It’s Always There. Lurking. Waiting for you to let down your guard and take control...
Your Negative Mind
Your monkey mind. Negative patterning. Reasons why not. Pessimistic thoughts. The negative cycle.
We all have a place that we go inside our head that is totally not helpful to anything we want to become or achieve. And yet, it is so alluring to stay there, to listen to the voices, to heed the call of the ever so powerful negative.
The thoughts that won’t stop.
The scenarios that haunt your insomniac mind in the middle of the night.
The flashes of fear based outcomes that cannot be stopped.
The should have/would have/could have revisions of a scenario that already happened.
Extreme versions and habitual versions of a self that thrives on worst case cogitations can catch you aware…or unaware.
As far as I can tell the socially approved solution to the negative mind doesn’t actually face the negative mind.
Think positive.
Control your thoughts to be what you want to experience.
Focus on what you want.
Feel the good in your life.
Well, I’m not going to say these methods don’t work. I will say that they aren’t very embodied. They are ignoring a lurking current in your thought stream, your emotional awareness, and most importantly your body’s energy.
Your unconscious creates more powerfully than your conscious mind.
By ignoring the negative place you have inside you, you really are not gaining anything you desire in life. A bandaid positive fixation point that exists in the hopes of changing something doesn’t accomplish much. The negative won’t go away unless it is faced, not ignored.
Is there a way to work with the negative that isn’t overly focused on the positive?
Absolutely. But a warning, it involves not only facing your negative mind but curiously learning about it.
Whenever we have parts of our psyche that we want to instinctually ignore or avoid it’s best to befriend them instead. By the way we may want to consider that these parts of ourself come back to visit us when we are in a weakened state for somer reason and control us more strongly than if we had just faced them head on.
This word. Befriend. What do I mean by it? When we meet someone for the first time, we tend to get to know them to figure out if we want to deepen into a relationship with them or avoid them moving forward, right?
The hardest part about this negative mind thing is that we really can’t do the oh so comfortable avoiding thing. We are inevitably going to run into this part of ourselves over and over and over again. Embracing this fact requires acknowledging the inevitable.
Since you are never going to get away from this part of yourself, the only thing you can do is deepen into relationship with it.
There is simply no other solution.
Tolerate, willfully ignore, pretend it doesn’t exist, or get to know it and figure out how to work together with it.
The choice is yours, as usual.
Free the Beast!!!
The negative mind needs to be heard, not corralled.
The second you start to try to put your negative mind away into its safe little box, you’re feeding its power.
It WILL take over when you are down, out, or incapable of controlling it.
When you hyper focus on thinking positive, you aren’t doing anything with the negative itself. It still exists. It is simply lying dormant. This is why the negative comes out when you least expect it or don’t want it.
By learning how it thinks, how it gets triggered, how it gets activated you can start to come to a certain sense of self acceptance that is greater than only accepting the parts of yourself you like or want or are easy to accept.
Getting creative with hearing the negative’s own style of thought, and forcing yourself to actually listen to it, creates a sense of wholeness and space for all of who you are.
This negativity inside you? It’s not going to go anywhere except into trauma, disease, and suffering…unless you face it head on.
There is a specific kind of bravery in people that do true transformational work. They can say to themselves, “I know what it is to hate.” Or “I understand the instinct to die right now.” When it comes down to it, we all have a death current. We all have a hate current. Through these currents we will eventually, if we choose to engage with them, also learn how to surrender into our own light. This surrender does not occur in spite of the negative thoughts. It certainly won’t happen by avoiding them. It only happens in accepting ourselves as whole beings, negative mind intact.
Bodies And Minds NEED Bridging.
Thoughts NEED Space to be Heard and Aired.
To give space for these negative mind thoughts to come up and into the light creates the bridge. However, I am going to twist this here into my own flavor of important information. Pay attention.
The negative mind is best freed to express itself when you aren’t triggered, stressed, emotional, anxious, etc. The negative mind is better to explore when you are as close to ground zero as you can be (a horse therapy term that I hope translates in this case). Here is where your negative mind become a clear aspect of yourself instead of an all consuming identity that has taken over control of your mind.
Know Thyself
At this point, it might be good to mention that negative mind cycling comes up more in certain situations than others, usually when you feel unsure or insecure. Knowing that, it’s beyond important to get to know what triggers your negative mind beyond the obvious.
I can’t tell you how many times I have had to point out to women that their negative mind gains more power before they bleed or during their cycle. That’s just one example of a trigger. Perhaps there’s a birth or death day of a loved one that cyclically creates an alliance with the negative mind. Maybe there’s a certain feeling (positive or negative) that feeds it’s flames. Negative mind definitely gains traction in circumstances where there is abuse triggers or boundary encroachments. When you feel like you can’t be you and stifle yourself, your negative mind usually has something to think about it.
You could have a lot of triggers that you don’t understand or realize are there. This keeps the negative mind powerful and unconscious. Only by bringing your own personal triggers into curious awareness can you start to see patterns.
Write down your triggers.
Keep a calendar if you can’t catch a more cyclical type of cycle.
Notice what makes your negative mind flare.
Seeking Interest and Common Ground
Befriending the negative mind means that you have to treat this aspect of yourself like it is something worth getting to know better.
