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“You gotta stop this magical thinking!” pleaded my husband for the twenty-thousandth time. He was referring to that point in a child’s adolescence when they believe all it takes to have something is to just think it — never mind that it really took a mommy and daddy out there working their ass off to make it happen. But what my husband called “magical thinking” I called “law of attraction” and it was the basis of just about every guru that I knew from Oprah Winfrey, to the late Wayne Dyer, to Abraham Hicks. What you can see clearly in your mind you can achieve. And I thought that I was doing everything right until just a few weeks before Christmas.
Money had already been tight when I got laid off from my job, effective immediately. As devastating as it was, it just meant that somehow I wasn’t believing enough, I wasn’t seeing it enough, it was time to step up my game. Now I’m waking up at 5:00 am to meditate, by the time I get my girls off to school I’m staring at myself in the mirror affirming how rich, powerful and deserving I am because a Black woman on YouTube said this is how she manifested $25,000. From there I’m going over my vision board, picturing myself sitting on my dream couch in my dream loft eating sushi. Next I’m tapping my thigh a bunch of times to find my money rhythm because my guy who teaches quantum leaping says it’s the quickest way to manifest the $50,000 that it’s going to take to make everything in my life just peachy. Now I’m swinging back by YouTube so that Dan RadioStyle can remind me why I’m such a fan of original new thought gangstar Neville Goddard, which reminds me that spiritual guru Abraham Hicks says everything is always working out for me and I just need to find the path of least resistance, which at this point means taking a break from all this manifesting because I’m exhausted and if this was truly working why am I still broke?
Christmas came and went and the only reason the kids had gifts was because my husband worked around the clock and back. I, on the other hand, spent a massive amount of time online, giving clicks to people who make their money off of my desperation to get what I want in life with the least amount of work as possible. Shame on me.
I can’t even blame my reality on the gurus at this point. I was discussing things with a friend recently who shared her philosophy that humans yearn for guidance and we’re trained to think that it has to come from a source outside of ourselves, be it our parents, teachers, the church, elected officials, or gurus. And we pick these “gods” according to our personality. There’s truth to that because my friend Mark swears by no-nonsense fitness guru David Goggins whose motto is “If you can’t do it yourself, you better create a mother f-cker that can!” Goggins’ philosophy is that we typically only use about 40 percent of our capabilities so the answer is man up, push yourself further, and “stay hard.” My friend also follows clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson who tells people life is a b-tch so you’ve got 12 steps to get it right. (The first step is stand up straight with your shoulders back.) Mark said he found himself going back and forth between the two when a friend told him about yet another tough-talking guru that sounded like just what he needed, and it was then that he realized he was “guru hopping.”
“I was like a lost man at sea, grasping for anything that came my way when all I really needed was God,” he said. “If I put my faith in him I wouldn’t need to follow another man.”
Mark and I basically realized the same thing: There will always be a thousand voices out there willing to take us wherever we want to go, at any given time, but it comes with a price. We have to give up our own voice because we can’t serve two gods. It doesn’t mean we can’t be encouraged by other people, but we can’t give them more power than we’re giving ourselves or God.
Okay, ya’ll stay hard.
