Dealing with Negativity
Dear Maggie, I saw that you do spiritual counseling for those that seek you out. I have a question if you don’t mind. I understand about the Law of Attraction. My question is…how? How do you stay positive? How do you get rid of the negativity around you?
Dear You, I love your question. It’s such a great one The simple answer is, you don’t. You can’t get rid of the negativity around you. You can only get rid of the negativity within you. So you work on yourself. You work on “I’m rubber, you’re glue. Whatever you project bounces off me, because it’s not about me, it’s about you.” (Okay, I edited it.) It takes a long time and a lot of consistent conscious directing of our own minds to get good at this, but the changes begin instantly, so give it a try. Just keep telling yourself that your happiness is your choice. You aren’t happy or unhappy because of anything other people do. You’re happy because you choose to focus on things that make you happy. So when someone around you is beaming negativity, you just close your eyes to it. Get away from them if you can, of course, but if it’s close family or co-workers, the best you can do is choose to focus on something good instead. Something good about them if you can find something.
Every time they start bitching or complaining or doing whatever it is they do that you perceive as negative, close your ears, and go “la la la” in your head as you look around for something nice. I’ve had to train the people in my life not to call me to gripe about things. I’ve done that by always turning it around on them with something like, “You know, we do, in some way, some how, attract everything we experience. So why is it, do you think, that you’re attracting all this stuff you’re griping about?” (That makes them SO MAD.) But eventually, they stop calling to bitch, or catch themselves when they start, and now we discuss the issue together and find the positive.
When you focus on all the negativity around you, it grows. When you worry about how to get rid of it, it grows. When you try to figure out how to stay positive in spite of it, it grows. When you do a spell to banish it, it grows.
Any focus at all on the negative thing makes it grow. Focus on positive things instead. It’s just like changing your radio station. As you focus on the good, think about good, find good things even in the midst of bad ones, you’ll no longer be a magnet for the negativity. You’ll be a magnet for positivity instead. The stuff you’ve stopped thinking about will fall away and you won’t even notice it has happened because that’s how thoroughly you’ve tuned it out. Eventually you’ll remember how much that used to bother you and notice that it’s completely vanished from your experience.
One of the big things we do, Lance and I, is look for the lesson. Every bad thing that happens, comes to us to bring us clarity, to push us toward something that we want or that our higher self, our Divine Self, knows we long for.
Look for the lesson in the really big bad stuff. My house burning down a few years ago, showed me what was truly important in my life and made me aware that without any of my things, my happiness was still intact. Now, today, my house has improvements I couldn’t have made in years on my own.
Here’s the cop who bought shoes for the homeless guy, click on the pic for the story.
People who just complain all the time are really hard to take. Ask them to stop, and insist on walking away if they don’t, or piss them off by telling them they attracted their problems, or piss them off even more by pointing out the positive things in their situation that they’re missing (they mostly won’t hear you,) or just try to tune them out. Change the subject. Pay them a compliment. Say “I’m really sorry you’re going through so much. Hey did you see that cop on the news who went and bought shoes for the barefoot homeless guy?” Keep turning it positive.
As you raise your vibration, the people around you have to either raise theirs too, or fade away from your experience. They cannot continue to be around you if your vibration is not a match to theirs. They are not playing on your new radio station. They become nothing but static and as you fine tune, you don’t hear them at all anymore. (Their third option is to pull you down to their level, to drag your dial back to their station, but you don’t want to let that happen.)
So that’s pretty much it. You just have to choose how you react to the negativity around you. You can choose to join it, to feed it with your attention, to jump into the bitch fest, or you can choose to refuse it, to return it unopened, to block it from your mind as you sing a happy song and find something positive to focus on instead. Practice practice practice. It gets easier. Lots of love, Maggie