Can We Make Choices to Work with and Through Negative Emotions?
Negative emotions are unavoidable. But we can choose to work with and through them.
Negative emotions: everyone has them, feels them, and experiences them. How that manifests for me is not how it manifests for you. But in our own way, we each experience this.
I started my day with enthusiasm and positive anticipation for what was coming. My morning reading ritual started got underway – but then, noting the time, I had to end it early to post my blog and prep myself for a Zoom call.
Got that done. Great. Forced myself to take my morning walk. This was largely good – but autumn is here, and I was chilled for most of it.
Got home, had breakfast, and considered my next move. This blog needed to be written. Meditate, see if a topic comes to me.
I chose to sit on the deck in the sun. It was warm enough, now. But my YouTube meditation vid began with a political commercial – which angered me. Then, the landscapers started all their mowers and blowers at the same time. I tried to stay with my meditation – but then a bee landed on my skin, causing me to snap back to the moment to shake it off.
Bothered, I couldn’t return to my meditative state. I decided to get back to my office and get to work.
I responded to some emails, then contemplated multiple distractions. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t shake the negativity.
Still without a topic for this article, I pondered the feeling of despair I had. Then, a quote from Paulo Coelho’s Brida came to mind,
“When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way.”
That restored missing clarity.
How?
Recognize that any path has challenges
For years, I’ve been working on my life philosophy. Pathwalking – choosing and walking the path that feels the most genuine and right to and for me.
As my philosophy has gained more and more definition over the years, I’ve been working to better recognize and understand the underlying tenets of it.
- Mindfulness
- Positivity
- Conscious reality creation
All three of these tenets are essential to choosing to live life on my terms. Without them and their practice, I might as well stop working to live life and instead just let life live me.
Though each of these ideas is mutually exclusive – like the more common tenets of religion, morality, and spirituality – together, they offer the clearest paths for our lives.
Yet as the Coelho quote points out – disappointment, defeat, and despair all will be found on the paths we traverse.
Today, for example, negative emotions related to multiple factors are eating at me. Seeing that political ad got me thinking about all the things way, way outside of my control that bothers me. This brings on a feeling of despair.
As I prepare my next novel for publishing next week, I looked at my sales totals for this year. Despite my efforts – they are disappointing.
Together, combined with other factors I’d rather not manifest by sharing – I am feeling a bit defeated.
But I know that I have found my path. And I must not be afraid. Mistakes are an everyday part of life – and all the factors the Coelho quote shares are not telling me to stop. Quite the opposite.
The message here is to accept what we cannot control, bad is unavoidable – but we can choose to walk through it time and again.
Negative emotions are not bad
I’ve written a couple of times about the matter of toxic positivity. The main issue is that – while positivity is good because it offers a positive perspective – toxic positivity tries to negate the negative.
We must have negative emotions to truly experience good ones. The Universe is full of paradoxes – yin and yang, black and white, up and down, and so on. We need both equally.
Negative emotions are a part of life. And they are not bad because they can serve to empower us further.
Sometimes, when I feel bad – after the initial visceral feeling – I am fueled to take action. Maybe I get it into my head to say, “That’s enough of this bullshit. I’m going to act for my own good!”
For those who don’t choose to wake up and live life to the fullest – people who merely exist day to day and follow the herd, letting life live them – it appears an easier path. And maybe, for some, it truly is.
But if it was the easier path – how come so many on it find nothing but things to complain about? How come they all seek a way off that path without truly looking for another?
A perfect example of this comes from a political issue. “Obamacare.” Some want it gone. But do they offer anything to replace it with? No. And that’s the equivalent of removing a path but not offering another in its place. How does that do anyone any good at all?
This is why Coelho says, “When you find your path, you must not be afraid.” Because choosing for yourself is not easy.
But even on the worst day – this path I have chosen is better than all prior attempts I made to follow the herd.
How the tenets of Pathwalking handle negative emotions
The underlying tenets of my Pathwalking philosophy recognize that shit happens. Life is never just a path of awesomeness. There will be bad times, lousy experiences, and situations we’d seriously prefer to avoid.
This is where the tenets of my philosophy come into play.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is conscious awareness. It is knowing, here and now, where, what, why, how, who, and when you are. It’s engaging your conscious mind, which opens you to recognize and acknowledge yourself in the only time that’s real – the present.
When you are mindful, you are consciously aware of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. That informs you of your conscious mindset/headspace/psyche self. That, in turn, lets you see your ego – which is in many respects how you project yourself to the outside world – and your subconscious mind.
Mindfulness lets you see your values, beliefs, and habits – which all live in your subconscious.
That informs you of who, what, where, why, how, and when you are.
Positivity
Once you are working with the conscious awareness of mindfulness, you can see your approach to life. Do you come at it from a place of negativity or positivity?
If your life is dominated by negative emotions – and you feel you’re not good enough, are lacking, are unworthy, undeserving, and the like – that’s a negative perspective and approach. Mindfulness is the open door for you to walk through to change it.
Choosing to take a positive approach means you seek, find, and/or create ways to deal with the negatives to build positives. See opportunity in a crisis. Hope in despair. Possibility and potential rather than impossibility and failure.
Choosing positivity over negativity via mindfulness ultimately empowers.
Conscious reality creation
We create our realities. And if we are not conscious of this – we do so subconsciously.
This is why if you’re not mindful – nor working with positivity – you can easily find yourself in a position you’d rather not be. Negative emotions, bad happenings, lousy situations, and a sense of overall doom and gloom will draw that to you.
Believe it or not, the Law of Attraction is a law of nature. And it’s as impartial as the Law of Motion, Law of Gravity, and so forth. When you are conscious of this – you can work with it to draw to your life what you seek.
When we don’t work with conscious reality creation – we create subconsciously. And that means things that happen to and around us impact us sometimes more than they should.
This in no way, shape, or form denies that negative emotions and bad things happen. Of course, they do. That’s life. But once they occur – this is how we move past them. It’s the decision to walk our chosen path and get through all the obstacles, challenges, obstructions, and other fear-inducing matters that will arise.
Negative emotions are unavoidable. But we can choose how long they hold onto us, and how to work with and through them. There are innumerable paths with amazing possibilities and potential beyond our wildest imaginations when we have the courage to walk them.
Are you choosing to live life or let life live you?
This is the five-hundred and thirteenth exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – using mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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