THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THOUGHTS

It’s perfectly okay to have a “negative” thought or emotion.  In fact, they are just as useful as any “positive” thought or emotion.  Like any other tool, you simply have to know how to USE them.    

Look, you are GOING to have “negative” thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and experiences.  You didn’t come here to not be challenged, never learn anything, and avoid all discomfort.  You don’t get to be spiritually superior by pretending that you alone have the eternal magic of nary a negative whisper.  So you’d better learn how to deal with negativity and make it work FOR you.  

I know that when people begin to understand how powerful their thoughts really are, they become afraid of their thoughts.  This is a temporary state (mostly because it’s exhausting trying to avoid your own thoughts). Nevertheless, it appears to be a universal experience, so I just want to invite you to remember that the world has managed to remain intact despite roughly 7 billion people regularly having angry, sad, fearful thoughts. 

That’s because those thoughts don’t carry much energy.  When you’re feeling dis-spirited, you aren’t bringing a lot of oomph to anything.  All the energy seems to drain right out of you.  It isn’t really draining anywhere.  That’s not possible.  But it can certainly feel that way.  In fact, when people routinely suffer from disempowering thoughts, they may respond with anger and even violence, in order to blast themselves out of that low-energy state.  Rage feels a lot better – more powerful – than despair.  But it’s really hard to maintain that energized state when the dominant thought sequences are disempowering. 

So the bottom line is that you don’t have to be afraid of your “negative” thoughts.  In fact, searching them out allows you to observe them, and quickly discover how easy it is to detach from them. 

I want to give you a little exercise in detachment:

Close your eyes and just notice your breath for a few moments.  Maybe 3 breaths.  Really inflate the lungs to full capacity – and you don’t have to work at it, just notice whether or not there’s a little more room there.  Imagine there’s a balloon in your abdomen, and you are filling it up completely.  Then release that breath and allow ALL of the air to leave your body.  If you need to, just puff out the last bits, making sure that the lungs are completely empty.  And notice that your shoulders, chest, and abdomen are already significantly more relaxed. 

Notice all the places in your body where you’re holding tension and just let your attention go from one to the next, relaxing the muscles deliberately.  You’ll already be feeling much more relaxed than just a few short minutes ago, but there’s more.  Ask yourself WHO is noticing all the tension in that body.  Is the body observing itself or is some other part of you noticing it?  Notice that you are not your body.  You are observing your body, which is an object that you are rather attached to, but you are not that object.  You are the observer.  You can control your body.  And you can notice it and pay careful attention to it, but you are not your body.  As you think those thoughts, ask yourself who is having those thoughts.  You are observing those thoughts and perhaps even paying a great deal of attention to them.  But you are not your thoughts.  Whatever feelings they inspire, you may be aware of those feelings and you may observe them, but you are not those feelings either.  They are separate from you.  They are experiences you are choosing to pay attention to, and you could just as easily pay attention to others instead.  Perhaps noticing one thing over another is mostly a matter of habit. 

This is useful information.  If you think about it, you may find yourself questioning a lot of the things you’ve always thought.  For instance, if you are not your body… perhaps you can detach from your pain.  Perhaps your pain is just an idea.  And perhaps you could also notice other ideas, like ease and comfort.  Or perhaps you could just let it be and it wouldn’t matter.  It would just be pain and not anything to do with you.  You may notice that you can experience pain or any other unpleasant stimuli in a lot of different ways.  Have you ever noticed that an unpleasant odor seems to disappear after a few minutes?  What else might disappear if you simply noticed something else instead?  After all, these are your thoughts, but YOU are not your thoughts.  You can just let go of your thoughts and realize that they are just thoughts, and of no particular significance at all. 

Your negative thoughts (and by “negative” I mean “disempowering”) can lead you into a very powerful experience when you learn to simply detach from them and observe them in just this fashion.  Ask the unconscious mind what it wants you to know about those thoughts.  Why do you have this thought and not some other?  Why does one seem to recur so regularly?  Where did it come from?  Let the unconscious mind direct your attention to whatever it considers useful in the moment, even if it doesn’t make sense right away.  Just stay with it.  Follow that thread.  It will lead you directly into understanding and allow you to let go of ideas that are no longer serving you, even if they once served you well.  After all, your sippy cup and diapers served you once, but you don’t need them anymore either.  In fact, if they were your only choice today, you’d feel quite limited by that. 

In the end, our negative thoughts and experiences are just as valuable as any other.  Don’t be afraid of them.  Simply observe, detach, and follow them where they want to lead you.  You cannot go wrong.