Positivity as a Healing Quality
Kelli
Positivity...blah, blah, blah
If you browse around zaadz often (or are lucky enough to get to hang out with zaadzsters!), then you have heard a lot about positivity. Once you hear the word multiple times every day, you may start to become desensitized to its meaning (i did). And, as Martin Seligman points out in Authentic Happiness, a lot of people think that postivity is "fluffy" (not as cool mel uses the word ;-)) "out there" or "unrealistic". Then a study came out that stated that depressed people see the world more realistically than the rest of us, and it proved that optimistic people really are wackos. It may be true that depressed people see the world realistically- on the material level- but they certainly aren't the happiest people, are they? I mean, they're depressed!
So, I have a choice whether to live my life as a realistic person who takes things at face value, or I can expect a whole lot more from the world- and myself- and set my expectations higher. I can be grounded and happy at the same time. I can expect for those "unattainable" qualities like joy, exuberance and laughter to permeate every hour of my life, and spill into the lives of others around me as well. I can wake up to the fact that I have been realistic my whole life and it's gotten me...well...a whole lot of realism (and not so much faith, or excitement...or laughter). As stated in Authentic Happiness, optimistic people have longer life spans, happier marriages and better health. The bottom line is that I am willing to sacrifice a bit of so-called "realism" for a new outlook that will improve my quality of life.
New Possibilities
A positive mindframe opens doors that are closed to us when we have a more negative mindset. Paulo Coehlo describes the desperation and lack of clarity we experience in challengening situations as staring straight at a black tunnel. He says, "When we are faced with something that really threatens us, it is impossible to look around, although this is the correct and safer procedure. We can't see clearly, use logic, gather information that can help us and those who try to get us out of that situation. "
Postive emotions facilitate creative problem solving. If we think about our own lives, we can see examples of this. If we are upset (we got into a car accident, the dry cleaner stained our shirt again, etc.) and someone tries to cheer us up, they may start by offering alternative ways of looking at the same situation. Why? So we can open our minds to the realization that there are multiple perspectives on the same issue. In other words, they help us become clearer. In the movie What the Bleep Do We Know, they refer to the detached, clear entity in a situation as the observer. We can be our own observer. To be our own observer requires us to take a step back, snap out of our current tunnel-vision perspective, and contemplate all of the approaches available to us. I think that's a cool idea- to be the observer in our own lives.
To use an analogy, our brain is like a map, and our thoughts are like the roads. When something occurs in our life, we come to a fork in the road. Do we turn right- and take the same attitude we always take- expecting the worst and talking ourselves out of possibilities? Or do we turn left- and try to see things from an alternate perspective? Turning left takes extra effort because we don't go in that direction very often so it is unfamiliar and even a bit scary. We may make a very sloooow turn onto that left road, not sure of where it will take us- but that is new and exciting! With every thought we have, we are turning down another road which will take us to a new destination (peace? or anger?) Whichever direction we choose to go with our thoughts is important 1) Because we think in a stream of consciousness, associative type of pattern, where one thought leads to another and develops momentum in our mind and 2) Thoughts lead to actions.
There's evidence.
From a scientific perspective, every thought we have creates a connection between the corresponding neurons. The more often we have a particular thought, the stronger the synapse (or connection) becomes and it is harder and harder to break it. When we decide to redirect our thoughts, we are actually working at redirecting those neurons to establish new patterns. When we stop having a particular type of thought ("I'm lazy" or "I can't do it", etc.), the neural connection dies and our brain is re-wired. As they say in What the Bleep, our brain looks like a thunderstorm in the the sky- with all the neurotransmitters firing and connections constantly being made and broken. The cool thing is that we do have some control over what goes on up there!
Thought Stopping
Something that has come out of the cognitive school of psychology is a technique called "thought stopping". This is something a person can do on their own, whenever they want to. You just have to be a little cognizant of your own thoughts, and their effect on you. If you know yourself well enough to realize that jealous, angry, or worrisome thoughts often get you down, you can train your brain to reject them, in a sense. Whenever you have an angry/jealous/ worrisome thought, you can tell yourself to stop. Then you can either meditate and try to clear your mind, or simply redirect your thoughts to other things you'd prefer to think about. Some people are visually oriented and like to picture an actual stop sign in their head, or they like to envision that they are closing a door on the "room" of their negative internal banter. Either way, it can be an interesting tool.
Positivity + Our Body
Not only does a postive mentality boost our mental health, it increases our physical health as well. It has been proven that cancer patients with a positive attitude are more likely to survive than their negative-oriented peers. Having positive thoughts also reduces stress, which is a major killer in our modern society. Because of the strong mind-body connection, an easy way for us to relax is to generate positive, healing thoughts in our mind.
