Love and Rage

Around 10 years ago, I found myself in the most unexpected set of circumstances. I felt completely lost in terms of direction, purpose, and meaning. I had moved to London a few months prior without a plan, but with lots of dreams, ambition, and entitlement. I felt the world owed me something. I had played by the rules and now it was time to receive my reward, thank you very much.

A world class education and a CV filled with a diverse combination of professional industries and volunteering roles somehow got me to a job in a Park Lane hotel serving breakfast to some of the wealthiest and most despicable people in the world. I topped that up with bartending shifts at the same hotel, where I had the absolute pleasure of serving alcohol to the same people. I worked 16-18hr days, because the hospitality industry allows for that, and so that I could have the pleasure of surviving in one of the greatest cities in the world. Do I sound resentful? Yes, I probably still am. I probably still think I deserved more than that. But sometimes, that is life.

It was in this state of affairs and mind, where my dreams, confidence, and savings had been crushed under a plate of eggs and bacon with a side of champagne, that I decided to attend an introductory talk to a spiritual practice in central London. It is a fairly well-known practice, as it was very popular with celebrities in the late 90s and early 00s, and that’s exactly how I found out about it. I’d bought a few books and had resonated with its message. And after not finding the meaning of life in my booze and sex-filled Glasgow life, I’d come to a point where I felt I had nothing else to lose, except my actual life, so off I went. And on I stayed. For a very regular 7 years. I lived and breathed and probably annoyed the hell out of my friends about this practice. And the reason why I pointed out my internal turmoil of feeling lost and purposeless in life, is to indicate that in that state of mind, people may become quite vulnerable and susceptible to external guidance. A sense of belonging will trump many things in this world.

In all honesty, and negativity aside, it was a space and time of my life where I experienced one of the strongest senses of belonging and community I’ve ever experienced; I made wonderful friendships which still last to this day, including my flatmate of 7 years!; I became closer to my family and cultural background and began healing some very old wounds; I was encouraged to look at and engage with the world in a more expansive way; I learned wonderful and wholesome traditions and rituals, which I sometimes miss dearly; I gained inner foundations that allowed me to be where I am today, at all levels; I felt empowered and confident again to pursue new and old dreams; and it was a space and time where I felt alive and like I mattered.

It was beautiful, and it wasn’t. All at the same time. From meeting many kinds of people over the years, and talking to friends who pursued different approaches, it is my impression that spiritual practices follow much of the same tenets: love thy neighbour as thyself, destroy or overcome the ego, sharing and volunteering, ritualised studying and learning, belief in mythical and unseen realities, going beyond our nature, connecting to a source, the interconnectedness of living things, the focus on the soul’s journey and dismissal of more earthly pleasures, cause and effect, the higher self, “love and light”, amongst many others. I learned over the years that people mostly believe the same things, but call it something different, and then somehow think their names and traditions are the one true path to enlightenment. Interestingly, they are probably the first ones to create the division that they so lovingly accuse the rest of the world of creating.

Which brings me to this point. Once you are immersed in a community where everyone shares the same elusive beliefs, you slowly begin to think that you know better than others outside of that community. You possess knowledge that others don’t, you see things and dynamics in the world that others don’t, and then next thing you know, it has become about saving all those souls down there in the physical world, who don’t know better… yet. I used to be like this: high in the clouds of my spiritual superiority and knowledge, “doing the work”, praying for world peace and saving the world, eliminating judgement and sending love, connecting to the light, overcoming the ego, learning to receive blessings from the universe, etc. I did do some great and profound personal work on myself during those years, but I also became increasingly blind to the dynamics of the human world around me, which kind of defeats the purpose, does it not? Whilst being encouraged to perceive reality as interconnected, I actually became more self-centred. And I can assure you I was not the only one!

