The Things That Really Bug Me About The Law of Attraction
Ok...so I pay attention to a lot of personal development/self-help material out there. There is so much out there and to be honest, sometimes it hurts my head. Some if it is very loud, and very in your face bossy.
However a lot of it is gentle, open, vulnerable and kind.
I'm honestly losing some tolerance for the loud, overbearing, Law of Attraction (like The Secret) personal growth messages out there. There is something that feels very disingenuous and fraught about those messages to me. I've seen articles floating around with messages like, "how I manifested $10,000 in 2 days. You can do it too!" or "The universe never asked you to struggle, it is simply answering your mood." or "Force the Universe to give you EVERYTHING you ever wished for."
Ugh.
The general consensus of the meaning of the Law of Attraction (LOA) is that it's a universal "law" that says human beings are powerful and have the innate, almost supernatural ability to attract and manifest things into our lives with our thoughts and intentions, whether that be positive or negative. Generally, the masses tend to boil it down to attracting stuff/success...especially in a lot of the business material I've been reading–all about manifesting money and success.
Now I certainly agree with the concept that what we focus on expands: positivity attracts positivity and negativity breeds more negativity.
For sure. I have seen that in my own life.
But I believe it’s a lot more complex than manifesting and it has deep societal impact. I have never seen any LOA messaging that ever recognized privilege–privilege that so many people just don’t have.
I went to an event earlier in the year, and although I got a lot out of it overall, one thing that didn't sit right was a vision-boarding exercise. The leader of the event had us cut out pictures of material things we want in this life (cars, big houses, diamonds, money), and glue them on our boards. Then we were instructed to manifest these very specific things (down to "the colour of your future Mercedes, because you don't want to confuse the universe" and that’s a direct quote) into our lives–by sending out our wants and desires to the universe. "It is important to hold back doubts. If we have doubt in our hearts or anything negative, we will surely sabotage our success." (Because the big, expansive universe can't get past our little bit of foggy doubt....)
This mindset is tone deaf. It does not recognize the privilege a select group of people from the dominant western culture have.
This thinking fosters entitlement, not contentment.
Entitlement will never be satiated.
Contentment fosters well-being and connection, and this kind of manifesting is hyper-individualistic and selfish.
I've never been a math person, but math is partly what makes this whole idea not resonate with me....Say there is a finite amount of money in the world (which there is), and to make my example super simple let’s say there's 10 people in the world. In this scenario there is $1,200,000 in the world and all 10 people want a million dollars. They are setting intentions, manifesting and putting the message out to the universe that they will earn a million dollars this year. Clearly there is not enough money for everyone to make a million dollars. So one gets a million and the others get the remnants in varying amounts. There is room for much disappointment, because not everyone will be a millionaire. Who says being a millionaire is indicative of happiness anyhow? Why is that even the goal?
The truth is that we ALL fail.
We ALL struggle. We ALL hurt.
Understanding this universal experience of pain is a big component of self-compassion.
The Role of Pain and Struggle, and There is a Role.
I also believe that it's important to honour ourselves, especially in the pain we experience. We have to sit with it, feel it, contemplate, learn from it, and eventually get past it. Sometimes we are doing the best we can, and life just sucks. Sitting with the pain and struggle is actually very valuable. It changes our paradigm. I don't regret anything, and I know that the pain I have felt in my life, has made me who I am today.
Pain changes us, and makes us stronger. This is also a very important component of self-compassion.
When self-help "gurus" never speak of pain, discomfort, doubt, and fear, I always see a red flag.
Most of us have a sense that the meaning of life is not about what we own, yet we are soooooo drawn to wanting more, more, more. The capitalistic world we live in nurtures the need for constant desire and want, rather than cultivating feelings of contentment, whether spiritual, emotional or material. It saddens me that the yardstick of success in the first world tends to focus on the size of one’s bank account.
What about the role of discomfort?
When we live life with a sense of entitlement, chasing constant bliss, we miss out on learning from pain, fear and discontent. I have little kids, and it's amazing to see them learn new things. Every new stage of development is filled with struggle, failure, fear and fierce determination.
I watched my oldest daughter learn to ride a bike. She wasn't a kid who picked up a bike and just rode with no practice. There were many tears, many scrapes and a whole lot of falls. I realized that I had to create space for her to learn. Which meant that I had to sit with my discomfort–the desire to protect her from the struggle. She had to push past her discomfort, and understand that falling is just a part of the growth process.
A few years ago we enrolled her in skating lessons at our local ice rink,. While we were lacing up her skates we saw an acquaintance who was just leaving after a hockey practice. He came over to my daughter, knelt down beside her and whispered "falling is the fun part of it, don't be afraid to fall."
I doubt he had any idea of how profoundly important those words were to her, and to me. It was something she often repeated throughout her lessons which got her through, and something I've tried to live by.
Consider the allegory of the butterfly shedding its cocoon. A man watched a butterfly struggling to get out of its cocoon. The butterfly struggled and struggled for hours trying to get its body out of the tiny hole. So the man, desiring to help, snipped the end of the cocoon. The butterfly easily emerged. The thing is that it was swollen and had shrivelled wings–never having the ability to fly. The discomfort and pain of shedding the cocoon is what gives a butterfly the ability to fly.
Things happen in life. We get to assign meaning to those events. If we choose to change the meaning we assign to events that cause discomfort, pain, struggle and failure, we see those events as an important part of our growth process. A rite of passage, perhaps. It stings a bit less.