There was a study done in India by Dr. Madan Kataria. He wanted to know if "laughter is the best medicine", so he got a bunch of people together, had them laugh daily, and analyzed the results. It turns out that daily laughter reduced their stress levels and improved their health. Since that study was done, there have been numerous laughing clubs formed in India, Europe and the U.S. There is a short movie called The Laughing Club of India about this subject.
It's a Healing Thing
Working for positive thoughts and attitudes is a healing process. When we think positively, we protect ourselves from our damaging thoughts and emotions, which are our worst enemies because they develop into stubborn patterns that can sometimes spin out of control. If we are able to change our emotions and our thoughts so that they are empowering and positive, this can literally transform our lives. Our potential to grow and to positively influence others lies in each thought and feeling we generate. Our body, mind, spirit and personality will radiate with joy and happiness when we make the conscious decision to work for healing.
Access: Public
authentic happiness
December 2006 
I like to see it as just an openness to what is. Thanks for the post. I will have to fully digest it when I am less tired. Peace, Kari
Excellent! Fabulous! Increible!
Sometimes I wake up and I’m not feeling so hot, so I have to transcend the day. I usually end up much better than where I started. I do A LOT of positive thinking, affirming, smiling, saying thank you, walking, being still; tonight I danced in the shower while singing Erykah Badu!
You have gotta do what you gotta do! Our problems, negative patterns, depression, and insecurities don’t usually go way by themselves; you have to take some kind of action! I am a firm believer in grace, but you have to do some work on your own. We have to invest in our own lives and take the reins, even if we follow a path.
Buddha, who was a pretty cool fellow said, “We are what we think. All that we are arises withour thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.” Thus, the abstract mind creates the material reality.
The mind is the most important frontier to master, and yet we often assume our thought patterns/ feelings are who we are, fostering a fragmented and perhaps distorted identity.
A positive attitude is an affirmation; it is a wish. With an affirmation I tell myself and the universe: “This is what my true heart wants; this is how things can look when they arise from a deep essential love.”
Thanks K — you are wonderful.
Thanks for your comment, and for sharing your experiences. :-) Dancing to Erikah Badu is always an awesome experience!!
I think that few people realize the power of optimism until they actually try it for themselves. Probably the first step- which you mentioned- is to know that your thought patterns/feelings are not you. If we can learn to take a step back and witness their effect on us, we will realize that they are a tool that can work for us or against us. It’s another fork in the road: we can work towards healing, or we can work towards destruction.
Kelli - this is an incredible post! Thanks so much for sharing.
I’ve been accused of being an eternal optimist - which makes me happy. =)
Now I admit, we need some realism (which is the optimist who has her feet on the ground), but I know that the more I focus on all the “bad stuff” that may happen, the more it manifests in my life.
I would much rather focus on incredible possibilities and only have 1/2 of them happen, than to focus on the potential negatives that shut me off from even that.
Your blog is so rich - I could comment on about a dozen things. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll just say thank you for the inspiration!
Nancy, I totally agree. It is possible to be optimistic and grounded at the same time.
Think of electricity, if you are not grounded you're potentially destructive whether you are positively or negatively charged. In human terms the grounded positive charge is optimum but a grounded negative charge can lead to great insight and awakening also. Being grounded is key. Without darkness there would be no enlightenment. For nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
Both the positive and negative require great amounts of energy to sustain but the neutrality of non-judgement, stillness, allows the flow of great amounts of energy with little or no effort. The greatest healing occurs when we see that the darkness and the light are just varying degrees of the same one thing, not opposites. That's Grounded Awareness, Consciousness.
Please pardon the pontificating, Kelli. I enjoy immensely your intelligent, wise, and thought provoking posts. Nancy's right, they are so rich. Namaste-
Rod- Thanks for your comment. I especially like this sentence: ”Both the positive and negative require great amounts of energy to sustain but the neutrality of non-judgement, stillness, allows the flow of great amounts of energy with little or no effort.”
You're right, whenever we have a strong feeling - whether positive or negative- it takes a lot of our energy to sustain it. Attachment and aversion can both be deleterious….but neutrality is powerful because it allows for anything to be possible. Providing a neutral territory allows for others to express themselves freely. Neutrality is also the nature of unconditional love. This is because we do not pick & choose who we care for when we love unconditionally- we just give love to whomever is an open recipient. We do not judge others as being “worthy” or “unworthy” of our love. We just love. This is what your company- LOA is all about!! It is so cool. :-)
As for the usefulness of optimism & pessimism, or positivity & negativity- I believe that both are absolutely necessary and natural. I think we need to let ourselves feel the 'bad stuff', i.e. sadness, frustration, grief, as well as the good stuff. It's important to address these emotions and to experience catharsis (on a large or small scale). But I also think that we can use our minds to decide what overall mental state we would like to cultivate for ourselves. I have learned through my own experience that optimism provides fertile soil for my dreams to actualize and for my clarity to grow. Therefore, I try to cultivate optimism in my life as much as possible while still allowing all types of emotions and thoughts (bad & good) to come and go like waves.
