Judging Negative People Is Not Human

I know, we all do it.  We claim we don't, but we do.  We'd like to think we don't, yet I bet if your life was under a magnifying glass, we would see this in full display.

Some are better at not doing it than others.  Some just seem to struggle with it all the time.

Judging negative people is not human.  We may think it is.  Our ego may convince us that it is, but to a person that is conscious, judgment is not a healthy thing.  It originates from the ego and is fed by the ego.

If you think that people are too negative or they are so negative that you must expel them from your life, you are judging them.  Who is to say you are right and they are wrong?  Who is to say that their level of negativity is too much?  It is a judgment call, not fact-based, even though every day I see people claim they have the right facts.

Screaming out for help...

Sometimes that individual is walking through a pretty hot fire and they are screaming out for help.  Yes, it is true that often times people do not really want the help because all they know to do in that moment is scream out in pain.  It is all they are equipped to do.  To shun them means they must walk alone, and sometimes those roads get pretty lonely.

Judging others does no good for them and quite frankly, it does no good for us.  It may make us feel like we are taking charge in life, but if you leave those that are struggling to stand up in the ditch, what good is that?  What good is it to put yourself in a position to judge others, when all you're doing is making yourself into a person that is not truly human?

A broader connection...

Often when things in other people bother us (including their negativity), it is because there is a broader connection.  There is something about that which makes us uncomfortable.  Maybe we haven't healed that part of our life.  Maybe we are still stuck in something unpleasant.  People cross our paths for a reason, and while shunning them is a choice you make, let it not be the only choice you entertain.

People are hurting in this world and they often need to know someone cares.  We pass memes along all day long and make statements, but we so often fail to see the full impact of those things.  Our words can become a knife slashed about to others who are already hurting.

Judgment stops healing and love...

When I've been in deep healing moments with other people, the judgment stops the healing from happening. It blocks love.  It is when you get rid of the judgment that the person knows you are real, authentic, and you are there for them.  The body and the mind know this from an innate level.  No words have to be spoken to understand this.

When we judge people we deem to be negative, we're not only elevating ourselves to a level that is not ours, but we're forcing them to go hide in a cave of loneliness, despair, and shame.  Let us rise to the occasion and see what the negativity means to our own life so maybe we can heal something we have not yet fully healed.

It is far better to help a limping person walk than to kick out their good knee.  Judging negative people is where we kick out the good knee and then look at them in disgust because they cannot stand.

We are far too quick to judge, and far too slow to truly understand how to love others and ourselves.  Judgment comes from judging ourselves first and we propagate it to all others.  By learning to show love to ourselves, we'll learn more how to show love to all.

And yes, there are some people that come through our lives that really push the limits.  Sometimes it is helpful to flee or take a rest from them, but to do so with unconditional love.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Embrace The Negative

I see people time and time again only focusing on the positive.  They only embrace the positive.  They only invite the positive into their life.  While there are good reasons for that, you're only grabbing half of life or healing or whatever the issue may be.

I know, you're probably ready to click off of here and say, "he doesn't have a clue what he is saying in this blog," but hopefully you will hear me out. I think it is an important part of life that many miss out on, especially those in healing.

No, I'm not talking about hanging around with doom and gloom people all day life.  I'm not talking about immersing yourself in the negativity.  I'm talking more about moderation and a shift in awareness and consciousness on negative people and thoughts.  I know that if you hang around this stuff, it can really bring you down.

Unfortunately, it isn't so much about the other person being negative as it is what the negative part brings up in each one of us.  Think of it as your teacher because it is showing you something that you are mirroring out and reflecting to the world.  Yes, I'm sure that is not easy to read, but it is true.  Its part of our human experience.  It is part of living in a human body.

If you only focus on the positive, you're exhausting so much energy to keep the negative away from you.  By doing this, you are giving power to the negative and actually attracting the negative, rather than seeing what it is in the negative that is there to teach you.

