When Positivity Can Be a Problem

Last year as part of work I had the chance to attend a training programme conducted by a well-known peak performance coach called Sajeev Nair.

He recounted his experience meeting the personal growth guru Deepak Chopra in his center in the U.S (Chopra Center for Healing) many years ago.

Chopra frankly told Sajeev Nair that the people who come to him are the kind of people who attend many motivational and success training programmes conducted by people like him.

They come to these courses and later think they have to be positive all the time.

They then feel bad about having negative thoughts and as a result become even more stressed. They become overly stressed about not being positive which was not a problem they had earlier.

The conversation he had with Deepak Chopra was an eye-opener for him and he changed his approach from a typical motivational and success programme to something that is more holistic and wellness-based.

Hearing this story took me back to the time I found out about the Law of attraction and started reading many books related to it.

I started to believe that I am not supposed to have negative thoughts or feel unpleasant emotions and as a result I would try to suppress it and would feel bad about feeling bad.

This of course, didn’t help and wasn’t a solution to anything.

It took me several years before I finally realised that the best way to deal with unpleasant thoughts and emotions is to fully feel and accept them.

I found that when I allowed my unpleasant emotions to be there without desperately wishing they would go away, it would automatically lose its intensity and fade away.

This was a real eye-opener for me and made dealing with uncomfortable emotions so much easier and less intimidating.

Today with a lot more emphasis on positivity there is the notion that we should be positive all the time. If you are not feeling positive then you may subconsciously think something is wrong and you need to fix it. 

But as I have mentioned in a previous article, A Magical Way To Free yourself of "Negative Feelings"

“See feelings as visitors, for they always come and go. Welcome them with acceptance. While they are present, neither fight nor avoid them. All they want is your acceptance and attention. Once you give them what they seek, they will be on their way, before long. Trying to fight them only makes things worse.”

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