You express your Self beautifully Kelli. I just noticed your comment on my first (of two) blog. I like what I see - I believe you are on a great path!
Nam myoho renge kyo.
I watched a short National Film Board of Canada film called “cosmic zoom” when I was a young child. It was a very innovative film which took the viewer on a cosmic ride from the infinitely small to the infinitely large. I remember that it left an impression on my mind of how we all live in our own small world ….oblivious to the amazing dimensions of life that are not a part of our everyday experience.
Another example of this is all the people who are interacting with you through this forum, with each other on this website and in fact in all aspects of our social lives. With each new set of squiggly lines that appear in this virtual part of your world, you know that another living creation of the universe is connecting with you; another living being that has picked up on your vibration and is now reflecting it back to you.
… But what is out there? … What is in here? As you've seen “What the Bleep”, you are undoubtedly familiar with the idea that even science itself is beginning to reach the limitations of its own inherent dualistic nature. It's validating to see that the meditative techniques of ancient sages, yogi's and yogini's is being seriously considered by Science. Every human being already intrinsically knows that this world and the nonstop experience of life is the most amazing thing of all and totally beyond any explanation. How can this totality of experience be explained when the process of explanation is itself embedded within the very thing to be explained? It is when this is fully realized that our endless search for knowledge is seen for what it is; an illusory, unobtainable goal that keeps our minds entrenched in the same view of reality. By wanting happiness, we guarantee we will never get it. To let go and be free, you must simply let go. If you don't break the habit of attachment and follow in your own habit of trying to grip even more firmly the concept of “letting go”, you will be simply repeating yourself and attaching to yet another idea.
Paradoxically, it is the minds unique ability to learn that is also responsible for its own lack of appreciation of the wonder of existence. And when we lack wonder about life, that is when we can bring harm and suffering to others. For if we truly are wonder-struck, we would be full of wonder for all that we experience and we would be far less inclined to bring suffering to others.
The ability to learn is our most unique quality but it is also what lies at the root of our own ignorance of the wonder that surrounds us at every moment of our lives. Learning is non other than conditioning and habituating. How can we learn anything unless it is habituated and remembered? Anything and everything we have now come to know must have first been habituated and remembered. Yet it is by conditioning that everything that surrounds us and is relegated to some prop in the background or our lives. It is then the melodrama of our human lives that becomes the focus of our attention. This world is a restless world, full of people who are easily bored and need constant stimulation. Many cannot spend time being alone in the absence of others or in the absence of conditioned entertainment. Being easily bored is a sign of not recognizing the inherent wonder that surrounds you.
When there is a deep connection with your environment, art and science, external and internal, love and hate, all dualistic poles merge together naturally. Compassion becomes effortless and boredom evaporates on its own. Everything is seen as not one, but beyond one indivisible whole. Science is the pursuit of truth, reality. It's a reconnection with something that we have alienated. We are trying to rediscover ourselve, recover from the natural unnatural schism. Art is the natural welling up of creativity within ourselves and in this way mirrors the creativity that arises in every “external” experience we lay witness to. Again, it is a reconnection. That same creativity manifesting in the “outside” world is no different in quality to the creative waves that ripple through us….giving rise to new thoughts, new feelings, new emotions. Love is an innate desire for something or someone to make us feel whole because we somehow don't feel whole without it. Hatred is the equal and opposite thing but of the same quality….we don't feel relaxed or natural in the presence of some other equally valid experience of the universe (usually another human being). That other living being, in pursuing his or her own bliss, unwittingly brings about suffering to you. When we have the wisdom to see that their bliss is no difference in essence than your own, opposites unite. We are all after the same bliss and we all have baggage which creates ignorance. So in the pursuit of our own bliss, we accidentally bring harm to others. Yet it is the illusion that there is something to want that itself propogates a false bliss based on attachment. The bliss of the great yogi's and yogini's transcends the normal conditional bliss for this reason. In meditative equipoise, those who understand are able to directly experience of bliss of existence itself which transcends any illusion that this bliss is attached to any appearance (i.e. any particuliar living being). It is the experience that all living beings are each themselves the source of great bliss….all coming from the transcendantal nondual. Thus compassion is natural and completely unmanufactured and boredom is dispelled because it is seen as arising from one's own ignorance of the wellspring of creativity that surrounds us at every moment and in every place.
