, almost any time you come across numbers (unless it’s The Bitch’s bank account and you are making a large deposit of small unnumbered bills), they’re arbitrary.

And 2012? It’s sort of a tipping point. A marker. You can look back 100 years afterward (providing you’re still alive then, which hello, looks unlikely) and say, “Oh yeah, looks like things changed. Huh.”)

You’re creating the world we live in. (NOTE: The Bitch did NOT say “you create your own reality.” Here’s why.) So we agree the life is changing. People are changing (if you want to say “evolving,” fine, I won’t stop you, but let’s agree that what we really mean here is learning how not to pick our noses, or at least how to pick them without getting caught doing it, not that “evolving” means anything remotely special unless you figured out the flying thing). We agree on that. And since we’re changing, and the world is changing too, why not agree to change it in a way that’s meaningful to all of us? More porn? Why sure, and thank you! (Oh, we figured that one out already. Fine, go on to the next one.) Holding hands and singing Kum-bay-yah? Uh, okay, but is that really the world you want to create? I’ll pass on that, thanks. But give me a world where people feel connected to who they are, and can communicate without using fucking guns or bombs to do it, and that’s a start.

But let go of the 2012 thing.

*Fast forward to 1:00; you’ll thank me.

Dudes, you welcomed The Bitch back with open arms. Awesome! (Next time, a little deodorant, maybe? Think of others before you embrace so fervently.)

And now the pressure is on. Fine. In the last eight months or whatever, The Bitch has had plenty of time to hone her already razor-sharp wit, to fine-tune her startlingly astute opinions, and to separate out the New Age bullshit from the sweet sweet perfume underneath the steaming pile.

Which is why we’re talking about Signs and Omens today.

How many times have you heard this:

“I was seeing these plus signs everywhere, just EVERYWHERE … blue ones! Especially on those little white sticks that Xerxes kept insisting I pee on. Isn’t that wild? It was totally a sign, that’s what I kept telling Xerxes, a sign. And next thing you know we’re engaged. Want to see the ring? I told Xerxes that he was supposed to spend two months’ salary on it, and he said something about paying for it with blood, something about ruining his life forever? But whatever, I mean, we’ve already set the date and all, and I have all those darling blue plus signs to thank for it!”

Or this:

“11:11. It’s EVERYWHERE. The microwave. The alarm clock. In the car. We’ve been seeing it for weeks now. Eleven eleven. So we’re going to name our daughter that. Eleven. It’s a sign.”

Sound familiar? Another nutzoid making important life decisions based on what they think a clock is telling them.

ALL HAIL THE CLOCK OF WISDOM!

I’m sure that darling little Eleven (or Evelyn, as her parents will sheepishly change it to a few months later, or perhaps Elven if they’re total LOTR freaks, and if you know what LOTR means then you might be one too, but you’ve already named your kids Frodo and Arwen which means I just cannot help you, sorry) will appreciate someday knowing that her parents were slaves to a hunk of plastic that plugs into the wall.

I can hear you whining already in that miserable pleading voice, “But Bitch, I KNOW that signs are telling me something! I just know it!”

Yes, and they are. They might be telling you that you need more fiber. Or that your mouthwash is, apparently, not doing its job. Or that you need to sell all your belongings and dress in long shapeless garments made of handspun hempen flax and stand barefoot at freeway exit ramps, attempting to stare passing drivers into submission with your newly-acquired laserbeam stare.

Or, they might be telling you nothing of consequence at all.

You have to decide which.

Signs do have meaning, though. Let me explain. First you have to understand that the You as you know yourself to be is just a small and puny part of the overall You That You Are. So say that we are all actually M&Ms. The part you know yourself to be (“Mr.Personality”) is the colored candy shell — thin, easily cracked, and melts in my mouth, not in my hands. And the bigger, wiser, and frankly more substantial part (“Chocolate Soul Brother,” or just “Soul” for short) is what’s inside the candy shell — complex, has a wider perspective, hangs out on the astral plane, etc.

