Elephant Journal shared an article recently titled 5 Potentially Hazardous New Age Myths. I’d like to go through each of the quotes they used and change the perspective a little bit.

1. “Everything is an illusion,” or The Myth that Metaphysical Truths are Actually Useful in Everyday Living.

Is everything around us really an illusion? It’s an interesting use of the word illusion. Typically when we think of illusions we think of holographs or tricks of the eye. But is that what’s happening in our reality? Is everything a trick of the eye? In a word, yes.

Everything around us energy. It’s your body’s ability to perceive that energy in certain ways that creates the objects you see around you on a daily basis. For example, if you have no sense of smell and somebody gives you a flower to enjoy, you are unable to perceive the scent the flower gives off, limiting your perception of the flower immensely. The scent of the flower then becomes an illusion because it isn’t part of your reality.

It’s understandable that everything appears very real to the human form. Remember that you are not your human form. You are a spirit in a meat suit, having a very human experience. The human body is a vehicle for you to drive around in during your time here on planet Earth. Your body is no different to the spirit than your car is to you. Your body is a temporary vehicle, made of pure love energy, that is here to explore, learn and grow.

The illusion is that you are stuck in the reality you’ve created for yourself. If you don’t like your current reality you have the ability to change it. Change your thoughts about the things around you, change your beliefs in how you think things work, make new choices and watch what happens.

2. “No one can hurt you unless you let them,” or The Myth of Invulnerability.

The article uses this quotation to talk about death. This isn’t really a great application of this quotation. The true and much more easily accessible application of this quote would be to things like people cutting you off in traffic, somebody insulting you or being mean or your mom telling you you’re fat for the fifth time that day.

You always have the choice of how you react to the people around you. You don’t have to get mad, it’s a choice. You don’t have to get hurt, it’s a choice. You don’t have to take stuff on, it’s a choice.

The ability to do this comes from the understanding that people are always projecting their own stuff. How people feel and think about you has nothing to do with you.

It’s the ability to recognize that everybody can only understand from their level of perception. If they are afraid of heights and you tell them you’re going skydiving, they are going to tell you about how dangerous it is. If you believe them, you won’t go skydiving. They are projecting their fear of heights on to you hoping you’ll take on the same fear and agree with them.

Let’s talk about the idea of death here. As I’ve previously stated, the human form is meant to be temporary. The spirit form of that individual lives on forever. The shedding of the human body is no different than selling your car and getting a new one. However, humans go through a grieving process because of the loss of the physical presence. This is completely normal and there is nothing wrong with it.

The problem arises when we think contact has been broken or lost in some way. All humans have the ability to connect with the spirit world. We are all spirits in our natural form anyway! The only thing that creates any sense of separation is that you believe you are unable to connect with the spirit world. You’ve been trained out of it. Open yourself up to the possibility of connecting with the spirit world and watch your family and friends return to you in a more powerful, connected way than they ever could while in physical form.

As for the emotions that go with death or any other event that causes you to feel something, you can and should feel all the feelings. Don’t attach a story to the feelings. Don’t attach an event to the feelings. Just allow the feelings to release themselves and move on. Simply allowing the emotion through you, without holding on to it or making up a story about it, is the best way to work through anything. Holding emotion in the body will eventually make the physical body sick. Release any and all emotions that come up, without projecting them onto anybody around you. It’s nobody’s fault you feel that way, you just do. Allow it and move on. Later on, you can feel into why that thing that happened triggered you. Until then, just feel and release.

3. “You don’t need anyone” or The Myth of Independence.

There is a vast difference between needing in a co-dependent kind of a way, and allowing people to share an experience with you. Needing somebody so that you can be happy or okay in any way is not healthy. Needing somebody because you’re co-dependent on them, like continuing to live with the spouse you’re in the middle of divorce proceedings with, is also unhealthy in most cases. Deciding you are incomplete without people in your life is unhealthy. Each of us are complete beings on our own.

You really shouldn’t need anybody, but you should want them. You should want to share your journey and experiences with the people around you. This is absolutely healthy and normal. Don’t be afraid to be around people and have people in your life.

Just learn to be okay with people coming and going. Give people the freedom to grow and explore on their own. Don’t get so clingy and attached that if they don’t call at 4pm on Tuesday you’re mad for a month. Allow the ebb and flow of relationship to be what it is without the dependent, needy, clingy thing most humans are inclined to create.

Be okay on your own and be very grateful when aligned people show up in your life. Enjoy their presence fully while they are there and allow them to leave when the relationship has run its course. This is the healthiest way to approach any relationship, including marriage. Allow relationships, don’t need them.

4. “Love is…” or The Myth of Certainty.

Love is where you came from, it’s what you are, it’s what you always will be.

Humans are incapable of true, unconditional love. Human love is conditional on behaviour, opinions, attitudes and beliefs. When the toddler does something you don’t like, you get mad at the toddler. Anger is not love. They cannot co-exist. In that moment of anger, you do not love the child. Once the anger is gone, the love returns, of course. This is the conditionality of love in the human form.

The spirit experiences no anger regardless of what the child does. The spirit is not bothered by the behaviour of the toddler, knowing full well that if the child is left to simply follow their own guidance, they will find their way.

I’m not suggesting that we start letting kids stick objects into light sockets or play in traffic, however, if true, unconditional love were available to humans, anger, fear, jealousy and hate would not and could not exist or be felt.