There is likely a part of you that is going to be challenged by this process. Just like getting to know someone you kind of don’t want to get to know any better, the negative mind will push you past your edges and teach you something about yourself that you never would have learned without engaging in the relationship.
You will open up to yourself in an unexpected way if you befriend your negative mind.
When I talk about befriending the negative mind, I am asking you to consider actually cultivating a true interest in how yours works. Mine is different than yours. Yours is different than anyone else’s. Each of our negative minds are built on the foundation of our own insecurities, defenses, and internalized negative emotions.
Your negative mind is just as uniquely you as your creative waves, your gifts, and your true to self way of expressing.
Once again, REMEMBER. One of the best ways to engage befriending the negative mind is to NOT do it when there is some sort of real attachment to what is going on.
I use kundalini yoga and meditation to befriend my own negative mind. Maintaining a pose or a movement within a pose is a place where the tension of the pose and the negative voice meet each other. I can feel my negative mind activate in it’s own way. I can feel my somatic negative response in my body. I learn through my practice to slowly accept my negative thoughts and the sensations that arise with them as an aspect of self instead of all of myself. This ability to separate and observe gives me a greater capacity to run more than one stream of consciousness when life does create a challenge or a trigger.
Physical Challenge + Rhythm = Mental Understanding
Your negative mind attracts negativity.
This means that with the thoughts that come in, there is going to be a strong emotional and somatic pull to those thoughts. The thoughts are the tip of the iceberg as far as the body is concerned. The body believes some of these negative mind creations to its core. Or that is what we are going to believe if we don’t also learn to challenge the negative mind. It is very easy for the negative mind to snowball.
Remember a few paragraphs ago when I talked about working with the negative mind when the positive or at least neutral mind has the primary a ground in your body?
This is true for challenging the negative mind as well.
When you are feeling depressed, stressed, or triggered it’s not really helpful to work with the negative mind in challenge. Same is true if you are doing something when you are tired, sick, or fatigued. When you are feeling ok, good, or positive about life; THAT’S the time to engage in learning more about the negative mind through physical challenge.
What do I mean by challenging the Negative Mind?
Challenging the negative mind requires engaging in physical activity (with tension) while simultaneously creating a rhythm to the activity AND also tracking what the negative mind is telling you to feel or do without giving into it.
I personally use breath (of course!) and sustained movement in the kundalini yoga style. There are other methods. Exercise itself, especially rhythmic exercise like running or jumping rope, creates the same challenge as yoga and breath. So can climbing with breath awareness or weight lifting. Go towards what calls to you.
I am married to someone whose negative mind is intensely strong when it comes to engaging in physical exercise. For someone like my husband, the act of challenging the negative mind into action can be almost impossible. Give some space here to not judge. Challenging your negative mind may not even lead to more than a short walk or one yoga pose or simply getting out of bed.
You don’t have to expect yourself to push more than one breath or action that is beyond your capacity.
The idea is to acknowledge the part of you that wants to, in theory, exercise or knows that maybe stretching would make the body feel better, or understands that there should be physical engagement with the body. Then notice as you begin to step towards doing something how hard it actually is to do it. Do something. Anything. Then let yourself feel your body to counteract the extreme power of the negative mind. Do you feel better somehow?
It might be that the simply act of defiance against the negative mind telling you to do nothing is all the challenge that is needed in this example. You are learning how you think and how you respond to how you think while also creating a challenge in yourself of not listening to the negativity 100%.
You have the choice to become different than what the negative mind is telling you who you are.
Regardless of your relationship to exercise, the challenge aspect is to not give in to the negative mind but rather to observe it.
A healthy psyche has the ability to
witness without judgement of self,
deepen through inquiry and curiosity, and
experience whatever is happening in the moment.
In this case the challenge is to pay attention to what the negative mind is saying- NOT WHAT THE BODY IS DOING.
The aspect of challenge is to engage physically, track what the negative mind is telling you, and not give into it.
Eventually, the negative mind will silences itself as you push through it’s strictures. It becomes background noise. It looses power over your actions.
Challenging your negative mind through physicality teaches you how to be with negativity as a part of yourself instead of your whole self and to not always give into the lure of what the negative mind is telling you to do or to quiet the negative mind. The components of physical movement and breath allow you to engage through the physical mind, in spite of it. Rather than giving into to the negative mind, avoiding it, or shutting it up; you can just let it be present without power.
Growth Meter
When the negative mind is a part of the self in given situations or moments, it needs to become less than 100%f your awareness. It has to stop being your only identity in the moment.
When it beocomes a sense of static noise instead of a lurking ultimate power, you are beginning to work with your negative mind as a part of your whole. You can hear the negative mind but choose not to surrender to it or cut it off. You can simply allow it space to be without controlling you. This is growth.
To embrace the negative mind is to honor the fact that your body is not wanting to let go of something, that something is trying to change and your instinct is getting in the way of the current, that the ego wants to hold on and not be present for its own death.
Most importantly embracing the negative mind means that when it shows up you KNOW that GROWTH IS HAPPENING. Change is occurring. You are in the midst of transformation.
Accept, let go, don’t give in but don’t ignore. The negative mind always has something to teach you.