When you embrace the negative, you take the power back.  You take control and harness the energy because now, you have the ability to conquer it or learn from it.  Maybe it is a stepping stone to something more in your life.

Focusing only on the positive means that you're giving up half of your existence and your continued growth.  It means you're not seeing the whole picture.  It means that you're locked in a pattern of consciousness and awareness that will limit you, rather than free you.

Most of the time, humans do not want to be around the negative because it is like asking a person who is carrying a lot of luggage to carry also carry a 50 lb weight.  Instead of being upset with the extra 50 pound weight, we need to learn how to let go of the luggage we carry.  If we do this, we will be further ahead.

Being human in a human body is a learning curve.  It is a process.  It does include embracing the negative along with the positive to find balance in our life.  Do it in moderation and you will be surprised at just how much power you reclaim.  Use the negative as a teacher and soon you will move to the head of the class.

Here is some interesting information from 2009 on negative or positive thinking.

Question of the Day
Do you try to embrace positive thinking in your life or do you struggle with negativity?  What are your thoughts on the subject.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2016 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Don't Get Rid Of Negative People And Things

I see way too much imbalance these days in social media and new age groups.  Everyone thinks that you should get rid of negative people and things in your life.  Every time I see or read that, I cringe.  My hair stands on end and I shutter at the thoughts these people are passing on to others.

We can't always have rainbows every day because a rainbow means the storm clouds have just passed.  In order to see the rainbows, we need to feel the storms and the rain.  It takes the rough parts to see the beautiful parts.  Unfortunately what too many are claiming as "truth" is that they can have the rainbows without the storms.

If you get rid of the negative stuff, you're really just numbing yourself out in life.  It is that plain and simple.  Without the negative and rough and bad stuff, you're only living half a life.  Part of life is pain and the other part is learning from the pain.  Okay, I realize I just simplified things too much, but that's the jest of the issue I'm raising.

Self Confidence And Negative Chatter

Far too many of us are excellent when it comes to tearing our self down.  It is much harder it seems for many people to focus on their good qualities.  We all have them.  There are things about each one of us that makes each of us special.

Unfortunately throughout our life, we listened to people who did not have our best interests at heart.  They may have told us how worthless or stupid or dumb we were.  Some of these people may have beaten us for not obtaining perfection as small children.  Love or affection might have been withheld if we did not perform to a level of satisfaction for those around us.

We've all got our stories and our experiences.  I'm sure any one of us could name them off in a list without taking too much effort.  It is sad that we endured these experiences, but it is even more sad that we have carried this baggage into our adult life.  I'm not saying it is easy to let go of the baggage, but we need to see it for what it is.

A hypnotherapy CD by Steven Bayner that I am listening to on self confidence talks about creating a list of our good qualities and then reviewing it.  It isn't a bad idea.  After all, we listen to so much negative chatter in our mind every day that doing something positive for our brain is like a gift from heaven.

A Little Good News or Some Toxic Negativity

If you follow the news much these days you will see what a depressing entity it really is. Okay, depressive news is nothing new of course because I can remember many years ago when a song came out by Huey Lewis and The News, titled A Little Good News. Many in those days were sitting here and saying the same thing.

Maybe things have not changed that much overall and all we are looking through is just one tiny little blip in time. Maybe it is all a matter of perspective. In fact, it could be that we as humans tend to navigate toward negative news and actually attract it into our lives. In all honesty before we go blaming the news media, if we as humans didn't soak up the negative news, than the news media outlets would be publishing something different.

If you need evidence of that, just take a look at Oprah's new TV station, the OWN network. It is actually a great place with some uplifting and thought provoking programming. You don't come away from watching her network feeling like you have to take a bath to rid yourself of the toxic negativity. Of course there are some that would not listen to Oprah no matter what, but the shows I have watched on there are very good.

Bag Of Potatoes

This is something that was going around the internet and while I usually don't give these things much credibility, I thought this had a nice moral to the story that fit on this blog. If the person who wrote this is reading my blog, please let me know and I'll be glad to give you credit for this work as I do not know who wrote this.