What if we choose to see struggle as character building. It teaches us joy, it prepares us for gratitude. Struggle isn’t a failure to manifest positivity. Struggle and pain are wired into the human experience. When we don’t experience struggle, we lose empathy for others who in pain. It can be easy to just say, “well they are doing that to themselves…they are attracting struggle. They need to change their mindset.” And perhaps changing their perspective could help, but that’s not for us to decide. All we have done is created disconnection and killed the growth of our empathy.
“Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. I learned about these qualities during my bouts with depression. In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul.”
~ Parker J. Palmer
Blame, Shame and Disconnect
Another thing that really bugs me about the LOA manifesting mindset, is that I see the potential for so much blame and shame to be attached to it. "Well....this bad thing happened to me...it's my fault, because I was putting out negative thoughts out there and I sabotaged myself. If I change my thinking, send out only positive vibes to the universe, the universe will bless and reward me."
To me, mainstream LOA seems like a very middle/upper middle class first world phenomena.
What about people living in war torn places like Syria, or people who are starving in Africa? What about all the innocent people who died in the holocaust because they were Jewish? The Black woman who is constantly passed over for promotions though she is the most qualified. The Indigenous family that continues to deal with the ramifications of residential schools. Babies who are born into poverty or with severe health conditions. Children diagnosed with cancer. Children who experience abuse, or teens who dealing with psychosis for the first time. Are all these bad things happening as a result of sending out negative energy to the universe? Is all this trauma and negativity their fault, because their mindset is too negative? Golly...if that's the case, it doesn't actually seem that the universe has my back.
A spiritual world that functions on laws like that is utterly terrifying. Bad things happen in this world that are way beyond our control.
Life isn't so black and white. We need to allow ourselves to see the different shades of grey out there. We must open our eyes to structural injustice. The manifesting mindset is abdication of the need each of us must play to shift these broken systems. It’s spiritual bypassing.
We crave to make sense of things, like tragedy and pain, by thinking that we can control what happens to us by our prayers or manifestations. This kind of simplistic thinking helps alleviate our fears, but it's so far from the full picture. It may be a piece of the truth–like the blind man who touched the trunk of an elephant and swore it was a tree. But is is not the whole truth.
It's a snapshot of how things work–it's a tiny piece of the greater whole.
This LOA philosophy also holds the capacity to create disconnect from others around me. I have felt judged by people who see the world primarily through that lens when I have expressed my sincere feelings, whether it be about fears, or doubt. It creates a disconnect from deep meaningful connection when the person listening believes that we are creating and perpetuating our own negative experiences.
Connection
“When you speak to me about your deepest questions, you do not want to be fixed or saved: you want to be seen and heard, to have your truth acknowledged and honoured. If your problem is soul-deep, your soul alone knows what you need to do about it, and my presumptuous advice will only drive your soul back into the woods. So the best service I can render when you speak to me about such a struggle is to hold you faithfully in a space where you can listen to your inner teacher. “But holding you that way takes time, energy, and patience. As the minutes tick by, with no outward sign that anything is happening for you, I start feeling anxious, useless, and foolish, and I start thinking about all the other things I have to do. Instead of keeping the space between us open for you to hear your soul, I fill it up with advice, not so much to meet your needs as to assuage my anxiety and get on with my life. Then I can disengage from you, a person with a troublesome problem, while saying to myself, ‘I tried to help’. I walk away feeling virtuous. You are left feeling unseen and unheard.” ~Parker J. Palmer
Joy Over Happiness.
Connection Over Selfish Gain
“Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness-mine, yours, ours-need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.”
The example I gave you at the beginning of this article talked about a vision boarding exercise all about stuff. What if we did a vision board that was all about choosing things like joy, connection, creating intention around how we want to feel? This feels refreshing and hopeful, and about the important things in life. The things that money can't buy.
I can be intentional about how I want to feel, about how I choose to show up in the world, and how allow others to experience me.
Transcendence Through the Pain
Question everything.
If we think we know the answers, it's time to dig deeper, because there's likely something we're not seeing.
I have low tolerance these days for any kind of dogma. Law of Attraction and manifesting mindset feels like dogma to me. It's a way of trying to feel like we're in control when life is uncertain.
This is what I do believe.
I believe that God (or if you feel better saying the Universe–do it) is all about love and grace.
I don't believe in destiny anymore. I believe that our lives are what we make them. I believe that we are given free will and can choose what we want to do with our lives. I believe that there is a strong positive healing force in the world. I believe in resiliency, restoration and generation. When a forest burns in a wild fire it destroys everything, but over time, little by it all grows back. It's the law of nature.
The forest will be restored over time. It will take time, but the forest has an innate need to survive as we humans also have.
I believe that when we approach the world with kindness, generosity and love–this can't help but have a positive affect on others and in turn nourish our own souls.
Bad things happen in the world. They just do.
We can choose to come together as communities and fight to change unjust systems that perpetuate harm.
We can survive and transcend pain.
Struggle can be a sacred time, if we choose to perceive it that way. Pain and suffering gives us the opportunity to discover that we are made of starstuff. Not that anyone wants to intentionally seek out pain, that's ridiculous of course, but when we realize that pain is a part of the human experience, and we have the choice to assign our own meaning to our stories (allowing the pain to define us, destroy us or build us up) it's certainly easier to make space for the light to break through–and trust in the grace and goodness of a God and a universe of love.
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
- Carl Sagan
Failure is normal.
Luck is a genuine feature or existence.
We are an incredibly resilient species.
And we need to get better at loving others.