You’ve been doing your spiritual work; affirmations, visualization, meditations, and life is going pretty well. All of a sudden, something you perceive as negative pops up in your life and you are completely blown away! How did this happen? Negative experiences aren’t supposed to happen to someone surrounding themselves with positive energy, right?
If we’re not careful, this is a trap that we can all get caught in. When we first begin to shift the way in which we live our lives and view the world, we can be constantly caught off guard by the challenges we face. We can start to question all of the work that we have been doing; certain none of it was working if “bad” things still happen in our life!
This kind of thinking was the ego’s way of sabotaging the progress that we’re making. It is a bit silly to thing that “bad” things should never happen to good people. Do we really think the world was created to punish the “bad” and reward the “good”? Who determines what is good and what is bad anyway?
Some might say that God is the one who determines what is right and what is wrong. With so much divisiveness in the world with respect to religion, the next question quickly becomes whose God? Is it the God of Judaism, Christianity or Islam? It’s been said that there is no right or wrong, there is simply what is, and what is not. What in interesting way to shift your perception of the world! Instead of coming from a place of judgment, look at the world in terms of what is and what isn’t and choose your response to that present moment.
Instead of allowing a negative experience to shift our vibration, making us angry or depressed, we must learn to accept that the experience has happened and figure out how to move on from it. There is no point in getting angry, or crying ourselves to sleep over things that cannot be undone. If there is a lesson to be learned, we should be open to that lesson so we don’t have to go through that experience, or another one like it again. This doesn’t mean that we won’t have emotional reactions anymore, but we can choose to refuse to permit negative experiences to consume us or our lives for extended periods of time like we used to.
We have had to find meaningful and effective ways to shift my mood from negative to positive when those challenging experiences come our way. Listen to happy music, take a moment to enjoy nature, play with a child or animal. The key is to find an activity that will elevate your emotions. It’s okay to feel bad, you just don’t want negative emotions to take over and become a constant state of being!
There are many different ways to shift one’s energy. Whether it is playing with your kids, exercising, or simply reading a book, we all need to find “go-to” strategies that we can turn to when life presents us with obstacles. How do you turn your lemons into lemonade?