Understanding negativity & its purpose

All pain is separation from something or someone. Sometimes it is separation from our own inner selves, our internal splits and self-conflicts. Negativity always has a message for us. However, if we bully ourselves into positivity and escape those uncomfortable emotions, we will miss the message, not at a small cost though.

Don’t be too quick to judge your negative emotions. Let your negativity speak to you. It will inform you where you’re hurting and why, so you can meet your needs and wants. Most people don’t even realize they have deeper needs and that their subconscious is communicating those with them in the form of uncomfortable emotions that they are continuously superseding with positivity. For example, it could be the need for healthy boundaries in relationships, so they don’t get hurt all the time by believing they have to give love always and instead can also make room to receive love.

We live in a world obsessed with positivity. However, our reality is that of duality where negativity has its place and purpose. We are first feeling beings before we are human beings. Any negativity stems from a negative emotion in the mind. E-motions are energies in motion, our internal guidance system. They are like informants telling us exactly where we stand in terms of our states of being. And energy creates matter, so emotions create our reality, literally!

Our reality is governed by the Law of Attraction which essentially states, like attracts like. So of course a positive emotion will produce positive outcomes and negative emotion will produce negative outcomes. Hence it is great to think positive and have an upbeat attitude towards life, in general. But when positive thinking is used to bypass our negative emotions or escape our uncomfortable feelings, is when it becomes more detrimental than beneficial. To understand this better, read my article titled, when positive thinking doesn’t work!

Here’s a scenario: Let’s say John is perceived as successful and happy by his colleagues and friends owing to his extraordinary achievements in life, but what they don’t know is deep inside he feels unhappy, lonely and miserable. In fact, one of the reasons he is so driven to succeed in his fields of prowess is to escape those uncomfortable feelings of loneliness and unhappiness, but he denies and belittles his own feelings, brushing them off as fleeting emotions. And each day he supersedes his feelings of discomfort and continues to ride the ladder further up in his career, deep within he feels more dissatisfied despite his accomplishments. Then one day he comes down with a chronic illness or cancer and he doesn’t know why he’s ailing. This is a very common scenario in our society. People at high flying jobs with dream careers may still feel empty and unfulfilled, as if something is lacking within.

All diseases are caused due to emotional factors. And of course they stem from negative emotions. But avoiding a negative emotion does not release it, rather pushes it further into our subconscious minds where we are not even aware of its existence anymore. A negative feeling is thus information from our inner beings, that something within us is hurting. But what is hurting? What is it informing us about?

In the above example, perhaps the deeper desire of John is to connect with people at a heart to heart level, feel love and acceptance for who he is and not how his career defines him, but he’s too afraid to be vulnerable or even unaware this is what he truly desires, so he continues to strive for success at his career in order to thwart those feelings of discomfort, burying himself at work, pushing his true desires further away.

Imagine the mind is like an ice-berg. The top part is our conscious minds or the part of the mind we are aware of, which operates during our waking states. However our subconscious minds, the part of the mind we are not aware of operates below the water surface, often showing up in our dream states when our conscious minds are asleep. The subconscious mind is 30,000 times more powerful than the conscious mind. So think of what happens when we try to supersede a deep rooted negative emotion or belief held by the subconscious with a positive thought in the conscious mind. We just meet with resistance, our own internal resistance! And what we resist, persists. So the more we try to avoid something, the more it shows up in our reality as unhealed aspects of ourselves. Hence instead of creating any positive outcome with our positive thoughts, we remain stuck and even depressed.

If we have a negative thought, belief, feeling, perception or emotion that takes dominion in our minds, then just positive thinking or meditation can’t eliminate it. In fact if we ignore or push it deeper into the subconscious, it will only fester and show up at inopportune moments as blind spots. What we need to do instead is shine the light of our consciousness onto those darker aspects within ourselves and bring them into awareness so they can hold no power over us anymore. That is how we can see them and set them free. Most of the time, our deep-rooted negative beliefs about life or any aspect of it, stem from childhood when our feelings and emotions are invalidated by our parents or primary caregivers. As children we don’t know how to deal with them so we develop all sorts of coping mechanisms to survive. Let us say whenever you tried to express your feelings or share your experiences, your parents were not available to listen to you. So you developed the coping mechanism of burying your feelings and never bringing them to surface, as you did not feel safe to express yourself. You came to believe your feelings were unimportant to your parents and instead only strove to make them happy by bringing better grades in school, bettering at sports etc. As you grew up, you continued that behavior into adulthood and then got into trouble especially in relationships where you couldn’t express yourself either. But if you aren’t aware that aspect of your childhood is holding you hostage to your own unresolved issues, you will never be able to freely express yourself in any connection, which will keep you dissatisfied in the long run or even end your connection with others prematurely. You see, the subconscious mind is trying to keep you safe all the time, but the result is often counterproductive. Even by ending a relationship it is keeping you safe because it believes expressing is not safe. Most of our negative conditioning comes from childhood. This is when inner child work can be of great help. Continue below to learn more about it.

