Negativity

Negativity comes in many forms. The varieties and permutations of negativity are as numerous as there are people. Sometimes it is a miniscule irritation at something that happened or should not have happened. Sometimes it’s a burning hot flame of rage. Sometimes it’s a more like a pervasive grime that coats one’s life. It is not necessarily deeply troubling, but life feels like a daily grind. One’s perspective is tinted by a sheen of muck. Sometimes fear is the negativity that manifests. It could be a fear of failure, a fear of being misperceived, a fear of not getting what we want. The various shades of negativity are as endless as the stories that create them.

Every form of negativity is a form of resistance. Every form of negativity is based in a story that has a central character struggling. But what happens when you remove the person in the story? What happens when there is no more narrative? Lets look at fear for a moment. What is it? From a biological standpoint, it is probably the secretion of certain chemicals in the body in response to some external stimuli. Our adrenaline starts pumping, our hearts start racing. The fight or flight response has been triggered. This is very useful when a disgruntled sabre tooth tiger is staring you down, but is perhaps less so when that trigger never subsides and you respond to every psychological challenge by running or fleeing. There is room for a more liberated approach. Without the story about the fear it is just a set of facts and sensations that are happening; a heart racing, blood pumping, adrenaline rushing. It is the negative story which gives those facts and sensations a "negative" connotation. We could use those same facts and tell a story about a running race and it would have a completely different meaning.

So are we to blame stories? Not quite so. That would just be another story. Stories are simply our ways of parcing out reality. They are quite helpful as long as we do not mistake them as the full truth. Stories are never completely true so it is delusive to search for our ultimate meaning in them. It is more useful to look to stories as a guide to how the outer world is being reflected by our inner world at that moment. We are held hostage by our stories when we cannot see that there are many perspectives and that the ultimate truth, in fact, stands even outside of all of those perpsectives.

Our negative emotions can teach us valuable lessons if we let them. Anytime there is negativity it is an opportunity to look into how we have been hooked into believing something false about ourselves and the world. What are we defending? What are we trying to hold up? What is beneath the fear? What are we afraid of? What are we believing that enables this negativity?

Experiment: Identify something that you are a little bit afraid to do. It should not be something that terrifies you or that you know you "cannot" do. And it should of course be safe. It should, on the other hand, be something that produces a certain degree of anxiety or fear. One beautiful example I am going to borrow from someone who writes on the ET TV Forums. As he was about to leap off a cliff into deep waters below, he kept approaching the cliff and then backing away. Each time he would get close to the cliff edge, he would try to be aware of the feelings, and sensations in his body at that moment. He became keenly attuned to what that experience of fear/anxiety felt like in his body and experience. You can do the same thing, even if it does not involve literally jumping off a cliff. Find something that causes you anxiety and just before you are about to undertake the activity become deeply present and witness the sensations in your body. What are you feeling? Where are you feeling it? What is happening to your body? Are there any thoughts that are accompanying your fears? What are they saying? Feel the difference between almost undertaking the fearful activity and moving back to what is comfortable.

In actuality, for this, it matters not whether you carry out the activity. The purpose of this experiment was to witness and truly understand what your own fear feels like rather than just react as your fear. I would be interested in hearing from you about how the experiment went. Please do write a comment.

Its nice to talk abstractly about negativity and all but don't terrible things happen? Isn't there pain and suffering and misery? These things are negative. How can you say that when there is negativity we have been hooked into a falsehood about the world?

It is a paradox that is difficult to articulate. Let me give you an example from my own life that begins to illuminate what I mean. In my last blog, I wrote about my struggle with mental illness. It has been difficult and painful at times. Yet despite this pain, or more aptly perhaps because of this pain, I sought an end to my suffering which led me to eventually "awaken" Sometimes its as if suffering enables us to see beyond the one who seems to be suffering. In my life, my mental illness has at one level been "negative", at another level it is simply a part of my experience and I am grateful, for what it has taught me and brought me in contact with. If something bad helps you to understand your true purpose and essence - can it be called negative so easily? If it expands your ability to be compassionate is it "bad". Now of course I am "lucky", and the pain in my story is not as deep as many other people experience, but the mechanics are the same. Once you feel your essence, you understand that no matter what someone else does to you or what you experience that may be "negative" there is an untouchable sacredness that has always been with you, will not ever leave you, and cannot be taken away, and you are never the same. This sacredness is unaffected by anything that could ever happen to you. This essence is the real you and it is connected to and part of everything else for lack of better words. When that essence is fully grasped through and through it becomes clearer that the "negative" does not really touch the essence of us. And if it does not touch "us" then isn't it a falsehood? This does not mean that something will never feel "negative" at the time, its just to say that the panoramic perspective is available to us if we can access it. Similarly, please don't take this to mean not to alleviate suffering. I am now going to blatantly and knowingly contradict myself and say suffering is real. Language can be so limiting. At a relative level, suffering does happen and we should do our utmost to relieve it when we see it in the world but at an absolute level, things are simply as they are. True compassion enables us to see that on the one hand there is real pain and misery. In fact, if we look closely enough and do not turn from it -- it is heartbreaking. At the same time, the quivering heart is able to see the essence of all things; that which is beyond the misery it is also able to hold the suffering.


So what should you do when you encounter negativity? What should you do when the flames of anger begin to rise and writhe? What should you do when you are afraid?


