Things are not good right now.

The rain was due to come, eventually; it always is. I just wish it was a shower I wasn’t so weary of. And I even wish I could blame myself a little; somehow that would make it seem more controllable.

Or that I had packed an umbrella.

I’ve been part of a metaphysical meditation group for a while now, which I absolutely love. It’s been rewarding, has challenged and built my character, encouraging growth and knowledge (as good spiritual practices should) and really allowed me to becoming in tune with God again and the general energies and divine guidance that’s around me all the time. It’s been a bit of an awakening for me, and presents the opportunity for a lifelong journey of learning and strengthening that I’m pretty enthused about.

I know that all that sounds really cheesy and the whole metaphysical practice thing really freaks people out, especially in the Bible Belt. We study the lessons of Christ and many of our meditational techniques are straight from the Bible, but the unregimented, direct-contact-to-God (versus listening to a self-designated mouthpiece like the Pope or a priest or a minister or whatever) practice really seems to rub a lot of people around here the wrong way, (and we won’t even get started on the reactions to the idea of communicating with guides who aren’t on a physical plane or recognizing energies as a part of God’s presence. That’s cause for major freakouts.) so I’ve learned to just keep my religious leanings and opinions under my toupe unless directly asked or unless I find myself in a situation in which my beliefs may be misrepresented.

Anyway, despite my parents’ ignorance causing them to believe I’m in some Satan-worshipping cult or the general Fear-based reactions I may be receiving from those around me, it’s something I’ve excitedly incorporated into my life and am really, genuinely excited about. Feeling such a truthful connection to a system/method of worship and spirituality is a real first for me and I’m seriously stoked about it.

However, that is not to say that it - just like any religious sect - is not without it’s faults. Within churches or meditational groups there are always politics based on egos or power struggles, which is just one of the facets of dealing with other people. It’s always been a turn-off for me to congregate in religious settings because the inevitabilities of human faults seem to get in the way of my personal spiritual growth. I like to think of my moments of meditation and learning as a break from the rigors of living within society and it’s bounds to reconnect with my spiritual center for a few minutes and recharge my batteries. Many people’s inherent need to judge or control other’s beliefs or morals within religious settings is just bullshit I don’t feel has any place in my personal relationship with Spirit, so I enjoy keeping my practices to myself. This meditational group I’ve found is not an official church and, even though we adhere to the Nine Principles of the United Metaphysical Church, there is no board of directors or church leaders who are funded by the church, which eliminates a lot of the dictatorship dramas that emerge in organized settings. We’re just a group of people who come together to share ideas, experience, and spiritual growth. We all accept that we’re all prone to flaws and faults and none of us are any more divinely guided than anyone else so we’re all giving and receiving on equal footing. It’s perfect.

ANYWAY, with all that said, I encountered my first real faith challenge this weekend when we had a guest minister/medium come from the UMC HQ and guide a clarion circle. I was really excited to get to work with someone who had a lot of experience with mediumship, and I was hoping to possibly learn about a spirit guide or two and ask a question about what path I should place my focus on to best work with the energies that are around me at the moment. I wore a few extra stones to enhance my rhythms and wore a light blue as it’s a spiritual power color. (When Buddists reach a sense of Enlightenment, they claim to experience an overwhelming light blue energy/light. In fact, in scientific studies, a few monks have been screened using MRIs and when they reach this blissful mental state, the reading on their mental activity shows nothing but this light blue color on the brain scans. It’s actually pretty amazing.) And then I sacrificed $25 to attend the workshop that helps the minister afford the gas money to travel to and from Roanoke, VA. So yeah, I was pretty enthusiastic about the evening, especially considering it was held on Wesak Weekend, during a waxing (almost full) moon, during a Mercury retrograde. I was pretty optimistic that everything was aligned for an amazing evening and, admittedly, more than a little giddy with anticipation.

Needless to say, I was sorely mistaken on all fronts. Although rather excited, I went into the experience with an open mind (as I do with most things these days. Preconceived notions have always backfired one way or another.) and I’m really glad I had the brains to keep skepticism on my shoulder.

