The Power of Positive Thinking was published in 1952 and the concept has only gained steam since then. With teachings about the Law of Attraction becoming more mainstream and many new thought leaders teaching us that thoughts become things, it’s easy to feel pressured to always maintain a happy, positive mind, regardless of how our heart is feeling. If our state of mind, whether positive or negative, creates our experience, it seems we cannot afford to indulge anything less than perpetually positive thoughts. We fear we will invite catastrophe if we dared to permit our thinking to slip into any kind of negativity.
Here’s the problem with that approach. We’re human. Living on this Earth plane with lots of other humans and surrounded by an unceasing stream of information, it is not natural, possible, and I will even venture to say healthy, to always be positive. When feelings of frustration, anger, fatigue, guilt, sadness, fear, or any others are felt within, we do ourselves no favor by jamming them into the cellar of our souls while we paste a fake yellow happy face sticker on and say, “Yeah, no, I’m good!” Our bodies are receptacles for our feelings, and when we accumulate many feelings without recognizing, feeling, and releasing them, we start to develop physical symptoms that belie our fabricated positivity.
So what is the middle ground then? Where do we find the balance, the sweet spot, to live a genuinely healthy, happy life? It lies in authenticity. When we give ourselves permission to feel how we truly feel, it is an act of self-love. When we are authentic, we are saying yes to Life, to what IS in this present moment, and that is a place of peace and personal power. When we acknowledge how we feel without judgement, we are giving space and grace for those feelings to be felt, but also for them to move through us and be released. Emotions are energy, and like all energy, they are always moving, and they will move through us if we don’t resist them; if we don’t stuff them down inside because we are afraid of feeling them.
In her touching and insightful book, Dying to be Me, author Anita Moorjani describes this concept that she learned through her near death experience:
When we judge some of our emotions as being negative and try to deny them, we’re suppressing part of who we are. This creates a blockage within us and prevents us from expressing the fullness of our magnificence, just as extracting certain colors from the spectrum on the basis of a moral judgment would truncate the light and make it something it really isn’t.
To be clear though, recognizing and feeling what actually is going on within us doesn’t mean that we have to act on it. We can feel anger without punching someone or something. We can acknowledge our sadness without retreating to our bed for days at a time. In essence what I’m saying is that we have a permission slip to feel how we feel. The irony of it is, when we actually let ourselves feel however we do, without resistance or judgement, the feelings do pass through, and we are left feeling free and light, because we’re not holding “negative” feelings hostage in our mind, body and soul. We are letting Life flow through us, and that, I believe is the point of it all. To be open and spacious enough to taste the whole experience of Life.