If you are able, watch the negativity. Become curious about it. Give it compassionate space and treat it with tenderness. Look deeply into it. Let it be as big as it needs to be. Many people have learned to count to ten when they get angry. It gives them a chance to cool off before they do or say something they regret. It can be a good practice. But often times people continue to tell themselves the story of why this person or that situation made them angry, so instead of cooling off they are feeding the fire of anger. See if you can feel the anger without the story. Concentrate on how the actual feeling of anger lives in the body. See how angry you can get for a moment. Not with some righteous indignation over what happened to you, but to experience the raw and simple energy of anger. What does it feel like? What color is it? What shape is it? What is it doing to your muscles? What is happening in your throat? What is going on in your belly or your heart? Give the anger some compassionate space to exist.

Usually another feeling lurks beneath the anger. Usually we are protecting or defending something. Often we are masking fear or hurt - other "negative" emotions. For me, I know I have reached the bottom of any "difficult" emotions when I begin a particular kind of cry. It is a cathartic cry. It is a cry of reaching and understanding truth. It is accompanied by a sweet tenderness towards the whole situation.



Hastily, we are so apt to write off our "negative" emotions and reach for something "better" but true reality, true love recognizes that these so called negative experiences are just other colors in the rainbow of life. They make the picture vivid and vibrant. True reality embraces them simply because they are. We do not need to fear them. We do not need to run from them. We do not even need to change them. Nothing that is real can ever be harmed so we do not need to worry. That which we perceive as "negative" is just another tool to awaken us from slumber and show us our divinity. So rest in peace the next time something "negative" appears. It is another chance to see yourself and escape the dream.

Dreams

Nights ago I dreamed that something was after my family. I even whimpered aloud as I once did as a little child. When I awakened it was clear that the nightmare had ended. It was clear that the absorbing story that frightened me just a minute ago, was not reality after all. It could have fooled me. It did fool me. The feeling was 0dd because in my life I have been so exceptionally content and happy. It was funny that "I" was not able to meet my dream with the same equanimity that I have been meeting the rest of life. I found myself marveling at this "other world" that managed to emotionally terrify me and handcuff my ability to be present. Yet in actuality the events were imagined. I was on edge. My adrenaline was pumping. It had all felt so real.


What if the world we live in is a lot like that? What if most people live in a dreamlike state; rarely aware of the true reality they could wake up to. Freedom is not the cessation of "bad" things from happening it is embracing what is happening simply because it IS happening. There exists a reality is below the surface of what passes for the real world and is a part of what we call the real world but in actuality it is more "real" than the things we touch, hear, see, smell or taste And yet ironically our access point to that richness of that reality is through thoses senses. We touch the divine through our bodies. Anything you have ever "experienced" of the divine or the formless has come to you through form by your senses. The dream world our minds recreate each moment is part of the real world. Yet have you ever awakened out of a deep slumber and for a few moments not had any part of your story come to consciousness ie) you were just present without referencing a who or a where or a what? Have you ever meditated and melted into a space where only the "isness" of the moment existed, where you were not thinking of a "me", where "every-thing" seemed to almost disappear. There is a richness to a world where we let things "be" as they constitute themselves before us in that moment. In our effort to control our world and rid ourselves of the fear of not knowing, we give a false consistency to the wildness of life, to the "suchness" of unmediated experience. We forget that the world is created anew through our own eyes each and every moment, that each and every moment anything can happen. So your father "always" criticizes the way you dress, and your best friend "always" gets withdrawn when you mention her relationship with her husband. How much does the fact that they acted that way in in the past - color your present moment with them? How much is your present conditioned by their "past' behavior? What would happen if you gave them the space to be whoever they were going to be in the moment you were interacting with them? What if you met them wherever they were and realized that you are both free to act differently at any moment and you both just might? You are not the accumulation of your deeds and no one else is either.

Forgiveness would be more prevalent. Forgiveness would come naturally because we would realize that we are each more than a tally sheet. It would come because we narrowed our lives to the present and gave ourselves the gift of relating to reality and not the "dream" world of what that person or situation was five minutes ago. Holding onto the past is painful. The present is always something we can handle. This does not mean that we need to put up with hurtful behavior, that we cannot remove ourselves from harmful situations, or that we cannot choose to spend time with other people, it simply means that the burden of attachment to something which is not now, is no longer there. Until you have forgiven, you are still in the dream world where at some level you believe you are a victim. Does that sound harsh? I do not mean it to be, I only mean it to help one free oneself. If you have not forgiven someone, then you are telling yourself a story in which you were wronged and that at some level things won't be ok until something else happens. Nothing ever needs to happen for you to be happy. Nothing ever needs to happen for you to be content.



Experiment

What if you really did nothing. Spend 10 minutes alone quietly sitting on a chair or lying in bed when you are not too tired. Language fails here but "try" to do nothing. Truthfully, I find its more like relaxing into nothing. No worries, there is no wrong way to "do" this experiment.



Debrief

What happened at the end of 10 minutes? Did your thoughts slow down? Did the "spaces" between your thoughts increase? Did you find your mind rattling on and on -- if so do you know how it started down that track? Did you find it hard to "do" nothing? Did you have a running commentary about how you weren't doing the exercise correctly? Did you fall asleep? Were you able to sit/lie for the full time? What constituted "doing" or "nothing" for you in the exercise? How do you feel? What were you able to sense during the exercise? What was your breathing like? Are you living your own life or is life living you?



The aliveness of the web of oneness can directly touch us in any moment that we are not ensnared in a believing a story about it. There is no magic to it. Just use your senses; your access point to the divine, to open to the world within the world, by experiencing without conceptualizing and by embracing the moment you are in. How will you know whether or not you are in the dream state? The more aliveness you sense in everything around you, the more your are leaving the dream world. The more your felt connection to that which inhabits the cosmos, the less you are living in the dream world.