This woman was nothing short of a blatant scam artist in the most pathetically obvious ways possible. She claimed she wasn’t merely channeling the energies and messages of any spirit guides or persons who may visit but was, in fact, goin into “dead trance” in which she would go all Whoopi-in-”Ghost” on us and allow each entity to inhabit her body for a few minutes each. Still open-minded at this point, I sat and watched the single most ridiculous performance I’ve ever sat through in my entire life. It was serious bullshit from beginning to end. Okay, since there were nine of us who attended the workshop, she supposedly pulled in nine separate spirit guides and a couple former relatives. However, despite these spirits and relatives having originated from a variety of eras and locations, they all had the same grammatical structuring, the same conversational habits and the same general speech patterns. At the end of every other sentence, each character would ask the recipient to confirm what they’d heard, although when the “spirit” was a Native American they would ask “Do you understand what I say to you?” and when they were anything else they would ask “Isn’t that so?” Ugh. Additionally, she only had one accent for her Native American “visitors” that was a paaaaainful (potentially offensive) stereotype of Native American accents which showed complete ignorance to the fact that tribes each had their own dialects, colloquialisms, accents and even interpretations of the English language. It was absolutely ridiculous and pretty embarassing to watch at that. Additionally, the “messages” that she gave in response to our pointed queries were equally as pathetic as her performances as they were retardedly generalized statements of common wisdom.

For example, when I asked about guidance in how to best align myself with the positive energies in my life, my “spirit guide” gave some obtuse, rambling answer about how “Spirit has great plans for [me] and how [I] have a great destiny to fulfill with my gifts. Spirit will make your purpose known to you and you will find great success when you learn to work alongside Spirit’s plans for your life.”

Um, yeah. I got that. Not only is it kind of something that directly applies to every living being on the planet, I pretty much acknowledged my awareness of that principle and my willingness to accept and take on this mission in my original question. I was just wondering if you could, you know, possibly bestow a little bit of that purpose to me to point me in the right direction to set me toward this destiny, since I have a lot of options right now.

All of her answers were in this faux-wisdom vein, telling descendants that they were being watched over and loved from deceased relatives (no shit. Really?), advising people to watch after their personal health to live their lives to the fullest (bederbeder) and other blanket-statement fuckwithery. Just to mix it up a bit, she would take little nuggets of information she’d acquired in pre-workshop getting-to-know-you chatter and apply them to personal messages. Like she told my minister to stop smoking after she and the minister shared a cigarette together. She told me that my daughter had a spirit guardian watching over her (duh) and that she was an Indigo child (something every parent would love to hear but ultimately has no way to confirm until years of development and experiences.)

It was painful. And disgusting.

Now, naturally, I get the lesson here. This whole thing reiterates my beliefs that, no matter what community I may find myself in, there will always be people who pull the wool over others’ eyes and take advantage of people’s longing to believe in something wholeheartedly. Also, there is never anyone more attuned with God in the way that I personally need to be than myself and my lessons will come as they are needed. This is something that applies to bullshit psychics as well as Hate-filled ministers or priests. Nobody’s immune to it and no sect is without their false leaders.

I get all that.

But I couldn’t help but to be disheartened, not only at the tremendous amount of bullshit I’d encountered within a communal spiritual practice I’d found to be pure up until that point, but also with the blind faith that the others in my meditation group instilled in this obvious fraud. After the session (and my brief nap to avoid being rude) they were all alight with hope and excitement about this fantastic experience. I, not wanting to be the bad guy and crush everyone’s renewed spirit, stayed silent along with their exclamations of praise and gratitude. I nodded along when they talked about how impressed they were and only verbally agreed with statements that it had been an enlightening experience.

It kind of took the wind out of my sails a bit. Last Monday in my weekly group, I’d received so much validation that my efforts weren’t for naught, that I was on the right path, that I was growing and developing spiritually (Seriously, I was ON FIRE in my receiving messages and tapping into the Spiritual party line that evening. I was doling out accurate, specific messages with real, tangible imagery and on-point cues and symbols left and right for the first time since I started attending these groups and it felt awesome to finally feel like a participant instead of just an observer.) and then this woman comes along, makes a mockery of the whole thing, and really puts a damper on my enthusiasm to return to group at all. I hate having doubts about those people that I share my spiritual growth with because that implies that I’m letting my own judgment of character get in the way of the benefits of being part of a community, but dammit, I hate feeling alone in my objective skepticism and refusal to just accept anything that’s handed to me from other people as The Real Truth.

I don’t think I’ll bring my disgust of the evening up to the group involuntarily and I’ll just keep my take on the experience to myself as it’s just one bump in the road ultimately. It’s just made me hesitant to want to go back to my group immediately and I hate that I was only able to experience real, innocent, childlike joy and enthusiasm for this part of my life for only a fleeting moment.