One of the most disheartening features of these communities is their reinforcement on the individual’s work, on the individual’s specialness and purpose, and on the wilful ignorance of destructive dynamics around them. Their incessant focus on the light leads them to ignore the darkness. Every coin has two sides, and spiritual communities tend to develop very dark sides because they spend so much time ignoring them and denying their existence. It has occurred to me that people in so called spiritual communities perhaps mistake positivity and wholeness. That is, if one is positive, one is whole by default. Which could explain how people can justify some very horrible actions and beliefs based on their positive intentions. But wholeness points to the entire continuum of human experience, which I understand may be difficult to grasp for most people. No one likes to admit that their minor and inconsequential views on gender may be in the same continuum as sexual assault, or that not seeing colour may be on the same continuum as genocide. We like to point out the positive and negative extremes of things, never acknowledging that there’s a whole lot of stuff in between connecting those extremes.

Learning about Jungian analysis during my training as a therapist was very important to my understanding of light and darkness in the human psyche, particularly the concept of shadow. The context and nuance that most individuals lack is that shadow is not simply what’s negative in our psyches, but what is repressed. Emotions themselves are not right or wrong – they just are. Their physical manifestations however, ie actions and behaviours, is a different matter. These may definitely be described as creative or destructive. But when we feel an emotion that we label as negative, or wrong, and we dismiss it, what we’re really doing is forcing it into our unconscious psyche, our very own shadow world.

Let’s take anger as an example. Someone who has grown used to force themselves to think positively at all times, will experience anger and immediately dismiss it as a low vibration energy and ignore or deny it. They’ll push through it, reject it in others, or fake it until they make it back to the positive thinking bandwagon, and the anger will be repressed and sent back to the unconscious. There, the anger will fester. It will also encounter all the other things we’ve repressed or rejected about ourselves. And there, it will turn into something else. This something else may be different from person to person, but it usually manifests in small but impactful forms of being: a mean comment here and there, a cynicism, an intolerance for difference, a passive-aggressiveness, a weaponising of victimhood, an unwillingness to engage with suffering, a refusal to accept paradigm shifts, an inflated sense of individual purpose at the expense of others, an actual disconnection from other human beings, dissociation. All in the name of love and light, of thoughts and prayers, of higher consciousness.

People’s high horses get so high, that they stop seeing the ground. By reaching towards and out to their higher selves, individuals disconnect from their very human and grounded realities. We forget that divinity is not up there in the cosmos waiting for us, but it’s also down here, inside of us, and inside of every individual we interact with. We always forget that. We may then end up becoming the type of person who upon finishing a spiritual class, goes to the spiritual centre’s reception and completely mistreats and abuses the person working behind the desk (I spent sometime being the person working behind that desk). We may also become someone who is adamant that we’re all connected and “one soul”, and is then unable to acknowledge the very human and systemic divisions that exist in the world. The thing about the cult of individual specialness and purpose is that it breeds entitlement and privilege. If someone or something challenges one’s bubble of positivity, people lash out and condemn other people as divisive. If the positive bubble is also a bubble of wholeness, then I guess a challenge to it may be perceived as divisive. But when the shadow is not acknowledged, the blame and responsibility is always elsewhere. Usually in the person who points these things out.

I can look back and trace the beginning of the end for me in this community, and it was when I started working as a therapist within community-based addiction services. Let me tell you about humanity: it is light and dark, up and down, love and fear, deep and shallow, all at the same time. And all on a continuum. In my first year at university, I remember having this lecture on human behaviour where our lecturer challenged us to consider whether we might be able to commit some of the destructive acts that we might come across in our therapeutic practice: rape, murder, suicide, abuse, etc. Obviously, we all like to think we would never do such things. That we are good, nice people, filled with intentions to make the world a better place. But we only have to look at history, even ongoing history, to realise that this is not the case. The most righteous of people can commit the most heinous of acts against others. Creation and destruction are in all of us. At all times. My clients have taught me that, particularly my clients in addiction. They forced me off my high horse of elusive elevated consciousness and showed me true resilience, true transformation, true fear, true love. They literally showed me life and death.