There is a line in the article I want to address. I’ve already touched on it, but I want to address it more directly. It’s this:

I’ve heard people accuse those who have life-threatening illnesses such as MS or cancer of choosing or causing their disease—a supposedly empowering belief that seems rather cruel.

All disease is energy. You are an energetic being. You are interpreting and translating energy in every second of every day. Your body and any disease that is within it, is also energy.

There are a few reasons why people experience disease and illness in their physical form: holding on to emotion, an excuse to not achieve or do well, or coming into a human form with a disease already present. Let’s look at each of these.

Stuck emotion is a very common reason for pain and illness in the body. The most likely physical manifestations of emotional trauma are things like sore joints and arthritis. However, this can and will progress beyond that to things like cancer if emotion continues to build up and be repressed in the body. This is another reason why allowing the emotions to flow through and be released is so important.

The belief that something outside of you caused the illness, creates the scenario where you let the environment decide whether or not you’re well. This means you believe in flu season and the dangers of certain chemicals and so on. So if you’ve lived on a farm your whole life and you used some fertilizer, read a news story that the fertilizer you were using causes cancer and believed that story, you could in fact create cancer in your own body.

Thousands of people manifested gluten sensitivity when that was all over the news a few years ago. They took on the belief that it was the wheat that was making them sick. The body will play along with any belief, and so the body starts to feel ill after eating bread because the brain decided that’s what needed to happen. The belief created the reality.

Sometimes people put themselves in their own way, physically. They manifest illness and injury as a way to keep themselves from being successful, doing what they truly want and being who they are. Instead of being themselves, they take on the identity of a sick person and become that instead. This is using the body as a reason for not achieving by making the body incapable of doing what it needs to do. Disease and injury as a form of self sabotage is a common thing.

Some souls choose to come into a body that is sick. The spirit version of you created this. It is still you that chose it, just not the version you tend to identify with. Remember you’re a spirit and you chose your entire life, from before conception until the minute the human form dies. For some of us that’s choosing to come into a body that doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. There are lessons there too and reasons for that experience that will be up to the individual to discover.

There is one other type of “sickness” that comes up and that’s ascension. Ascension symptoms include things like headaches, dizziness, spiritual flu, nausea, tiredness and so on. The list of symptoms is long. The difference between actual illness and ascension is that the doctor won’t find anything wrong with you. There is no inflammation. There is no swelling. There isn’t anything actually going on.

The medical system doesn’t diagnose ascension and so what we end up with is people who are experiencing ascension being labelled with umbrella diseases like chronic fatigue because the system doesn’t yet recognize that ascension can make somebody feel awful without actually having them be sick.

5. “You are responsible for everything that happens to you” or The Myth of Control.

Yes you are. Whether it’s your conscious mind or your spirit, you are responsible for everything that happens for you, not to you. To you implies that you are a victim of your reality, which you are not since you created it. It is only when we take full responsibility for absolutely everything that we can begin to fully heal.

This is tough for the ego to swallow. It wants to project fault onto something or someone that it thinks is outside of itself. Here’s the truth: we all come from the same pot of stardust. The perception of separation is the true illusion. We are all one big pot of energy. We are all divine love. There is nothing that is separate from you, regardless of what your human form tells you.

What people generally point out is that nobody wishes to be beaten up, raped, get cancer and so on. Those aren’t things we consciously, with our egoic minds, create. That is very true. It is the spirit that is you that puts your human form into these different experiences because there are things to be learned and felt.

The human form still has a ton of control, mind you. I’m not suggesting that life is fated in any way. The spirit is making choices based on your current thoughts, beliefs, feelings and actions around what needs to be experienced and learned.

The way you work with this is to listen fully to your spirit, do all the crazy things it tells you to, love life, create, have fun and just be. Listening to the small, inner voice that’s there is how you get some perceived “control” over things.

Not taking responsibility is the reason why you keep getting the same lessons on repeat. This is why you date the same type of guy/gal all the time and the same horrible break up happens. This is why every time you get some money something breaks. This is why you continue to experience similar types of events over and over again. It’s because the lesson isn’t being learned by the human and so the spirit continues to create similar events until the human learns the lesson. As long as you’re blaming the people and things around you, that same lesson will continue to play out.

We’ve come full circle now. The experiences are there for a reason. Understand and take responsibility for the fact that you are creating them by your thoughts, feelings and beliefs and change those, don’t try to control the outside world, control yourself.

The human form doesn’t like taking responsibility for the choices the spirit made when it wasn’t looking or couldn’t make those choices for themselves because they were an infant or not born yet. But this is the reality. This does not mean you beat yourself over the head with a bat. It is not a hammer to beat on self with. It is a tool to use to heal with.

This is freeing if you understand that it also means that nothing outside of you is affecting you: not the weather, not flu season, not fertilizer, not the food you eat, not the people going by, not vaccines, nothing. Nothing outside of you is affecting you. You are complete, whole, perfect, pure, unconditional love all on your own without changing or doing anything.

Begin to understand fully that you are spirit first and human second. Just like you are not your car, your spirit is not your body. True recognition of that will free you from the perceived burden of being responsible for things you think you have no control over. You do have control. You always did, from before conception until right now, you have had control. If you don’t like your creation make new choices. Change your perception. Watch what happens when you do.