Positive thinking stunts your growth
Importance of re-connecting to the negative
As of recent we have been educated on the importance of positive thinking. We’ve been told by all the modern “gurus” that positive thinking is what will move us forward and give us our dream life. Affirmations, notes on our mirrors, mantras, key words, etc. have become our modern day bible. The underlying belief being if you just focus and think positive enough than you will get what you want. Now there is some truth in this as people can use their thoughts to get into a better feeling state and this can attract more of what they think they want into their life. However more than not I see this fail time and time again as people can’t sustain the energy level required to manifest their dreams and soon fall back into their old patterns.
While we have been bombarded by the “positive thinking generation”, we have simultaneously been taught to ignore, dismiss and devalue negative thoughts and feelings, which has seriously stunted our growth and forward movement, as feeling these states generates a shit ton of energy for transformation when one knows how to use these feelings productively.
I’ve noticed that people are adamantly resistant to feeling sadness, fear and anger, which are often defined as negative emotions and less comfortable to feel than joy, happiness or excitement. I must emphasis feeling here because many people will stay in their stories (thoughts) about how sad, fearful and angry they are, but will never actually feel their emotions. This creates mental masturbation, which is one of the greatest ways to create suffering for yourself. Such people often want to move forward, create change, break through and transform and yet simultaneously feel stuck, report that they feel too much, or the opposite extreme, nothing at all even though there is apparent distress in their body or life. In both these situations a person is on the verge of feeling, however they are resistant to feeling negative/uncomfortable feelings.
Negative emotions
Finding the fuel (energy) for sustainable change
Most of us are familiar with the saying that “life begins at the edge of your comfort zone”. Feeling negative emotions is feeling uncomfortableness. Personally my depth of awareness and ability to have the life I want has come from allowing and feeling negative or uncomfortable emotions. It’s not to stay in those states forever, but instead to gain insight and wisdom through the new perspective in which they offer, and to generate massive momentum to move forward and choose that which is asking to be chosen next in your life.
Learning to drop in and be with uncomfortableness is the first step. Some people however get stuck here and learn to be comfortable with uncomfortableness. This is NOT the point. Uncomfortableness should be uncomfortable and should always, always, always generate movement, action, and change. Nobody earns a medal of honor for bearing or being in suffering the longest.
This brings us to the second and most important step which is learning to move through uncomfortableness. This is essential to all transformation. No transformation will occur without it. To not be thrusted into action through feeling uncomfortableness, is well, just dumb. Its like holding your hand on a hot stove and not moving it because you want to see how long you can endure the pain. No, you must take immediate action and move your hand off the damn stove instantly, less you want to live without a hand! This is what feeling uncomfortable is supposed to generate. Immediate, effective, life saving action.
So hopefully you can extrapolate here but in case its not obvious, when you choose to numb your pain or get rid of your uncomfortable sensation (called symptoms), through medication, surgery, shopping, facebooking or yes even positive thinking, you learn in a way to be comfortable with uncomfortableness, because you suppress that which you don’t want to feel. In that suppression you lose your energy to create any change because you are comfortable and people don’t create change when they’re comfortable. In fact most likely you will just continue your life in the same way you were before the discomfort arose until the next thing starts to break down in your body or life.
My advice would be to feel your feelings, even the negative ones you don’t like or want and let them move you to the next place in life, which is their whole entire purpose in the first place.
Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Tomato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado
Is there another way to sustain easeful and blissful states in your body? In fact there is! You are wired for bliss. There are opioid receptors (pain blockers) that run all along your spine. Endorphins and enkephalins, your body’s natural opioids, get produced when you experience pain and also when you experience enjoyable, high energy states. Your natural opioids find their receptors and light them up, hence you get physiologically rewarded for bliss feeling states.
As a spine specialist I’ve had the pleasure to see what happens when the position, tension and tone (vibration) changes in a person’s spine. When a person has greater freedom and range of motion they are able to live in a higher energy and more blissful state. Inversely when a person has high levels of tension in their spinal cord it is harder for them to take a full breath, to physically move or be flexible, and to be an in open state, which is required for ease and bliss. These individuals can ingest a substance and shift their state temporarily, but when the experience wears off they are still living in the same body that does not feel as free as their substance induced state.
One of the things are hear most often from people who come and see me in my office is that they want to improve their energy levels. Many people don’t sleep well, wake up tired, get tired midday, or some sleep wonderfully and still have low energy and motivational levels. So what is really going on here? Why are we not feeling as energized, motivated and inspired as we would like to feel?