Bag of Potatoes
By: Author Unknown

One of my teachers had each one of us bring a clear plastic bag and a sack of potatoes to class. For every person we'd refuse to forgive in our life, we were told to choose a potato, write on it the name and date, and put it in the plastic bag. Some of our bags, as you can imagine, were
quite heavy.

We were then told to carry this bag with us everywhere for one week, putting it beside our bed at night, on the car seat when driving, next to our desk at work.

The hassle of lugging this around with us made it clear what a weight we were carrying spiritually, and how we had to pay attention to it all the time to not forget, and keep leaving it in embarrassing places.

Naturally, the condition of the potatoes deteriorated to a nasty slime. This was a great metaphor for the price we pay for keeping our pain and heavy negativity!

Too often we think of forgiveness as a gift to the other person, and while that's true, it clearly is also a gift for ourselves!



Blog Post & Images (c) 4/1/11 Don Shetterly - use by permission only
http://www.donshetterly.com

Joy, Gratitude, Abundance

No matter how difficult it gets or how much the negative stuff floods my mind, I need to stay in the mindset of hope, gratitude, and joy.

By keeping my thoughts in this realm, I am opening myself up to possibility and empowerment.

Joy and gratitude helps raise my vibration which then allows me to participate in the plane of abundance and what I am called to do.

Forgiving, releasing and letting go of negative drains upon my life will enable me greater capacity for all that is good in my life.

Give A Smiley Project

Today, I am launching a new project called "Give A Smiley Project". There are so many negative events happening in our days and our lives, that I just wanted to see if this small little idea could take off and really impact everyone in the world in a positive way. I have no idea what will happen but it all starts with passing a smile along to someone who has impacted our life. I won't give anymore details away here right now because you can read all about it on my website. For more information, go to http://www.smileyproject.com. There is nothing to buy, no spam and it is just something that will hopefully give you a smile.

While I'm launching this idea on the web, it is meant to be something personal that is given face to face or through the mail. The internet is fine and allows many close connections, but this is something that is much greater than that. It allows a more personal connection in this endeavor.

Please share this with your friends and pass it on!

Dear Angels

Dear Angels,
Help me replace my
negative thoughts,
doubts and worries
with love and
acceptance for
myself.

The Emotion Of Triggers

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Emotional triggers, for many people, are part of everyday life it seems. These triggers seem to always hang around and make their presence known whenever they feel like it. Sometimes emotional triggers appear not only when we least expect them, but at some of the worst moments. I know this too well because it seems like I own a goldmine of emotional triggers. While I don’t actively try to harvest these things, they just seem to find their way to the surface.

Emotion tends to guide many things we do, even if we are not fully aware that it does. Most of these emotions are not necessarily conscious, but they show up in a conscious manner. Often the person displaying these emotions is not necessarily aware of it or how they are truly coming across to the observer on the outside.

So what is a trigger? That might be a good question to answer because they are many, and I would say each person has something that triggers them. A trigger is some event in your present moment that connects you in a very deep, automatic and quick way to something that you have experienced in your past. It could be a sight, smell, sound, touch, taste or it could be a word, phrase, piece of music, color or just about anything that you observe and interact with in a day. Watching a TV program may invoke connections to memory places in your brain, as can hearing some song or even feeling the touch of someone around you. What you pick up does not necessarily have to be something horrible, and it may not necessarily be something that is directly related to the past event.

When something in your present moment invokes an automatic reaction deep within you, it is connecting in the brain and in the body with some moment of emotional charge from your past. It is an extremely quick, unconscious connection that can play out within a matter of seconds. What sets it off has no limits, no boundaries and often no warning. If you are able to identify what sets the triggers off, then you will be ahead of the curve, but often they are silent lurkers waiting to pounce as a lion would wait to pounce upon its prey.