Mr. Personality is kind of stupid. Well, one-dimensional. He gets caught up in day-to-day life, like about who gets to eat the red ones, and forgets the big picture. Soul, on the other hand, has got it goin’ on. Soul sees clearly the whole big picture and then some. Soul has this loose plan-thing, stuff he’d like to accomplish in a given lifetime, but he’s got to keep Mr. Personality from getting too distracted by things so they can get anything done. Soul is more or less the brains while Mr. Personality is the brawn. Soul can’t do much on the Earth plane because Soul doesn’t have physical form except as expressed by Mr. Personality. They need one another. This works pretty well except for one thing. Communication. The thing is, they don’t speak directly to each other most of the time. It’s weird — you’d think that chocolate and a candy shell could talk to one another, but they don’t speak the same language.

So they resort to signs.

Say your soul needs to tell you something. Like maybe it’s time to stop picking your nose and scratching yourself and to start doing whatever this big Life Plan stuff was that you signed up for. Since your soul doesn’t actually have arms, it can’t wave them wildly in front of your face to get your attention. Instead, you get little nudges. Like to look at the clock once a day, say, at 11:11. After several days (or maybe weeks, depending on how dense you are) of this, you suddenly go “OMG A SIGN!” and then madly start Googling 11:11, soon becoming convinced that the world is ending IN JUST TWO YEARS and you’ve got to help prepare, so you sell everything and move to New Zealand, where you hope that both the proliferation of sheep there and the space-time continuum regarding reverse drain flow in the Southern Hemisphere is going to save you.

Now, if you had been paying attention, and trusted yourself instead of Google The Omniscient to determine the course of your life, you might have taken those 11:11’s for what they were:  nudges. And then, if you were smart, you’d simply start listening for more. You’d ask questions like “What is this sign really telling me?” (hopefully you are not asking this out loud in the presence of your boss) and then wait for an answer to take shape. Doing this, frankly, takes trust in yourself and also in the connection you have to yourself on a soul level.

“But Bitch,” you whine again, a confused puddle on the floor, “How do I KNOW? What the signs are telling me? Can’t you tell me, pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease?!!!!”

Well, sure I can.

But do you really want to trust me with The Rest of Your Life? How do you know I won’t tell you that you need to shave your head, paint yourself green, and become a lamppost in order to find enlightenment? People are so quick to give up their own power and just hand it away to some stranger. Use yours. Trust The Bitch — you do have inner wisdom.

“But Bitch!” (this whining thing is getting out of control) “What about Omens! YOU SAID OMENS!!!”

Oh. Yeah. Those.

Okay, two, no three, schools of thought on omens, which are signs foretelling the future, right?

1. School #1. Time is simultaneous (that’s right: past, present, and future are all in this one big amorphous Now), which means that omens telling the future, or at least pointing to a possible future, are not a crock of shit and can exist. CAVEAT: like signs, omens also mean what you think they do. In other words, their entire meaning is the meaning you give them. If you think, for instance, that seeing two crows walking hand in hand (wing, beak, whatever) across the street means you’re going to meet this fabulous guy to walk hand in hand with for the rest of your life (or until one of you gets tired of it, which is reality people, let’s face it, and we’ll talk about this “forever” nonsense another time), then SO BE IT, IT IS SO, it is done, amen.

2. School #2. Omens don’t mean shit and you can’t predict the future.

3. School #3. OMG! I live my life doing everything the signs tell me! Also not stepping on cracks! And holding my breath in tunnels! And OMG black cats! And ladders!

(HINT: The answer is not #2 OR #3)

TO REVIEW: Signs are a way of your soul kicking you in the head. Pay attention. Then listen. They mean what you think they mean. Don’t ask other people what they think your signs mean; your signs are for you and if you ask other people you’ll only get their opinion and why are you giving your power away like that? Listen to yourself, pay attention, and be cool.

Also: in the U.K. please substitute “Smarties” for any reference to “M&M’s” in this post. We apologize for any momentary confusion.

Now go forth and spread the wisdom! Also tell everyone you know.

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.

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.

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.)

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.