The Sure Cure for Negative States

The Sure Cure for Negative States

 

The real reason negative states persist is because we resist seeing the following truth: blaming others for the pain we feel is like resenting our pants for being too tight.

 

The Power to Never Feel Powerless Again

Whenever someone hurts us with a pointed remark, what we see isn't whether or not there's truth in their words; all we "see" is our wish they hadn't said anything at all! In such moments we are absorbed by a familiar negative reaction whose one desire is that the unwanted event just go away. This resistance acts within and upon our consciousness as a "blinding" and binding force, so all we can "see" is our own negativity over what we wish wasn't happening!

What is it about these kinds of events that causes us to feel powerless to relieve the source of our pressing stress?

The feeling of being powerless has nothing to do with what someone else did or didn't do. The only reason we feel powerless is because we have become the captive of a mind resisting itself, an involuntary prisoner of a mind struggling to escape its own negative images. And there is nothing but powerlessness in this resistance because by law whatever we resist... persists!

What possible good does it do to resent any moment for unfolding as it does, to wish it didn't happen? Does it change the moment in any positive way? No, it does not. Does our pain prove our position as being the right one? To the contrary: the more we don't want the moment in which we find ourselves, the more we lend credibility to that moment as being overpowering.

Real power is knowing we already possess everything we need to succeed in the moment, as we would wish it.

Whenever you see an angry person, you are looking at someone who just found out he does not possess the power he imagined his own. All that's left in such moments is for this individual to defend his imagined loss by blaming others for it; now his false power is in being resentful. Comparing this kind of "power" to the one that follows makes our discovery clear.

Real power lifts us above challenging circumstances; it shelters us from those fears that want to drag us down into troubled thoughts. In a word, real power is the quiet but certain understanding that everything that comes to us works for the good of us, no matter what it is.

We can practice this true, new power anytime we wish to have its strength and safety as our own. We start each time by remembering that ours is the power to choose what we will and will not give our power to.

Rather than defend our mistakes by finding excuses for them, we can understand that our refusal to learn the lesson at hand ensures we will meet that lesson again, along with its misery. The light of this new awareness empowers us to accept what life would teach us, and the truth sets us free.

On one hand, negative states want to convince us we are powerless in the face of what frustrates us. But we have seen the truth: this false perception is actually produced by a dark state that would have us turn to it for the power we need to make things right. And so now we can do something radically new: rather than give ourselves over to the habitual reaction of resisting the moment, we remember the truth that sets us free; ours is the power to live from the power of our choosing. Said slightly differently, but equally true: we are created with the power to surrender our sense of powerlessness and, in exchange for this sacrifice, realize a life without stress and strife.

     -- Guy Finley