Ah well. At least I got out of there before I was asked for fork out 25 bucks. Free bullshit is always preferable to bullshit you have to pay for.

I’m effing sick of this “My husband is an idiot! Isn’t that hiLARious?!” mentality. Actually, I’ve been pretty sick of the whole male-bashing idea of feminism for a while now, but, in my new life as a domesticated housewife, I’ve become increasingly aware and appalled at this “My husband blows; let me tell you why…” societal norm that allows women to publicly bash the spouse they specifically chose for themselves.

First of all, it’s exhausting and boring to listen to women talk about how their husbands screw everything up all the time or snore or fall asleep watching the game or fall into a thousand other male stereotypes women seem to love dredging up ad nauseum. Secondly, it’s degrading as shit, really, and makes the housewife doing the bitching look like an uncreative, ungrateful, whining cow. And thirdly, it makes women in general look like we can’t pull our heads out of domesticity and quit bitching about men’s inevitable quirks even though really, they as a gender made a lot of progress in the last few years.

Alright, maybe this tradition started with housewives of yore who were sick of being stifled and bitched amongst themselves in whispers while their husbands went out and held jobs and voted and owned land, etc. And I can understand that sort of passive resistance to an extent. But the last hundred years have shown a massive amount of change for the ways that women have been accepted as equals into a male-dominated society and I’d like to think that women’s mentalities would have shifted into a little more gratitude, at least on the homefront. In American society women are allowed to vote, we’re allowed to start and own businesses, we’re allowed to sue a guy for telling us we look nice, we’re allowed to get raises above men if we deserve them, we’re allowed to do pretty much whatever we want to do and yet here we are whining and bitching at the poor grandsons of the ones who actually made us feel repressed in the first place.

We get it; American husbands are burpy, farty, car-loving, beer-drinking, sports-watching, tits-appreciating, nacho-eating, tool-wielding creatures who are gloriously unaware of what to say to appease women and sometimes fall asleep after ejaculating. We effing know, okay? And, with the success of shows like Tim Allen’s Home Improvement and Comedy Central’s The Man Show, every man is aware of it, too, and even invited to accept and celebrate it. Mind you, this early-90’s “I’m a MAN, dammit!” movement never condoned abusing women, never supported dishonesty or infidelity, never advocated developing a drinking problem and dropping out of life or becoming a belligerently violent sonofabitch. This movement simply acknowledged the dynamics of men in today’s society and celebrated the various avenues of the masculine mystique. And that was perfectly okay.

But women had to swoop in and argue that somehow it wasn’t okay to just be different, just be a man. To watch such situation comedies (that are effing awful, ohbytheway) like Everybody Loves Raymond and The King of Queens (both of which I still cannot understand the appeal), we’re inundated with the idea that because men are sometimes selfish (who isn’t?), sometimes awkward (again with the “who isn’t?”) and sometimes misguided (again…) that gives their female spouses the right to publicly criticize and humiliate them for the sake of comedy. These emotionally taxing, painfully relentless shows pictured women berating their husbands (both of whom were really pretty good guys in the grand scheme of things) for having basic human flaws and the husband just sitting there and taking it in hopes to just shut their wife up for two seconds.

Um, this is normal? And nobody’s cited this as the cause of our rising divorce rate?

The thing is, nobody seems to worry about whether or not a man’s feelings have been hurt. If a man accidentally mentions that his wife or significant other may have put on a few, he must spent weeks groveling, but if a woman makes a degrading comment to her group of cackling friends about her husband’s beer gut, he’s expected to sit there and take it. “Like a man.”

Something seems very very wrong about that.

And it’s everywhere, and shockingly accepted in popular culture as well. If I go into a little women’s boutique, inevitably there will be some dishtowel or coaster or tiny decorative housesign dedicated to perpetuating some male-bashing stereotype like “Soap! It’s a man-repellent!” On my drive to the library, there’s a sign for some Tool Warehouse that advertises itself as “Daycare for Men!” It’s just this whole social undertone that screams “HAHA! Isn’t that hilarious!? Men are so incompetent that we can’t leave them alone for five minutes without giving them something to occupy themselves! They’re completely clueless about everything and we have to herd them like cattle or they’ll never get anything done!”

We call this normal. Some call it feminism. I call it sick.

