One simple way to make life better: expect negative experiences.
When we hold onto the expectation that we should be happy, that we should be able to achieve our goals, that we should feel good all the time, the only thing we do is set ourselves up for massive suffering.
(Sidenote: America marketing/consumerism does NOT help with this. We are bombarded by messages that say we should be happy, and if we are not, then we should buy ____________ so we are happy.)
The human experience is a pretty equal mix of positive and negative. Fact.
And thank goddess! If we didn’t ever feel sad or bad, how would we even know how great glad is?!
When something hard happens in our life and we go about resisting, pushing it away, distracting from it, or immediately trying to fix it, we actually make it a more powerful presence. It goes from a complaint to a shriek — Pay attention to me!
I know most of my life, I’ve been conditioned to distract away from the hard things in life. If I could, I took immediate action to fix it, then I used tv, food, alcohol, internet, to numb out remaining hard feelings. It never used to be in my repertoire to just be with what is. To allow the negative feelings to exist and be felt.
What would happen, if we just allowed bad things to be bad things?
If we let them exist without being in a hurry to change them?
If the thoughts we had were not, “why me?” or “there must be something wrong with me”, but instead, “hmm…what learning might be here?”
What if we gave ourselves EXTRA love rather than beating ourselves up for feeling bad when bad things happen?
What if we allowed ourselves to feel negative emotion all the way through, instead of chopping it off with sugar, alcohol, tv, or internet?
The answer is that bad things would be easier to move through.
When we resist, deflect, or defer painful feelings and experiences till later, we simply push a snooze button.
They still get stored in our bodies.
They still require process and allowing to release.
And stored negative emotions in the body create all sorts of havoc. They make us hesitant, suspicious, untrusting, and less able to connect with ourselves and others. They cause disease. They exacerbate addictive behaviors.
Growing/success as a human is not about feeling less bad. It’s about getting better and better at navigating the experience of feeling bad.
When we get better at experiencing the hard half of life, we get better at life.
Baselines increase.
Goals get achieved (because we don’t fear failure and don’t beat ourselves up when we do fail).
And we get to become the people we are meant to be and do the work we are meant to do, meaning the planetary condition improves.
This is no off/on switch, but rather a process of awareness, deconditioning, and rewiring. Here’s a few tips to get started.
Don’t take bad things personally. (It’s part of the human experience.)
Expect the negative. (instead of “why me?”, it’s “ah, here it is, the other half of my human experience”.)
Use hard times as an opportunity to practice loving yourself extra much. (This decreases suffering every time.)
Realize the worst that can happen is a feeling, and that negative emotion won’t harm you. (It’s just a vibration, and if it’s allowed, meaning processed to the end, it is temporary.)
When you forget all this in the moment, remember after the fact. Learn and let it go.
So…don’t expect the worst. But, do expect that life will throw you amazing highs and terrible lows. Your job is to get better at going through it.
Not sure how to start? Do you feel like you’re trapped in old patterns? I can help you. Shoot me a message and let’s chat.
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