They showed me the violence of not recognising, or dismissing, trauma and difficulties in others. Spiritual movements end up making everything about individual responsibility. We are responsible for every single thing that happens to us, from a karmic perspective. We are paying for things we did in our past lives, or in this life, etc. I still think there’s room to consider our individual responsibility but try and think about this for a moment. How cruel is it to be in the presence of someone who has experienced great trauma in their lives, or experiences intersectional injustices on a daily basis, and tell them that they are responsible for it? Can you see the violent magnitude of that way of thinking, of that way of being? Too many people in so-called spiritual circles have an affluence and privilege that renders them completely incompetent to engage with certain human and systemic experiences. Too many people are focused on their individual lives and purposes to understand the impact, and even existence, of systems that render many individuals in our societies completely powerless to make significant changes in their daily lives. When you think of peace and equality, what do you think is implied? Peace from what? Equal to whom? We live in completely unjust, unequal, and exclusionary structures. Do you really think an individual is responsible for that and can navigate that on their own? Do you really understand the day to day impact of trauma or poverty in someone’s life? Telling someone who feels the daily impact of trauma in their lives to step out of their comfort zone, is frankly violent. And I say that as someone who used to think like this!

And so, there’s a part of me that is greatly disappointed, but not at all surprised at the entanglement of “spiritual people” with fascism and extreme-right ideologies that this pandemic has recently revealed. I have witnessed a great many instances of so-called healers and light workers going up against community, social justice, and spiritual leaders who have spoken out against racial injustices, white supremacy, and systemic oppressions. I have witnessed the complete dissociation that leads someone who identifies as a healer and “lover of humanity” to blindly support certain fascist leaders in the western world. I have witnessed spiritual leaders and practitioners embracing ideologies that are extreme in their fearmongering and conspiracies. I wonder if people have been denying and dismissing fear for so long, that they’ve lost the ability to recognise it? I have also witnessed the silence, the absolute silence of certain spiritual communities in the past few years around #MeToo and #TimesUp, and during this time of confronting racial injustice and white supremacy.

I have been told to be nice when talking about oppression, because we are all one race, all one with the universe, etc. Yes, we may as well be all of that, but demanding niceness when you’re ignoring the suffering and injustice of others, is frankly inhumane. And you can fuck right off with that rhetoric (there, take that for divisiveness!). The collective shadow has stopped knocking at the door for attention, and it has broken in. No more hiding. No more bypassing. No more pretending or faking it until we make it. We have faked enough. Back in that spiritual community I was a part of, I met some of the most loving people, and some of the fakest and most deceiving people. But it was the blind commitment to niceness that kept us all interacting without confrontation. Being nice keeps oppression alive, because it values peace over justice. It values equality over equity. It values conversation over action. It values tone over content. It values philosophy over transformation. It values what it ought to be, rather than what is. It dismisses and denies the very valid rage of people whose lives are constantly impacted by the unjust systems of this physical world.

I still go back up and down this high horse sometimes. Working as a therapist has very similar dynamics of superiority of knowledge and wisdom, but my daily interactions with clients and systems of oppression, tend to keep me grounded more often than not. And I admit, I’ve probably swung to the opposite end of spirituality and might be too focused on the ground level experience of many people living with trauma, and disconnected from any kind of metaphysical reality. And yes, I’m also aware of my tone of superiority even as I write this. I think socio-ideological bubbles will do that automatically. I would say that the main differences between then and now, is that I no longer believe I can save people. I’m also more able now to explain but not excuse things anymore.

I would love to be able to ignore many of the things I see every day, and I’m somewhat envious of those people who manage to live such apparently blissful lives. But that will never be me, and I’ve made peace with that. I’ve made peace with the fact that my profession requires me to be in close contact with the trauma and pain of others, and this will always determine how I see the world around me. But I know that I will also be in close contact with their hopes and triumphs, and that will give me enough nourishment as well. I will always care about all of it. I will always be angry and enraged at indifference, injustice, and blind allegiance to niceness. I will always have love and rage in more or less equal measure, because to me, life is about both. Not just as concepts, but as valid, grounded, lived experiences. I accept this human experience for myself.