This connection to the past is an emotional trigger. There was some past experience that had such an emotional charge to it, that the current moment is connecting that brain synapse. Often the triggers hit us in such a way that it knocks us for a loop in life but sometimes the triggers could be connected to something very beautiful in our life. For instance, if you smell a Christmas tree and it triggers your mind back to some fun early childhood memory of Christmas, it would be a very beautiful thing in this instance.

However if you take the same scenario and have another person influenced by the smell of a Christmas tree, it could take them back to a moment of horror, pain and sadness because of some event they experienced. So while we often see triggers in a negative manner, they can be positive as well, bringing out our life’s experiences and memories that we treasure and cherish. A person is able to have both positive and negative triggers.

Take, for example, emotional blasts to the past that I cherish. I have some very beautiful hymns and choruses from church that I just love to play on the piano. It takes me back to the days where I was learning how to play the piano and would spend hours creating the beautiful music. At the same time, there were many agonizing moments taking place in our house, and it was usually filled with a lot of stress, anger, yelling and strong displays of emotion. So often those songs, while they were played with beauty, were also a part of something I was trying to escape from. Now I find that in an instant, I am taken back to both sides of those experiences from my childhood. They are one and the same. The trigger could be positive and it is in many ways, but it is also negative and invokes a sense of sadness, horror and pain which still resides in my body to this day.

Another trigger I have struggled with is one that took many years for me to begin to understand. As I was sitting at a traffic light, there was this car that pulled up beside me with a stereo blasting, and the bass sound was pounding the pavement extremely hard. No matter what I did, I could not get myself to let go of the bass sound coming from that car. I began to notice that I was becoming extremely angry. Fortunately I had my windows up and AC running, because I was screaming every obscenity at the person that I could get out of my mouth. I hated them at that moment and wanted them to die. If I would have had a gun, there’s a chance that I would have used it and that is one reason I will not own a gun. I started honking my horn and waiting for the light to change in what seemed like an eternity in slow speed. I’m sure people were wondering what my problem was, and I had only a couple of things on my mind. Either I wanted to flee the sound and the situation as quickly as I could, or I wanted to do anything to get this to stop. My heart was racing, my head was pounding, my muscles in my arms and legs had grown tense and all the time, the AC was not working fast enough to even being cooling me down. Finally the light turned green and I was able to escape from the loud bass sound coming from this car, but I was left wondering why I got so angry and almost out of control for something like this. After all, it didn’t seem to bother others around me.

As time went, I began to be impacted less and less by the bass sound around me but it still made life pretty difficult. Then one day long after this, my cat began just meowing very loudly each day shortly after we moved to a new home. It was like she wanted attention but expected me to come to where she was, and she wouldn’t be quiet until I did so. The sound was excruciating and no matter what, I could not get my cat to stop making the loud meow. Finally one day I broke down in tears as I connected the trigger of the bass sound to my cat making the loud meow.

You see, when I was a child, I always loved having cats. We moved a lot so it was difficult but somehow I always managed to get a cat. My parents seemed to love animals but for some reason the cats were always afraid of my father and I never knew why. One night as a child doing dishes, I was standing on a kitchen chair because I wasn’t big enough to quite reach the sink, and had myself propped up while washing the dishes. I had to be very careful to get each and every dish very clean because if I did not, I would be in big trouble. So it was with fear and trepidation that I would wash the dishes to help my mom. On this night, there were very loud sounds coming from outside. I knew my father and mother had gone outside to the basement cellar for something, but wasn’t sure exactly what it was. We had one of those basement cellars that had the door right outside the kitchen window and back porch, which opened up out of the ground. That’s where my kittens stayed during the night, and since there were ways into the basement that the kittens knew about, it was a great place for them. There was the little gray charcoal colored kitten, Charcoal; the black kitten I named Blacky; and the grey colored one that I called Smokey, that I would sing the song “On Top of Old Smokey” to. They meant so much to me and were my companions in a world filled with turmoil.

