How to Turn Negative Emotions Into Your Greatest Strength

HJ: Negative emotions can be uncomfortable and so we have a tendency to avoid them, but when properly understood, they can lead us to greater happiness and fulfillment quite rapidly.  The fact is that every experience we have in life can help us learn and grow when properly perceived.  This means seeing them through the lens of non-duality — dropping notions of right and wrong, good and bad, and understanding things for what they really are — an endless succession of experiences impregnated with meaning, each one intended to help us learn and grow — to evolve to higher levels of understanding and awareness.

Therefore negative emotions are just as important as positive emotions — they offer the same opportunity for growth and in a certain sense, perhaps even more so, because they alert us to those parts of ourself which are still unhealed.  If we listen to their message and do the necessary inner work, our happiness and overall experience of life can increase greatly and quite quickly.  In that sense, are they really ‘negative’ emotions?  I would say that if one is willing to learn from them and cares to discover their true message and meaning, that they are actually beneficial emotions.  Such is the power of a non-dual perspective.  It allows us to see things as they really are — whole and perfect.

– Truth

Embracing Your Dark Side

By Vaz Sriharan | Warriors of Love

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In spirituality, as we are taught to remain positive, we often focus totally on the light and positive aspects of Self in turn denying the dark and negative attributes we all possess.

We are All That Is. This means that we are both the Light and Dark. To deny or repress the darkness within is to deny a divine part of Self. In this respect, we must ask – what is the Dark?

Life, as we know it, is polarized – into the Light and the Dark. The Light represents what we see in life as good and positive whilst the Dark represents what we see as bad and negative. As we experience life through this polarity, we naturally split everything into two camps of right and wrong.

In essence, our mission is to transcend polarity consciousness using Compassion – the embodiment of Unconditional Love. Compassion is the highest frequency in the Universe because it has the ability to see the power and purpose of everything – both the Light and Dark. Spirituality, the teaching of unconditional love, allows us to see the positive in the negative, where there is no right or wrong. It is the teaching of bringing Light into the Dark.

As a result, Compassion allows us to view the Dark in a completely different manner. Here we see that the Dark is not simply ‘bad’, but a place that requires love, healing and attention. The Dark is a place where Light has yet to reach – it is an absence of Light! As we endeavor to heal our darkness we are offered explosive opportunities for growth, leading to greater happiness. Therefore negative traits are really positive ones in disguise! They are strengths disguised as weaknesses.

The Dark provides the space for Self-discovery. By turning your attention to a part of yourself that needs healing, you are focusing your Light on that Dark attribute. What happens when you turn on a light in a dark room? The darkness is immediately transmuted into light. The dark does not fight back! The Dark has no power over the Light, it is only our fear of the Dark that energizes it further.

Using compassion, you can turn any Dark facet you encounter into the higher frequency of Light.

Embracing our dark side first requires us not to fear the dark within ourselves. It is when we fear a part of our-Self (i.e. when we suppress our insecurities) that we project it onto another. One way of spotting whether we are denying a part within us is through our judgements. When we point a finger at another and label them as ‘evil’, ‘power-hungry’ or ‘egotistical’, then in truth we are denying a part of ourselves. For within each of us is the ability to be all these qualities – we are All That Is. If we heal those parts within us that are in pain (i.e. the insecurities) then we become compassionate and understand that the other person require healing themselves. However, if we are in denial about our insecurities and have not healed or understood them, then we will naturally find it uncomfortable in another. What defines each and every being is how we approach these negative traits within us. Do we deny these traits, thereby allowing them to fester and grow? Or do we see the importance of these virtues in teaching valuable lessons about ourselves, thereby allowing us to grow.

When we feel a negative emotion or thought, it is important that we do not attempt to ignore it. This may seem like a paradox as we are persistently told not to dwell on the negative, indeed, spirituality teaches us to maintain positive thoughts in order to have this reflected in our outer reality and to learn self-love. However, remember that as we endeavor to be positive, it is our responsibility to deal with the negative parts (our insecurities) that we already possess.

Let us take an example and look at a woman who strives to live her life positively. Every day she endeavors to maintain positive thoughts and to be nice to those around her. Now let us assume that this woman is having a lot of trouble with her partner, who belittles her about everything she does. The woman does not want to be negative or cause tension and so ignores the anger that is swelling at the way she is being treated.

This is a very common situation amongst Lightworkers, where in an effort to be positive we ignore the negative. Without even realizing, by approaching life in this manner we have polarized to the other extreme – to the Light!

In this case, the woman is forgoing her own happiness in an effort to be ‘nice’. She believes she is being positive by ignoring her anger but in reality she is suppressing her anger. This suppressed anger will then turn foul and affect other areas of her life. When we ignore a negative attribute that emerges, we are ignoring the dark within us that requires love (light). We are distancing ourselves from another part of our-Self. If you had three children, would you choose to love only two because they were good and behaved properly? Of course not! You would love all unconditionally. Learning to unconditionally love our-Self means learning to love all parts of our-Self, without conditions!

