Why I Resigned from the New Age and Said No More To Disembodied Ritualistic Spiritual Bypassing

For years I went round and around the spiritual scene, like a headless chicken circling the farm yard.  I became adept at vulnerable self-disclosure and skilled at emotional processing. I took great pride in being able to relate and emote in the consensus language of any spiritual circle. I learned how to “be vulnerable”, how to do “catharting” and “hold space.”  Some of these experiences were really healthy and still serve me well to this day. However, in looking back I can see glaring flaws in the esoteric belief structures of these groups, and they kept me locked in limiting patterns even while conditioning me to believe I was becoming ‘evolved’ and ‘awakening’. 

It is ironic that in spite of the social connections, fun, softening, opening, enjoyment, depth and intimacy of it all, I shifted very little of my core relationship patterns, ailments and life circumstances during this period. Also, the more I practiced journeying into other realms through trancing out, getting ecstatic at dance events, becoming orgasmic in tantra circles or taking cacao and purging out my emotional backlog, the more absorbent to other’s emotions and hyper sensitive to psychic phenomena I became.

There was a certain intimacy in bonding through shared trauma and disembodied journeying, a pleasure so enjoyable that I became addicted to the nourishment such deep emotional outpourings and catharsis provided. This emotional smorgasbord blinded me to noticing that I was repeating the same patterns and negative cycles that I came with 10 years prior.

I see now that a subtle form of self-deceit crept in, because I learned to be extremely open and vulnerable about my feelings in safe sharing environments which felt soooooo good. Receiving the support not only of my peers but more importantly, the guiding occult powers that we were calling in led me to believe that I had finally found the sacred tribe my heart had always been longing for. As I learned to be vulnerable and elicit the support of my peers in the cauldron of the divine elixir we had seemingly created, it appeared to make all my anxieties and issues diminish… until they came back in the weeks that followed. This created an insatiable craving to keep going back to the next workshop, the next training, the next whatever to satisfy my growing hunger to feel this increasingly addictive sense of belonging and connection to spirit.

I became part of a consensus that this was how one went about healing in the new age: The Love and Light, Hard Core Alternative Spirituality, Divine Feminine, Pacha Mama Way. This commonly accepted consensus extended to warm womb-like intimate sharing circles where we catharted, primal screamed, called in deities, danced to the moon and assumed we were healing.

One of the deficits of this type of trauma bonding was my reliance on a higher power, a deity or goddess to make me better without actually having to take any personal responsibility for my part in it all as a co-creator… it was like sexed up Catholicism. I could go to confession but I could also get all sweaty in front of a fire or even get completely naked if it was a tantra group! It was even reputed that in surrendering ‘all’ of myself to the goddess or a deity, my life not only would be magically sorted out, but would be ‘blessed’.  In the heat of the intimacy and the charged atmosphere of profound catharsis, everything tends to feel “more than”, especially the “good stuff” which was lacking in my personal life outside of these rituals. Consequently, I was blinded to the awareness that such infantile magical thinking lacked any of the depth of development required to actually bring about true awakening, embodiment and conscious self-empowerment.

A foundational belief and assumption underpinned this magical thinking: I could shed a skin without actually having to engage my psyche and consciously work the distortion through as the change agent in my life. Instead, the changes I craved would be divinely decreed and bestowed upon me through participation in these workshops. This type of ‘sacred ritual’ was considered so auspicious that it could somehow replace the nitty gritty practical business of taking conscious, embodied adult responsibility for my behaviours, patterns and inherited traits and bring about transformation. It fed a spiritual narcissism of being evolved and a naivety about how enduring change actually happens. It bedazzled me from seeing that I was being seduced into handing over my sovereign power to external forces, without understanding the consequences involved in employing them.

In many of these circles, the rational analysis of patterns or showing caution and maintaining healthy personal boundaries was also rejected, labelled and shamed as being ‘fearful and in your head’. We were encouraged to do exercises or take journeys which took us out of our bodily awareness and proprioceptive intelligence in order to maintain the momentum of the divinely orchestrated process we were being led through.

This insistence on maintaining an approach of surrendering to expansiveness and merging with the divine was deemed by the person(s) holding the space as fundamental to our ‘growth’. As keepers of these sacred and ancient lineage teachings, those in charge intuitively knew through their superior connection to these discarnate beings what was in our best interests. Only a complete and unconditional surrender would enable these changes to take place. Through showing up in this way we could prove ourselves worthy of receiving these blessings and graduate in the way of ‘the divine feminine’ or even be ordained as a ‘priest or priestess of the Goddess’.

I see now that relying solely on my emotional outpourings and yin connection to a group consensus opened me up without any real healthy discernment or boundaries (especially psychically) to what I encountered in other realms. There was an assumption that the divine or the full super moon or indeed the biggest powerhouse of them all ~ Goddess  ~ would change me. She would enact her grace upon me if I opened myself just a little wider and surrendered yet more of my soul and sovereign free will to Her or the group leader who was Her proxy.  On some courses, it was mentioned from that start that we were responsible at all times for our own self-care, and yet any opportunity to remain sovereign in our psychic boundaries was taken off the table.

