Is Trying to be Perpetually Positive a Negative?

Is Trying to be Perpetually Positive a Negative?

This will probably go against the beliefs and teachings of a lot of people but oh well. I have to put this out there. I am so over being told that to be a Spiritually awakened person you must focus on the positive all the time. Really? As always I can only speak from experience…Nothing could be further from the truth!

I cringe to think of all the years I spent equating Spiritual with ‘must be positive’. It seems even when we are on the Spiritual quest we are yet again made to feel ashamed and a failure if we do not strive to ignore and hide the fact that we still feel negative.

All of our deepest insights comes from our feelings! We live in a construct of oppositions. We cannot know freedom without constraint. We cannot know joy without sadness. We simply cannot experience all the wonderful joys of life without comparing it to the lows we have experienced. When I say lows, I mean lows! It is about taking extremes and bringing them into balance within ourselves. Think about it. When did you take the biggest steps forward in your life? I am guessing when living daily as you were became personally unacceptable. You were either forced out of fear or inspired out of love to take a step in a different direction.

Reflecting back on my life, I am able to see clearly that it was never the good times that inspired me to make changes. Unfortunately I was always so intent on avoiding the uncomfortable feelings arising due to believing that all I had to do was ‘think’ positive. Rather than help, all that did was compound the problem. Not only would I be unhappy with the situations, but I would beat myself up because I was not seeing the ‘positives’. It became a vicious cycle until I simply could no longer function. But…when I finally made a change, I still ended up in the same types of experiences  with the same negative feelings hounding me. Lesson not learned!

After literally years of introspection I came to realize that the only time I really made any progress with my life was to allow all the negative feelings to come up and actually analyze them. Rather than blocking them and thinking I was just being negative, I took the the time to figure out what the core issue was when situations and people triggered negative feelings and reactions.

We do not make concrete changes with our lives unless we understand exactly what needs changing. We must make these changes within ourselves based on our own inner guidance and not what a book or a ‘guru’ or anyone tells us. Don’t get me wrong. It is imperative that we seek the knowledge of skills on how to be our own creators and I encourage it, but in the end all the real wisdom comes from going within and applying that knowledge to understanding our fears!

Another key aspect is refusing to gauge your progress and sense of self based on anyone or anything outside of yourself!! Just stop! As long as you are comparing yourself to anyone or any ideal presented to you, you will remain stuck. There is a huge difference between someone or something inspiring you vs. making you think you are less than because you have not reached that level of success.

When you wade through all the new age garbage out there, you will find some age old wisdom…the greatest awakenings, the deepest insights on life have come from what is called ‘the dark night of the soul’ or from a place of feeling immense pain!

Stop looking for the band-aid fixes and positives in situations where you are feeling horrible and dig into the root of where these feelings are coming from.  There are only two states of being we experience instantly…love or fear. Every single emotion, perception and reaction to our lives comes from one of these two states of being. Recognizing, acknowledging, and then reflecting on where our fears lay waiting to sabotage our best efforts is the only way we can be rid of them. Once we comprehend the blockages our fears create, we are free to practice new behaviors and thinking patterns to remove them. It is so simple. We cannot ever simply jump from negativity to positivity without the understanding our own personal GPS system that takes us to either of these places. This inner GPS is our intuition, that initial feeling we have before our mind instantly takes over creating the emotion programmed into us since childhood.

So go ahead, feel it all…the good, the bad and the ugly too..especially the ugly….and be positive that this is when you begin to understand your true power of creation.

~Anna

Jeff Brown states it much more eloquently below. Please take a few minutes and visit his website. He is a very inspiring writer!

“PS (Perpetual Positivity Syndrome) is one of the most common obstructions to awakening on the spiritual path. Defined as ‘the addictive need to default to positivity under any and all circumstances’, it prevents a maturation in the deep within because sufferers refuse to be present for all that is. Symptoms include a constant need to find the light in every situation, a tendency to forget or ‘rise above’ the negative aspects of their partners, an inability to fully support and hold the space for other’s suffering, and a turning away from the growth work demanded by life’s challenges. Instead of forging a grounded, discerning positivity in the heart of all that is, they jump to the light, while averting the shadows that inform it. They reactively bliss-trip, when lessons are waiting in the wings to be learned.

Those who suffer with PPS are often of the illusory view that they had perfect childhoods or that they have moved beyond the shadow, but they are sadly mistaken. If anything, their obsessive clinging to the ‘positive’ is rooted in their unresolved emotional material: pain and anger that will only come back to haunt them. At the end of the day (when the darkness settles in…), there can be no light without shadow. And no substitute for hard-earned transformation.”

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.