In recent years, I've been tremendously helped by a book called Your Aura and Your Chakras, The Owner's Manual by Karla McLaren. Do I cry "omm" at every opportunity? I don't, but the visualisation she espoused has been most helpful in clearing out my emotional "baggage", as it were. Having a child with autism and a failing marriage, etc. etc. made me a very anxious person. Anyway, I got a hankerin', a curiosity, to see what she was like today so I checked out her website. Everyone has one, you know. Lo and behold, I found a skeptic!
May 2010, she releases her next book.
The Language of Emotions:
What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You
by Karla McLaren
Okay, I thought. Let's see what's up, so I dig in to the book's blurb page to find out something startling to me and my little moderate soul. It's really the same book. Okay, the language is different. She expresses her thoughts not as a "new age theorist", but as a "now healthy sociologist". It's like watching Gone With the Wind in French subtitles. Nothing about the movie has changed, but it suddenly sounds more lofty, less base in it's slavery and dysfunction.
I'm not ridiculing her newfound skepticism. I just have a healthy skepticism of skeptics. The very belief that nothing can be divine or metaphysical or whatever is at times with skeptics almost a religion. Perhaps, it's because I'm so comfortable with my belief that I don't and can't know everything, and that most of what I know is total crap. But reading her repudiation of her "new age" career struck me, and I'm still not sure how.
My background in paranormal studies isn't as lengthy as McLaren's. I haven't been in a cult, likewise I have not then left a cult to pursue a degree in analyzing things like cults. Psychologically speaking, that seems telling, but I don't have a degree in that either. Still, I've given it all some thought and decided that we, people, like to give names to the things we don't undertand. Energy Systems, for instance. I am one and so are you, even scientists can agree on that. Electrical whosits shoot through our brains to make them go, hence energy. Chakras, well, those may or may not exist, but how is it not helpful to allow people a means of organization for their various inner parts that they feel and experience but cannot explain? What's wrong with it?
Okay, so one possible thing is the belief that this is how it is and all you need do is meditate your problems away. I've never met one real person who really touted that philosophy outside of Oprah, and I know a few Wiccans, New Agers and Unitarians, oh my. To me, healthy skepticism allows for the possibility of belief while searching for evidence of the facts. Okay, I'm the unitarian. Caught me!
All of this being said, I still swear by McLaren's book for meditation and visualization. It helps me focus all that energy so that I can search my life for the problems and go to work on them. I don't think I'll buy the second edition in 2010, however, it will make me smile that all the skeptics out there will be reading up on "Energy" and "Chakras" under more acceptable names. It's all in the re-branding, I guess. Peace, man!
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