I didn’t realise at the time that I was giving my power away to higher forces and remaining disassociated from my body in the hope of something greater than myself absorbing my woes and taking them all away. I see now that it was a regressive throw back to my younger years to seek out the unconditionally loving mothering energy I never received or the union with the feminine’s transformative potency to transmute and soothe the pain of the upset I was experiencing. This resulted in me becoming lazy and diminished my ability to connect effectively with my higher self, while remaining in my body and drawing my own divine presence into my life. I was bypassing all of this, falling back on the group’s power instead, and drawing in other lesser sources whilst ceding my sovereignty to goodness knows what

Ironically, I ended up becoming so open to unseen realms, and so desensitised to my body that I became super absorbent and undifferentiated in groups and around people in general. Other people’s states would merge with mine and at night I would get hijacked in my dreams. I spent most my time out of my body drifting into the higher or lower elemental realms in my desperately misguided hope of healing what was not working for me in my life. I did this on the assumption that what I would encounter in other realms always had my wellbeing at heart because it was a universe of LOVE and surrendering to this undifferentiated entity known as Goddess, would initiate me into receiving the grace and gifts of healing and mercy.

I didn’t think for one moment what sort of connection the group mastermind or leader was cultivating and what sort of pacts we were making with discarnate beings, who we assumed were divine, Goddess or beneficent deities.  Smudge sticks and countless other ceremonies would need to be utilised after a simple visit to the supermarket to cleanse myself from all the strange ‘energies’ that would Velcro themselves to me at will.

Knowing what I know now about metaphysics, the quantum field and working with Pure Source by remaining sovereign and embodied, I see that I was looking for a ride on the shirt tails of higher intelligences to heal my life. I was doing it without really understanding how to enact true and enduring change. I was naïve and I had no inkling that I was trading my soul off to higher powers or old and ancestral religious practices in exchange for their healing gifts. There was no aspect of these trainings that taught me to read the small print about working with discarnate energies and how to discern what was Pure or in alignment with Source and would not cause me to be indebted

It’s my experience that this kind of ‘healing’ is the premise for the majority of the new age, and it tends to enhance the individual with gifts and shifts and healings without requiring any embodied ownership, as well as leaving a legacy of debts to the higher power/ancestor(s) that have been summoned in its wake. This is highly problematic because it abnegates soul alignment with one’s own higher power and sovereignty to imposters and enthrones them as ‘God/Goddess/Pure Source’. It substitutes alignment to entities, higher beings and deities that are not necessarily pure, connected to or aligned with Source themselves, and thus can induce attachments, infestations and even possessions. This sort of “dissociated connection to deities” resulted in my losing touch with my embodied self and my personal and psychic boundaries of authentic choice/empowerment were eroded. Thus the damage, the trauma and wounding remained and was exacerbated until it became a hook and reentry point into a destructive cycle.

Reaching for sweetness, mothering, goddess, succour and relief in group and ‘sacred ritual’ was like binging on a sugary McDonald’s milkshake at the expense of the deeper work of digging down into the roots of the issue and drawing my own higher self into those places in my field and my body to clear out the old baggage. This spirit binging felt like deep diving but it was actually quite superficial.

Lurking behind the mask of the drama and of deep catharsis was the real agenda of soul harvesting and emotional siphoning. In the emotional outpourings that result from this way of intense processing, known in psychic terms as ‘loosh’, discarnate beings feed off the energy that is generated. Some entities are also able to enter the physical and etheric bodies of those individuals who have given over their sovereign ‘will’ and they begin to take over the person or in the very least, they form an etheric attachment through which they can influence or syphon the individual at a later date.

Being in ceremonial circle in this way also became like a crutch, a weak substitute that subtly bypassed the more painful and difficult work of facing and uprooting the deeper traumas all together that had been passed down family lines and sometimes acquired in this embodied experience. The entities which had been called in also lifted those in the group out of their suffering, but did so without actually resolving the root issues… such are their purported powers of ‘healing’.

Accessing these ancestral imprints effectively and without getting compromised requires a stronger medicine and a sober mindedness that is sufficiently analytical and also meditative so that it can penetrate these distortions at their origin. In suspending my adult mind and sovereign boundaries and regressing to tribal group think, I found these circles not only weakened me but they englamoured the healing process, thereby distorting it. By taking advantage of the miscalibrations of the emotional body and celebrating the misguided inner child, I could be hoodwinked into riding the emotional highs and receiving the healing uplifts offered. I had ostensibly moved through a part of my ancestral trauma but at what cost?

Tragically, I became weaker and more subjugated to these forces because my own higher self and Soul in communion with Pure Source were not being drawn upon. Thankfully over the last 5 years I have discovered a path of undoing these associations and connecting to and embodying Pure Source. I learned how to entrain my higher self back into my body. It is a subtly, and yet substantially different path to that of the glitzy ceremonial new age healing rituals. Working with this type of embodiment shuns the lavish, cathartic, ritualistic, juicy, emotional, oxytocin fuelled orgies of communal bliss I used to dive into. Instead, it demands I stay present during ritual or meditation, present and embodied whilst connecting directly to Pure Source. Thus, it can literally draw out the dis-ease the way it came in and as it rises out I become authentic and focused on embodiment to the extent that I feel centred and fully anchored in myself. I have learnt to notice those patterns where I had ceded my sovereignty and therefore I can now change those patterns and regain dominion over my body, auric field and ultimately change my akashic records at the blue print level of my soul. 

Writing by David Stone with edits by Mama’s girl