I used to subscribe to it, too. Because of the married women I’d watched during my upbringing, I thought it was okay to publicly “pick on” my significant other about his faults. I thought telling a room about my lover’s shortcomings for the sake of a joke was perfectly okay, even admirably comic. I never stopped to consider that if I was with a man who wasn’t affected by this sort of passive emotional warfare at all, maybe he wasn’t the kind of person I wanted to be with in the first place. Maybe I wanted to be with a man who was sensitive to feelings of mine AND his. Maybe I wanted a man who stood up for himself when he was publicly emasculated. Maybe I wanted a man who was assertive enough to tell me to back the fuck off when I was hurting his name, even if it was within a group of my friends. I never ever stopped to consider that I wanted someone who wouldn’t tolerate inequality from my side, just like I would from his.

The reason strippers are so appealing is obvious: they’ve got great bodies that they’re willing to gracefully show off. But the reason strippers can stay in business with one man or another far longer than just one dance is because they know that men want to feel wanted. This seems like a basic enough principle, but when a man is belittled and emasculated by a nagging wife who doesn’t listen, it’s very tempting to pay someone a little money to make him feel attractive, funny, clever, intelligent, and important again. Most of these men realize they’re being played by the dancer for his money and conversation per song (and the ones that don’t can be found scouring the Craigslist “Missed Connections” ads looking for that stripper who inevitably fell madly in love with him right back… poor guys), but apparently the need to feel appreciated is just that powerful. It’s obviously not about the sex so much and, sometimes, it’s not even about the looks on the girl. Many many lonely, unappreciated men flock to strip clubs to feel like they’re worthy of the attention of an attractive woman.

Now, I’m not advocating men leaving their wives and children every night to sit and chat with exotic dancers, but it seems to me that women would work to understand a little better why men seem so drawn to such a torturous, expensive place where they pay hard-earned money to get teased and not get off. I mean, if it was all about looking at beautiful women’s bodies, there are far less expensive ways than sitting in a smoke-filled nudey bar with a bunch of horny guys. Obviously, the human interaction must have something to do with it. And most women would be floored to learn how many men go to strip clubs and pay for access to the Couch Room, only to sit and talk with a stripper until his wallet is empty. The numbers are staggering.

The truth is, everyone needs to feel appreciated. Women love to publicly whine about how underappreciated they are but don’t stop to consider that maybe they’re actually fueling the problem with their own man-bashing. Women love to point fingers and make excuses about how “He started it with his [fill in the blank-itude]” and “Well if he didn’t [fill in the blank] then I wouldn’t feel this way.” but the truth is, I’m sure it started a long time before that. In each couple the lack of respect needed to belittle the other started with one person or the other and varies, but the all-encompassing mentality that it’s NEVER okay to talk shit about your wife but ALWAYS okay to do the same about your husband is stagnant in the social consciousness.

Feminism originally was women fighting to be seen as equals; so how in the hell do we expect to achieve that if we won’t treat men like our equals? I mean, even if we were to believe that men really are inferior (which I don’t), shouldn’t we at least be teaching them through example? We’re busy teaching our kids that it’s okay to be different. And men and women are allowed to be different, too; that’s what heterosexuals tend to enjoy most, actually. (And what homosexuals have learned to appreciate as well.) We’re allowed to have different interests and differing opinions and differing sexual fantasies and different habits of cleanliness (… or not. It’s really everyone’s personal prerogative.)

But blanket statements made toward the men of America are just as backward-moving and ignorant as those outdated chauvinist assholes who still make them about women. Period. And speaking ill of one’s male counterpart is just as offensive and intolerable as a man slandering his wife publicly. Period. (Just because men don’t want to start arguments in their defense doesn’t make these things untrue.)

Why do women assume that talking about how stupid or ill-equipped their husbands are makes them look more intelligent or powerful? If anything, a woman bringing out her spouse’s faults makes her look like more of an imbecile for choosing and staying with such an obvious moron in the first place. Additionally, it gives the appearance that she is perfectly happy with stagnation and living with someone she doesn’t respect and appears to despise. How delightful!

It’s far past time to stop these WASPily hateful comments and to start encouraging women to speak well about their husbands/significant others if they want the same in return. Not that a woman can be blamed for her husband running off and having an affair, but it certainly makes a bitchy, emasculatory woman seem like less of a convincing victim when it happens to her.

Mark my words, if I ever become a sex therapist, the first thing I’m going to have every couple do is dress up like a stripper and a strip-club patron and have her pretend to be interested in his every word, maneuver, and cheesy line without so much as a twinge of disgust. If that doesn’t light some fires, I’ll close my practice.