Nuance and the New Age

Beauty Amid the City

I was raised Catholic, so I was fed a steady diet of dogma from as long back as my memory goes. My mother was very Catholic, as in she almost became a nun. The story goes that she called the convent the night before she was supposed to arrive and told them she was not coming. Her father was a Eucharistic Minister, a layperson who gave communion to the congregation. He was also a mean drunk.

While we went to church every Sunday, once a week to CCD, and our mother taught CCD classes to groups of kids in our home, we somehow were spared the experience of Catholic school. I’m assuming my father had some input on this, as he was decidedly not Catholic. He did not go to church with us every week and would only go on Christmas and Easter.

When my younger sister and I would complain about having to wake up early, dress up, and get in the car on Sunday mornings, asking why it was our dad did not have to go, our mother would reply with, “When you’re a grown-up, you can do what you want.” We heard that a lot. We were raised with the dogma that children are to do as they are told, and had very little decision-making input in our lives other than choice of candy bars or what we wanted off the menu.

The abrupt turn that happened when I was ten, once our parents separated and our mother started going out drinking most nights, gave us whiplash. We were thrown from one side of the car from being completely controlled to the other side of complete abandonment. Not having to go to church every Sunday was one of the benefits that hid the truth from my sister and me that there was no longer anyone minding the store of our well-being, including God.

I don’t know when I started believing in reincarnation, but I do know that by the time I was sixteen, it was the only thing that made any sense to me. This belief began to fill in the void left between the programming of my early life via Catholicism and the void I had found myself in, a life where those who were supposed to be taking care of me were doing me actual harm, but the dogma of “good Catholic” and “all controlling and consuming mother” was so embedded in my psyche I could not see the actuality of the ghost mother she had become.

After high school, my spirituality became a hodgepodge of remnants of my Catholic upbringing, forays into Tarot and other forms of divination, spells, fragments of Buddhist ideology, and at times, a complete abdication of anything outwardly “spiritual” at all.

In 1991, I sat in a movie theater and watched Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep in “Defending Your Life”. I witnessed on screen the closest telling I had yet seen of the encapsulation of my spiritual belief system, one I had not yet even fully formed until that moment. This comedy, from the mind of Brooks, portrayed the idea that the choice is always love or fear, and those who choose love move on into the celestial realms while those who choose fear are bound to return to Earth again and again until love wins.

“Hell” became here/Earth to me, and “heaven” simply the place you go after graduating from having to be here. This was it, this was my new dogma. It supplanted my Catholic teachings while also in part remaining the same. It was an exchange of one dogma for another. It satisfied my need for hierarchy with a system of grading in place and gave me a story to explain what, in so many ways, we as humans in the third dimension are unable to. It stuck a crowbar underneath the idea that I had little to no power and gave me a bit more leverage in the choice department, yet still at the end of this life, I’d face a godlike being telling me where I would go next based on whether or not I had been a good little girl and suffered enough to achieve martydom. It replaced the following of the ten commandments with the choosing of love (much better in my estimation at the time), and yet still left me in the “less than” position as a human.

My holocaust memories of life as a Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto had already begun to surface, and why that suffering was not enough to graduate me from Earth after that life was a question I just did not ask at the time. I guess in that dogmatic thinking I was supposed to love the Nazis even while they were abusing me? Right, that’s it. That’s why I had to come back to Earth again. I failed at loving the Nazis.

Years passed, and then the moment of conscious contact with a nonphysical being in the form of my spirit guide Mirando arrived in November of 1996. Shortly after that, I became acquainted with a host of others, including the Pleiadians. Suddenly, a whole new dogma inserted itself into my consciousness, replacing the outdated version I had been walking around with, or at least that’s how it seemed. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t a replacement, just an alteration.

There were (and still are) core tenets in the New Age ideology as a direct voice channel that one had to agree to back then if one wanted to be in the cool kids channeling club, including that the self is responsible for every single moment it experiences and that fear is to be avoided at all costs. Like a script, it all downloaded itself into my brain in a matter of days, New Age dogma replacing the mishmash of random beliefs I was carrying that had replaced the Catholic dogma that had come before. A common denominator remained - a polarized belief system, declaring itself the ultimate truth, with rules and laws.

I’ve always been a questioner. Once I could form words, “What’s that?” was my first and most common phrase. I questioned the dogma from Catholicism to the New Age and everything in between. Once I started channeling, I constantly questioned the information coming through and the sources it was coming from, looking for validation that who I was connecting with was “of the light”, ultimately earning myself the nickname “dark buster” from those humans I was collaborating with when we would gather to channel together in my garden apartment in Chicago in the late 90s.

I’ve spent over thirty years moving professionally in this space, making it exclusively my work twenty-seven years ago, from Tarot Card Reader to Direct Voice Channel to Teacher to Reiki Master to Writer. What I can now say for certain is that all of the dogma is just that, dogma. My seeking and questioning has taken me up and over and around and back to the simplest of truths, that what matters most to me is compassion, kindness, empathy, and love, that being of service means more to me than any mythic story I can access and tell about our origins or why we are the way we are.

I began to pick apart the New Age dogma in earnest in 2020, as the pandemic crashed through our reality, and my response to it was to shake my consciousness out of a certain level of slumber. I’d been nodding along with some dogmatic beliefs I never fully aligned with.

An aspect of life in the third dimension is that there are mysteries that are unknowable to us. This is unavoidable. Dogma and people’s need for dogma exist in part due to the anxiety most carry about this. Dogma has been used as a mechanism for control, telling us at times not to see what is right in front of our faces due to our need to belong and feel protected by the group.

Surrendering to “The Great Mystery” is an act of resistance. It is empowering and healing to release the need to find answers to the unanswerable or to take on someone else’s answers as a way to soothe the mind’s anxiety.

As a questioner, I will continue to ask and seek. I will continue to connect and explore. As a guide and teacher, I will strive not to create more dogma or parrot back dogma that has been a source of harm. I will show up in the moment, as honestly and vulnerably as I can, offering support, love, healing, and a nuanced viewpoint, releasing the need to be comfortable that being “right” affords, and embracing the discomfort of uncertainty.

Dogma establishes absolutes. It is hard and inflexible, creating the illusion of infallibility. A nuanced viewpoint tells us there is more to the story than any absolute. It honors the complexity of humans and our relationships. It moves us out of polarity and into connection. The release of dogmatic thinking and the application of nuance opens the pathway to compassion, empathy, understanding, and love.

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