On that night though, I heard a very loud noise of screams coming from many different things. It was horrible and I remember being horrified at what was going on outside, knowing that it was something to do with my cats. Of course I had been warned not to venture outside no matter what, and I knew that at the risk of losing my own life, I would not do this. But I listened to the screams of my kittens begging for life and begging to just let them go, as I heard the old heavy wooden cellar door slam and then slam again and again. After the final slam of the door, there was silence. No kittens could be heard. Not a single kitten left to make a sound. After what seemed like an eternity to me, my parents came back in through the back porch of the house, and you could tell my mom had been in tears and was struggling to look me in the eye. I knew she didn’t want to do what she was forced to partake in with my father. I’m sure it was horrible for her as well. My father seemed to have that cold stare in his eyes that I had seen before, and announced to me that the kittens had been playing around the door and got caught as the door was trying to close. My little brain wanted to accept the reasoning he gave me, but deep down it just didn’t add up. My eyes wanted to cry but I was warned to not be a baby about it, and it was just an unavoidable accident that had happened. After all, as I was told, crying about it would do no good and I just needed to act mature. So without tears, I finished washing the dishes that night, staring out into the night sky knowing that I would never see Charcoal, Blacky or Smokey again.

So as I sat there in traffic that day with the bass sound coming from the other car, I didn’t initially realize how the awful noise was connecting me back to a day as a child when I so wanted to stop my father from killing the kittens. Yet I was powerless to do anything or to stop it. Then when my cat began her loud meows, the sounds connected me back to that frightful night. To this day, it is very difficult to even think about this, let alone write about it, and yet it was not the first nor would it be the last time this experience would be all in a day’s activities for me.

You see, these emotional triggers stay with us until we find a way to discharge the emotional energy that is locked up within them. For if energy is trapped in a moment, it will continue searching for ways to exit and complete the direction it was going. Whether this is through something that one does physically to themselves or others, or through some type of health and disease condition or whatever way it is, the trapped energy spends its days looking for a way out. There is some point within the body where it resides, that once tapped into, yields the event as if it were playing out in the present moment. Many of us go through our lives with these things residing within us, but we never find the way to completely release them from our innermost selves. Sure we find ways to rationalize them, and make sense of them, all the time harboring the potential energy that they encase.

You may be able to go for years without ever dealing with many of these things, and in fact it is quite possible for one to go to their grave avoiding them. However at some point, the trapped energy of these moments will play out in some manner. Avoiding them keeps us operating at less than we were meant to be, and keeps us from becoming more human with potential beyond our wildest imaginations.

If you’re fortunate like I was to begin putting the pieces together, that is a good first step in recovering the energy and the trauma that the triggers hold. However, it may take years for all of this to happen, or it could happen quickly. I have many more examples of my own experiences in this as I am sure each person does. But finding the point in the body where these experiences and triggers surface is the key to having the opportunity to let them go. Once this connection to the body is made, the potential is so great. After all, the trapped energy is potential energy, and by taking the power back from it, you gain so much in your life in so many ways: from pure awareness, joy and an easier life, to less health issues and a more wholesome body to live in. No, it isn’t easy going through the triggers and reclaiming this but it isn’t as hard as one may think it is. The rewards are great, especially if you are able to do this with someone that understands how to guide you through this process and has undergone the process of healing in their own life. For truly someone that has already walked the road, can be one of the best people to help other travelers find their way through the maze of emotional triggers we suffer in life.

May you be awakened to a new thought as you have read this, realizing that there is much more than you may currently have in your life. Know that the aches and pains, health conditions, and all those discomforts you feel in your life are there for a reason. They are not to be gotten rid, of but experienced to the point of reclaiming your power over them. For when you reclaim the power of these discomforts and pains in your life, you truly are discovering what it is like to live in your body. Living in your body and enjoying it can be one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves. The potential has no boundaries and the rewards are without limits. My hope is that you will not focus upon the pain I endured in the example, but that you will use what you have read as a catalyst for searching in your own life.