Positivity becomes genuinely healing when it leads us to the experience of bliss arising directly from pure existence itself and the absolute good which transcends relative good and bad and relative positive and negative. It is our own experiental ignorance which creates dualism of good and bad, positive and negative. When we don't have a direct taste of the nondual, we collect together a set of appearances and solidify them into an illusory object called “ego”. The more we feel and fool ourselves in the existence of “ego” as an entity separate from the “external” world, the further away we move from genuine peace. We must use relative concepts of good and bad, positive and negative to move us towards meditation where we can ulitimately unite these 2 opposites by directly experiencing the nondual reality which gives rise to them both. Out of that genuine taste of reality will come a natural transcedent and equal love for all living beings. We become the universal mother, seeing all as our children, be they good or bad. Those who bring suffering to us are seen as chlldren who are themselves trapped in degrees of their own ignorance. Suffering arises as a natural consequence of ignorance. They are to be loved no more nor less than children who do not bring suffering.
Like us all, keep searching for your bliss and becoming aware of any suffering you bring to others
… from another part of the universe reflecting your own wisdom back to you.
Gien, Thank you for that insightful post. While reading your post, I realized that it is full of paradoxes, just like life! A lot of it reminded me of the Tao Te Ching.
I agree that the ego is the one thing that stands between us & genuine peace. The shattering of the ego is a definitely a worthwhile process, but it is slow & painful. It's like chipping away at a stone (stubborn, hard stone!).
** I want to make an adjustment to what I said here, based on new information I recently learned. :-) I just read a short excerpt calld “Egolessness” by Ken Wilber, in which he talks about integrating the ego (not throwing it out). Integral philosophy is about transforming all parts of ourselves (weak & strong) into tools for growth. I used to believe that we had to 'lose' our egos in order to become a vessel for goodness and strength. Now i believe that our ego can be transformed into a powerful tool that we can use to connect to the world and to accomplish a lot of things. We just need to learn how to train our ego so that it doesn't get out of control, and we aren't completely driven by the ego's desires. If we feed our ego patience and love, and keep reminding it that “yes, we are safe” and “yes, we have everything we want and need”, it can work for us to help us achieve our dreams. Not an easy task, but an interesting idea, no?
From all written above, i think “Negative Thought Stopping” is the most apliccable tool in my daily life. I am often negative, and stopping to think about negative things perhaps makes me realize that its all a vicious cycle; that the non-integrated part of me wants to keep things the way they presently are, it wants to keep the status quo. It doesn't want to die. NEGATIVITY doesn't want to die, at least it doesn't want to die abrubtly. NEGATIVITY can't die abruptly , it will only die through transformation. STOPPING is the first step into transforming negativity. Perhapsm after STOPPING many times, I will find the space to approach the same situation that is causing the negativity with a creative mind. A different kind of thinking. A lighter thinking. Positive Thinking.
Moshepop - What a great insight. Negative thought stopping is definitely a first and critical step to changing patterns of negative thinking/self-talk. After all, we have to become conscious of it and truly own it before we're able to transform it. One of the most powerful concepts I learned in my Spiritual Psychology program is that true healing/release comes from the application of love (vs. just understanding) to the parts inside that hurt - in other words, to the non-integrated part of you. Maybe a loving dialogue with the non-integrated part of you could be added to the tool box to help bring about that different kind of thinking you desire? In both my own personal experience and my experience of working with clients, those parts usually have pretty good reasons for wanting to hang on – most of the time, they're just trying to protect us from getting hurt in the best way they know how. By loving them, and making friends with them, we're able to work in partnership with them to come up with a new game plan. Just a thought - use it if it works!
Kelli - I'm so happy to have initially responded to this blog and to now have the pleasure of reading all the great comments. You have truly inspired people. Thanks!
Wow! These are really great, insightful comments. KW is right-on in my book; integration is the way! The only variant I offer is based on the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin. There is the concept of the lesser (shoga -Jap.) and the lofty (Taiga - Jap.) ego.
From this perspective it could be likened to the chem. lab experiments we used to have to do - titrating chemicals until a reaction occurrs (color changes, a precipitate forms, something stinky is formed, etc…) As we convert more of the lesser ego (marked by all the limiting and limited attributions generally applied to the “ego”) into the function of the lofty ego, what emerges is our true Self; in Buddhism referred to as Buddha, or Buddha Nature.
This is definitely a long-term project and is consistent with much of the previous comments inasmuch as sincere efforts and determination are needed. This process is termed “The Human Revolution” in my 'Sangha'. We transform the inner workings of our negative mind and bring forth our innate wisdom and compassion.
I hope my comments are not too off-target or taken as an authoritative declaration of the ultimate truth. This is just how I have come to understand this realm, based on the sutra teaching that admonishes and encourages us to “become the master of your mind, and not let your mind become your master.”
This is my truth, based on my 33 years of untiring and unceasingly joyous practice of chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo as a practitioner of Nichiren's Buddhism within the SGI-USA organization - http://www.sgi-usa.org. Thank you all for inspiring my writing this evening. All of your comments are nothing short of brilliant!! Deep bows, jb