Media Fawns Over Spiritual Guru Shaping New Age Thought

This week, numerous media outlets have showcased a “spiritual leader” who offers affluent suburban women a New Age religious worldview that fits into their modern life. Gabrielle Bernstein was featured this week by the Wall Street Journal, Good Morning America, Morning Joe, NBC’s New York affiliate, and the Today Show. The appearances were part of a media blitz to advertise her new book, which advises people on how to overcome childhood “traumas.”

Bernstein’s prominent appearances are not surprising given the major impact she is having on American culture. The 45-year-old blonde New Yorker has published 10 wildly popular self-help books, including one that was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller.

Bernstein’s school of spiritual thought is modeled after that of former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson — who in turn was inspired by the 1976 New Age text A Course in Miracles — and she is self-consciously aiming to reframe those teachings for women today. A review of Bernstein’s 2011 book Soul Provider explains that inspiration in this way: “Bernstein felt inspired to translate Williamson for her own generation by repackaging the esoteric lingo and tailoring the teachings to single-life struggles.” Williamson wrote the foreword to Bernstein’s second book.

Bernstein says she decided to bring Williamson’s teachings to the world after they helped her recover from addictions to drugs, alcohol, and relationships.

Marianne Williamson has at times balked at the moniker “spiritual guru,” but Bernstein fully embraces it and is clear that being a spiritual leader is the most accurate way to describe her. Bernstein’s spirituality is one where her god is her “inner guide” or intuition, and she must surrender all to it. At the same time, she believes her ego — which she equates to her inner self-doubt — is an illusion that was formed as a result of childhood trauma.

“I’m not going to teach you how to make green juice,” Bernstein told the New York Times upon the release of her seventh book. “I’m going to teach you how to know what God means to you.” On another occasion, she described herself as a “spiritual lightworker.”

Much of Bernstein’s spirituality is dependent upon “manifesting” — an alternative to prayer in which, rather than asking God for help, one wills something into existence by praying to themself. Bernstein told the Wall Street Journal earlier this week that she manifested her son, husband, house, and her appearance on Oprah’s talk show into her life. (“I should like to manifest a Wall Street Journal without articles like this,” responded one Wall Street Journal reader in the comments section.)

Bernstein’s “self help” method rests on changing “thought patterns” so as to clear the way to “manifest” the best possible version of your life. In a fawning interview on Good Morning America this week in which host Robin Roberts practically pledged her fealty to the spiritual author (“Boy did you change my life”), Bernstein explained: “We manifest what we believe…. And so when we start to shift our core beliefs and focus on our core beliefs, that’s when we begin to manifest more of what we do want.”

Also implemented into Bernstein’s spiritual routine: acupuncture, meditation, “lymphatic drainage massage,” crystals, “self-hypnosis,” Kundalini yoga, “emotional freedom technique mediation,” and “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing” therapy.

Bernstein’s latest book focuses on the “Internal Family Systems” “therapeutic method,” which aims to remove “negative thinking patterns” that people picked up from “childhood trauma.” In her Good Morning America appearance, Bernstein explained that “all of it” — meaning all negative thoughts and weakness — goes back to childhood trauma. Such a perspective is in line with the recent cultural phenomenon in which droves of people are having an epiphany that they had a traumatic childhood. The popularity of this idea was in large part driven by the 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, which was the No. 1 New York Times bestseller for numerous weeks in 2021. Bernstein herself had the realization in 2016, at the age of 36, that she was sexually abused as a child.

Bernstein’s perspective can only be described as a spirituality unto itself that is totally foreign to America’s traditional Christian worldview. In it, God is something that exists within you, you must surrender to the “universe,” and you can summon prosperity into being by willing it to existence.

The strange part is how much media figures have immediately bought fully into it. On Morning Joe, for instance, Huma Abedin blurted out, “I love how you say that we are our own inner healer.”

The post Media Fawns Over Spiritual Guru Shaping New Age Thought appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.