One of the primary goals at Chiropractic Alchemy is to help create an environment that allows for a higher energy state to inform your body-being. We do this through influencing and advancing the nervous system so that it can be a conduit for a higher vibration (energy) to course through it. Higher vibration coursing through your body means that a more highly intelligent or organized energy is informing you. As a result your body functions better, its easy to feel and use your emotions, and creativity, insight and new awareness are increasingly present. This is innovation and advancement of the human body-being in action.
If you are human you have experienced fear. Fear is simply the belief that things are not working or going to work out for you. It comes with the thoughts that you will be hurt, won’t be taken care of or loved, that you are on your own, separate and isolated. Fun times🎉, not.
Fear and excitement are the same energy, simply viewed through different lenses. To un-fear yourself you must see how everything is working for you. How the relationship that just ended is working for you. How getting fired is working for you. How the painful sensation in your body is working for you. How your current income and resources are working for you.
In general disempowerment occurs when you have an experience where you want to feel, think, see or do something and you feel like you can’t. It is an unresourceful inner state that says “I’m powerless, helpless here” and there is no possibility that the situation or you could ever change.
In order to use symptoms you must first shift your relationship to them. We have been very focused on getting rid of symptoms as our relationship to them has been that they threaten us in some way. Perhaps we think they are a threat to our health or an activity we want to participate in. The symptom however, despite what you currently believe, is not the problem. It is only an effect of an out of alignment belief system and its only purpose is to show you that you are out of alignment. They tell you “hey- something in your emotions, thoughts, beliefs or behaviors is ready for an upgrade”. When you shift your perspective in this way you open the door to new possibilities. You are elevating your consciousness right there. When you elevate you can hear your body talk in a different way. Instead of just hearing “this hurts”, you hear new information that may say “hey, you need to stop trying to control everything in your life, you’re making us (muscles, belly, etc.) tense up and hurt”. Now you have more useful information that you can do something with and you are empowered because you can do something about it if you choose. When you are empowered and make changes, your body is empowered, and it naturally begins to heal.
The other conundrum is that when people feel relatively good they often don’t realize that they can feel even better. They create a ceiling for themselves that looks like “I’m doing good and this is as good as it gets.” This may be an unconscious script running in their mind as a result of perceived limitations of how good a person can feel. There may also be underlying beliefs about how good they can allow themselves to feel. Some older belief systems conditioned people that it was bad to feel too good, thus capping what feels permissible.
If we want to claim our birthright we need to raise our standards on what is possible for our well-being and place greater value of feeling great. Being pain or symptom free does not mean your are well. Having only positive emotions or thoughts does not mean your well. Being well means you experience a sense of joy and bliss being alive in your body and you are actively finding ways to increase your capacity to feel even more amazing. 
Say a stranger walked up to you and gave you tickets to watch your favorite musical artist at RedRocks this summer. Prior to receiving these tickets you weren’t even aware that your favorite group was coming to town. What a gift! Later on that day when you get home you look in your bag for the tickets to put them in a safe place and you realize that they are not there. After searching for hours, retracing steps and going over every possible place they could be you give up and deem that the tickets are lost forever.
People use anger in a myriad of unproductive ways. Those that express their anger unproductively use it to blame others for their problems, prove their rightness and feel in control. People also repress their anger unproductively. Doing this allows them to be insignificant, not take a stand for themselves or what they value and not be the authority in their lives. Neither of these ways are healthy, nor do they harness the transformative power of anger.
Regardless of how you have learned to deal with anger in the past the goal of productive anger is to help you be your own authority by moving through victimhood into empowerment. From an empowered place you are the decision maker of what is right and wrong for you and you alone. There is only your standards for your life and you are accountable to keep them. It is moving through layers of conditioning about what you’ve been taught about how things work and who you are, to becoming the determiner, creator and master of your life. Productive anger is key in this process of providing the fuel to transform the places you keep yourself small so that you can shine in your magnificence. Using anger productively is fiercely loving yourself enough to care about your life.
At some point we have all felt the pain of being rejected. Perhaps it was in a relationship where your partner no longer wanted to be with you, or no one seemed to want your skills or services, or perhaps your professional community or group of friend no longer included you.
If you do these “simple” steps you will feel less self-hatred (and other hatred), less displaced anger, less undesirability and more self- acceptance (instead of rejection). You will be acting out of deep care and love and it will free you up for what life wants to give you next. Sometimes we spend so much time resisting what is that is takes years for us to accept what life wants to give us next. Free yourself now so that you don’t spend years in unnecessary suffering.
Would you like the cells of your body to function at a higher level? Curious how? There is much scientifically proven evidence which now indicates that lifestyle choices and emotional states influence how your cells function. What this means is that the food you put in your body, the exercises you engage in and the emotions that you have will influence how your body functions. And there’s more.