By applying the power of compassion to all areas of our life we see that there is purpose to both the light and the dark. In this case, the woman may see that her anger is a message from her soul saying, “Hey! Heal this part of me!” Compassion allows her to see purpose in her Dark aspect as she uses awareness to evaluate what her pain is trying to tell her. Maybe it is teaching her to be more resilient or to stand up for herself. Ultimately, the feeling or thought reveals there is a part within that is in pain and requires love and attention. Using awareness, the Dark is transformed into Light; ignorance is transformed into wisdom.

Expressing and releasing your Dark side

The term Lightworker is a being who works towards bringing Light into all situations. This is You! This is en-Light-enment – the process of empowering the Dark with Light through Compassion.

Embracing and releasing negative emotions are crucial processes both spiritually and psychologically. The process of acknowledging and healing an insecurity changes our entire life experience. Our subconscious mind affects every thought, feeling and action as it draws on our beliefs of the world to help us interact with it. Therefore, the fewer insecurities we harbour, the more confident, free and happy we are.

As we have discovered, it is imperative that we do not ignore or suppress any part of our-Self. Now the question arises as to how we actually deal with our darkness, for the main problem we face is that we do not desire to ‘be negative’ or hurt another’s feelings in our release!

We have always had the ability to be our own therapist. In this respect, as we encounter a negative emotion or thought, we can undertake a two-part thought process:

• First, we ask ourselves why the emotion has emerged?
• Secondly, we ask if someone else is involved in our emotional turbulence?’

Let us take an example, and look at a pair of friends – Paul and Amy. Now, Amy is angry with Paul for being over-invasive with his energy. Amy feels that Paul unloads his problems but does not seem to have time to listen to her problems! And so Amy becomes increasingly upset of being taken advantage of. However, Amy feels that to say something would be confrontational.

There are two lessons here. Firstly, it is spiritually conducive for Amy’s growth to look within herself for the reasons she is feeling this way and not blame another for it; only something unhealed within us is open to attack. Pain can only be felt if it is within us to begin with. A truly en-Light-ened being, of pure unconditional love, would not be harmed by anything externally for there is nothing within them open to harm!

So in this example, Amy would first ask – Why is this situation affecting her? Is the situation a lesson from the Universe telling her to listen to herself more? Is Amy distracting herself from her own life by listening to others’ problems and thereby ignoring her own life? It is all very well helping others but if we feel adversely then we know, we sense, that something isn’t right.

The second lesson is for Amy to honour her own power and express herself, compassionately.

So as well as looking within, it is important for Amy to inform Paul of how she feels, for Paul may himself have something to learn from this – maybe to begin to listen more to others?

By controlling ourselves to not express anything ‘bad’ will only energize that emotion or thought further! A negative (dark) emotion or thought is only ‘bad’ because we deem it to be so. This is more polarity consciousness! Using Compassion, we see the positive in everything. We express and release the dark emotion or thought, allowing it to ‘come to Light’. Here, we use our awareness and love to heal it, rewarding ourselves with a new learned strength.

The purpose of course is to release the emotion or thought before it becomes anger! Anger is an energy that establishes blame, either with the perpetrator or the recipient. In essence, it is a belief that one is being victimized. The subconscious mind can only read this as – “People victimize me, meaning others have power over me; therefore I am weak!” – this will negatively affect every thought, feeling and action in our lives. The more we practice to embrace and express what we feel, the more skilled we become at highlighting and rapidly healing the dark within us. Subsequently, we become more confident, secure and happy.

Methods for releasing

There are many methods of releasing our darkness. One of the most effective is through writing. When we write our angry or upset words, we energetically release these words and allow them to come to the light of our consciousness. Too often, the emotions and thoughts that roam around in our heads are cluttered, chaotic and formless. As this happens, we can easily lose sight of what we are actually feeling, allowing the emotion to constantly consume us but without release. When we put pen to paper, we see just what we are feeling and thinking. We let the emotion out and we release.

Another way to release anger is exercise – this is an excellent method of releasing stored negativity. By stimulating the physical body, we speed up the energy flow within and force negativity (a heavy vibration) out of our naturally high vibrational loving states of being. Some people prefer this method. Punching a beanbag or sprinting furiously can be effective ways of releasing negativity – notice how good you feel afterwards? Whatever we do, it is crucial that we acknowledge our dark traits, healing them with the power of our awareness; irrespective of our method of release.

Embrace your divinity, all of it. As you learn to love yourself unconditionally, you learn to honour yourself as the sacred being that you are. Honour your every feeling, thought and action for it has been generated by a divine being – YOU! Embrace the darkness within as you would embrace a lost child. Offer love and healing to those parts of your-Self in pain; nurture the child into a powerful adult. The more you face and love all parts of your-Self, the more you accept and become the Divine Being that you already are.

Free yourself, Love yourself.