The posts below of Jeff Brown gave me pause. He speaks of the New Cage movement and I’d like to share my thoughts on that. I have facilitated classes numerous times at New Thought churches. I definitely have had some challenges helping students understand the vital role diving into the physical sensations arising in cellular memory in response/ reaction to trauma and suffering plays. Students also often resisted being willing to explore limiting thoughts, fearing the exploration itself would harm them my linking them with low vibe thought. So I understand where Jeff is coming from and know anything can become dogma, causing us to view ourselves as sinners as so many religions have conditioned us to do.
Sometimes this journey to inner freedom can seem so convoluted and trying to find out way may feel like traversing the most complex labyrinth with sand traps, bogs and quicksand on all sides. Yes, I have seen clients and students try to free themselves just to get get caught by New Cage beliefs. Yet, like with much of religion, there are Truths sometimes buried in the dogma. How to wind our way through this fluid terrain?
For me Matt Kahn nails it with his love whatever arises, or Byron Katie, loving what is. As inner spaciousness arises, we witness how our thoughts and actions shape shift reality, we see hoe judgments weigh us down. Yet to judge, shame or blame ourself stick us more to the tar baby. This path is strewn with paradox. Add the complexity of needing to leave one tool behind just when we get the hang of it because at a higher frequency it now longer serves, well dang. Enough to make a girl’s head spin. So when in doubt we love ourselves, no matter what. We slow down spend time in nature, have compassion for our own suffering. We trust there is a power greater then us guiding us and supporting us. We begin to glimpse our own magnificence and from then on, it is downhill to our destiny of Self Remembering. The whole game is to remember, to uncover the dirt hiding our majesty. Beloveds, you already are a miracle, your only task is to Remember. Savannah
Post below by Jef Brown
Next time you have a terrible thing happen to you and someone says ‘You chose your every experience’, knock them unconscious :). When they come to, ask them to thank you for fulfilling their dream. And then, insist that they forgive you before they have even healed their head wound. Then tell them that ‘pain is an illusion- just be aware of it, witness it, and you will come into the Power of Now’. Then, remind them that there are no victims and that they just need to ‘turn around’ their story of victimhood. When they try to get up, push them back down on the ground, and remind them that ‘everything you see and experience is a reflection of you’. That is, ”you must have had some issues that you needed to look at around violence. I gave you a gift. Be grateful.” Ask them for some money in exchange. Tell them to give you their pin number. When they begin to get angry, remind them that anger and judgments are substandard emotions and that there is never anyone to blame. If this doesn’t soften their edges, inform them that the ego is the enemy, and that the part of them that is perceiving this situation as unacceptable is merely misidentified… “You are trapped in the matrix, and seeing the world through that limited lens.” Tell them you are here to liberate them. And then, steal their wallet, so they can learn another valuable lesson about attachment and manifestation.
-Jeff Brown
I had a friend who died a few years ago. One of the things that contributed to her death was her immersion in the mantras of the New Cage movement: the body is an illusion, your suffering is an illusion, the ego is all bad, ‘just ask for what you want and it will come’, ‘You chose your trauma’, presence is what happens when you watch your unprocessed pain from across the room etc. These dissociative, dehumanizing perspectives were appealing to her because she wanted so desperately to turn off her pain and find an easier way. This would have been fine if she had simply utilized these techniques as a detachment tool, but she went farther, and made them into a way of being. Unfortunately, these tools became weapons that turned against her. When her unresolved pain rose back into consciousness again- as it always will in its efforts to be seen and healed- she was now entirely ill-prepared to deal with it, having floated away from reality for so long in a pseudo enlightened spirituality-induced stupor. She couldn’t deal with the now because she was still crippled by the then. What she needed was healing, not more self-avoidance techniques. When reality became too much to bear, she ended her life, unable or unwilling to work through her material. Let there be no doubt that models that lead people away from the healing of the heart do not serve humanity. Real spirituality is all about enrealment- it includes everything human in the equation. The real now is the one that includes everything we left behind on the path. We must work through our story, before the unresolved elements of our story kill us. Prayers for those who have been led astray.
Jeff Brown