Most people have their inner worlds totally contradicting their outer worlds. They put up a front that contradicts what they actually feel, bypassing their feelings and emotions all the time to be socially acceptable. This form of avoidance can take a heavy toll on our emotional health. So you may find someone living the high profile life diagnosed with a chronic or terminal illness, or they are depressed and suicidal. If the world would not be so judgmental then people could accept their negative emotions more freely and there would not be so many diseases. Our own hurtful emotions will feel less hurting as we also get a glimpse of other’s imperfect worlds. The reason our pains hurt so much more is because we think we are the only one feeling miserable and the rest of the world is living a perfect life. These feelings are exacerbated on social media platforms where we see others succeeding in the fields we so desperately wanted to succeed but couldn’t. So stop attaching so much negative meaning to negativity! It relieves the pressure to perform or always be on our best behavior. Instead of condemning negativity and resisting, if we would just look at what it is trying to tell us about ourselves, it will lose its strong hold upon us. If people would be more open with their negative feelings and emotions they won’t be as destructive anymore. It is when we try to hide them that it becomes dangerous not only for us but for others as well. And beware of any coach, mentor or spiritual guru promising to eliminate all negativity from life; they are is simply lying or bypassing!

Our emotions dictate everything. Every action is sponsored by our internal world of feelings and emotions. When we have an illness we go to a doctor to cure it physically, however the reason that illness showed up in the first place is because we are hurting emotionally. So we need to work on our emotional health if we would like to eliminate the root cause of diseases. But that is not taught in our society. We have to learn through experience. No wonder people are walking around with baggages of unresolved issues giving birth to narcissists, drama queens, control freaks, energy vampires, and other forms of parasitic personalities which show their face in relationships mostly. How can these people care for another when their own internal worlds are hurting? In fact, they don’t even know they are hurting within; they’ve been so good in burying their hurts over the years that they unconsciously developed these unhealthy personalities as a result. The only way we can care for or truly love another is when we can care for and truly love and accept ourselves. The universe then mirrors to us that same love from others. So have more self-compassion; you can’t give what you don’t have.

In society, we deny entire parts of our being by not acknowledging this invisible world of emotions and feelings. Yet all the while we send and receive negative thoughts and energy, not realizing the harm we do to our inner beings. Energy we send through our thoughts and feelings impacts both our physical and emotional health as well as the world around us. It is our right as humans to have and express the range of feelings from joy and love to fear and anger without being judged or put down for feeling our feelings. It’s a part of what makes us feel alive. Read my article: feel your feelings, know yourself to understand this better. Escaping ourselves is no shortcut to self-actualization. When we don’t allow ourselves to feel we deny our humanness.

Solution

Nonetheless, negative emotions are uncomfortable and we don’t want to feel them. So there are some techniques to bring our negative programming to the conscious mind and release them so they don’t have a strong hold on us anymore. And then we can take the risks necessary to pursue our passions and dare to dream, without resistance!

Shadow work: it is a great way to bring the negative emotions to light. Mostly our negative programming happens in childhood and at puberty. So whenever we get triggered, instead of escaping that moment, if we are willing to look inside, to where that problem first originated, sometimes just an awareness of the problem can raise the vibration and release its strong hold upon our psyche. Shadow work in short, is radical self-acceptance.

Inner child work: it is a form of shadow work where we bring our hurtful moments from childhood into light and see how our inner child is still hurting from those seemingly insignificant incidents in childhood, and then be willing to be present with that little child residing inside all of us, give it love, our unconditional presence and acceptance. This is a form of self-soothing as we cradle the child within us that is still hurting from the long gone past.

Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT tapping): this is a method to tap onto the meridian points through which energy flows into our bodies, while at the same time speaking out loud our negative feelings and limiting beliefs. Although this involves focusing on the negative emotion, it actually brings the subconscious programming into consciousness and releases it. Any problem can be tapped away this way and then positivity tapped in. This method of treatment is rapidly gaining popularity among psychologists and psychotherapists nowadays. It really gives us relief from our symptoms and can even tap away diseases, stress, anxiety and other forms of physical & mental disorders.

Mind-body code: according to Dr. Mario Martinez, the root cause of diabetes among many Tibetan monks, is repression of Anger. He goes on to prove that anger when not processed or felt, and one goes directly into loving kindness or forgiveness of the enemy as in the Buddhist traditions, the body reacts by releasing endorphins which in the long run affects glucose metabolism and hence causes diseases like diabetes. He emphasizes on embodying rather than intellectualizing these practises in his famous book, The Mind-Body Code. To learn more about this, read why many tibetan monks have diabetes. Our difficult / negative emotions must be processed before releasing them, not suppressed. Suppression will cause a dis-ease in the mind, thereby causing a disease in the body as one cannot separate the mind from the body.

Finding support: find a friend who would be willing to process your negative emotions with you and not invalidate or judge you for feeling a certain way. If you can’t find someone, you can be your own friend and acknowledge where you are hurting, then self-soothe that aspect of you, process and release it. Don’t escape yourself with distractions because that will keep the problem locked inside your subconscious, especially if it is a deep rooted dysfunctional belief that you developed in childhood.

Other methods: grounding or surrounding yourself with white light and asking the divine for protection and release of your subconscious programmings, positive affirmations, creative visualisation, hypnosis and focused meditation could be helpful. The key is to be patient with yourself and not judge yourself at any moment, whatsoever. That is where self-love begins and love for all others.

In the end I would say, everything that happens to us has purpose and we can choose to take whatever comes our way and transform it into something meaningful & beautiful.

Here is a dose of positivity about negativity:

• Our negative emotions make us more human.
• Negativity is always a message from our subconscious about hurt aspects within our inner worlds, screaming for attention, thus creating more self-awareness.
• If we can bring the negativity to light we can set it free, but if we resist we keep it there.
• Negative emotions tell us exactly where we stand in terms of our states of being, and our truths.
• If we can resolve our negative emotions consciously, we can find creative solutions for our problems, get unstuck in life and be free to manifest our positive dreams.

So the next time you have a negative thought, don’t be too quick to call it a bummer!

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