Press play below to listen to the Mind of Ease 15minute Q&A Session on “What to do when you are overwhelmed by negativity”:
[audio:https://tobyouvry.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Mind-of-Ease-QA-Sept-20121.mp3|titles=Mind of Ease Q&A Sept 2012]Alternatively you can download the recording onto your computer by right clicking here:
Here is a summary of the question:
“In the last meditation class, you shared about developing mental positivity.
However, many times the force of negativity in my mind is so strong that I’m being drowned and the awareness is not even present there to witness the river of mind flowing at all.
For such situations, when there is no awareness to recognize your negativity, how do you even pull back with awareness when awareness itself is absent? (Especially you are in one of those endless loops of negativity which drain your life?)”
And here is the summary of my answer:
Answer:
Meditation is about developing the strength of our conscious awareness and the ability to witness the contents of our mind, it takes practice!
The best time to work on strengthening our self awareness through meditation is when our life and mind are relatively stable and peaceful. If we wait until there is a crisis in our life before we think about trying to meditate, then often it is too late to be of real, practical use.
Most people are leading unconscious lives, being drowned by the force of negativity and habit. Broadly speaking there are four or so stages that we need to go through in order to consciously re-work deeply engrained and overwhelming negative energies/patterns in our mind:
1) The first stage is to notice the negativity when we get carried away by it
2) Second stage is to detach with self compassion and flow with the experience, not fight with it.
3) Third stage is to dissipate the negativity, and reduce its momentum in our mind and life by practicing non-resistance to it (ie: Not feeding energy by fighting with it or trying to overcome it purely by force of egoic will.
4) The fourth stage is to replace the negative thought pattern with a new positively structured set of perspectives, thoughts, beliefs and behaviors
This takes time! Our negative personal and inter-personal patterns (ie: in our relationships) have been building up for years and years, of course it takes months and years of consistent practice of conscious awareness to become aware of these patterns, heal them and replace them with appropriate alternatives that wil server the evolution of our consciousness.
Yours in the spirit of a mind of ease,
Toby