IT’S A WORRISOME LIFE – Working with Negativity
Our human psychologies are nuanced and complex. One foundational affect, or deeply embedded physio/emotional belief, is that we need to store negative experience in order to learn how to protect ourselves and our species. This gives way to an experiential prejudice toward negativity, commonly referred to as “negativity bias“, or the “negativity effect”. As a protective measure, humans value negative experience above positive. Deep within we believe that positive experience is inessential and negative experience is instructional.
During our ascension up our planet’s fauna-chain humans developed higher cognitive functioning. This came to replace, or become superimposed upon, earlier rudimentary defenses. We traded fangs, claws and venom for memory and reason. This is why, when threatened, many of us get locked into compulsive thinking. This greater RAM space allows us the processing ability to strategize our way out of danger and toward sustenance. We employ memories of past experience toward reasoning solutions in the present. However, while our present reasoning ability is contemporaneous, it is based on older, more ingrained experience. In order to secure our survival, our systems developed negativity awareness which is driven by past painful experience, or handed down genetically from past experience. This creates a cognitive dissonance because while our social mind pretends to search for pleasure or actualization while our deeper tendencies are driven by survival. Remembering Maslow’s pyramid, the foundation of our actualization lies upon supplying our basic needs. Survival is our most foundational need.
Our higher spiritual development seems to be what is needed for us to us to feel fully actualized. In order to realize that potential, we need to incorporate fun, relaxation, meditation, art, exercise, and social interaction into our lives. However, often in life those experiences become hijacked by the urgency of “more important” negative fixations. In some cases, we are so fixated on negativity we fail to see opportunities for enrichment in our life. This is interesting because while negativity is driven by survival, our reduced awareness actually makes us less secure. This “ostrich syndrome” is, in humans, more like an eagle placing its head in the sand. We have the potential for tremendous awareness that is all too often conflated into a survival binary. We have the ability to see the whole picture, but nonetheless focus on the negative in a misguided attempt to secure our survival. In this way, we overvalue the negative, and even exaggerate it. We create a culture around it, competing with each other over whose life is worse. Jon Kabat-Zinn called this “Full Catastrophe Living”.
But, being locked into negativity is not satisfying. There is so much goodness in our lives that we discount or undervalue. At some point we become depressed. There is only so much we can push away in our lives before we start to close down to ourselves. Our negatively oriented life becomes itself fully negative. When this happens a natural – though unhelpful – strategy is to find blame. In order to ease our suffering we find an object on which to pin our pain. This object of blame may be our lover, a co-worker, or an element of society. But it is often driven by older, more deeply ingrained fears. Our mind is like a periscope searching for danger even when no danger is apparent.
If we are interested in living an actualized life, gaining some agency over our thinking is essential. Meditation master Chogyam Trungpa encouraged students to look at their minds with acceptance and accept their thoughts. He felt it important that meditation be devoid of judgement. In his view, all thoughts had equal value. Our mind can be seen as basically good rather than an instrument of torture. In this way we can see our mind as fundamentally workable. By not dismissing thoughts we are offering our mind the room to discover itself. However, by applying the techniques of meditation and returning to the breath, we are accepting but not indulging our thoughts. All thoughts are equal but present moment experience is the point. So we come to be familiar with our thoughts and the games our mind plays. Then we can determine if we want to follow along in action. Rather than reacting to everything our mind tells us, meditation offers us the executive functioning to see our mind and decide how, if and when to act. The process of meditation allows us to “pause before send”, creating a buffer between thought and action. This is also very much true on the micro levels. Even if our action is tightening in the body, we are supporting negativity. We have the choice to notice and release the tension.
This subtle somatic negativity is important to recognize and accept. We may walk down the street nominaly enjoying our day, but internally clenching our stomach in fear of what may happen next. Even when everything is going right, is our body waiting for the other shoe to drop? It is essential to see this subtle negativity and feel the feelings otherwise they provoke unless they build within us and influence our mind in ways we cannot see.
If Trungpa recommended we accept our thoughts without judgement, there is one category of thinking he deemed unacceptable. “Negative negativity” are the judgements we have about ourselves, including those we have toward our own negativity. Negativity is naturally inherited behaviour. Blaming our negativity is counterproductive. It’s essentially blaming ourselves. Whenever we feel the tightness associated with self-affliction, we can come to see that we are punishing ourselves, which is self-flagellation. We can just let any self-judgement go.WE don’t have to pretend we are a buddha, or Mother Theresa or Kendrick Lamar. We can be ourselves and accept negativity as small minded and self-defeating but entirely common and natural. We can allow ourselves to feel our negativity without judgement – but also without action. We can become aware of our underlying behaviors without acting on them. We have every right to feel however we feel, but no right to inflict those feelings upon ourselves or anyone else. If we act out our negativity we are training the mind to continue negativity. On the other hand, as we are socialized not to act out, “acting in” builds internal pressure until we explode, or fall into depression. Both of these actions build the propensity for us to see the world negatively making it easier to act out/in.
Negativity is the cause and condition of psychological trauma. Trauma may refer to a specific wound, but also to its embedded experience. As experiencing trauma is reliving past experience, acting on trauma is living in the past. When we relive the past, we are performing the same experiments which garner the same results. Acting on negativity and seeing the world negatively wounds us deeply. Walking down a street bitching internally at everyone is not an indicator of spiritual actualization. It is programming us to be victims of our own hatred. Victims? Yes. While negativity masquerades as a logical response to the buttheads of the universe, in truth, when we percolate ill feelings inside us, that churning will manifest in ourselves and our world. It’s the I’m rubber you’re glue syndrome in reverse. Whatever we churn inside manifests in the world, which sends back in kind. Instant Karma, it was said. But we can work with karma and make it less instant. We can slow it down with a tool called mindfulness. When you feel negativity, uncouple from fixating on an other, pause and feel inward. Don’t expect answers. When you fondle a lover you dont expect immediate gratification. You’re touching in to let them know you care. Feel in to your body and let yourself know you care.
Whenever we feel that negativity we can use it as a red flag to pause and check in with ourselves. In this way, life becomes lighter and less burdensome. When I find myself bitching I ask: is this real? What am I actually feeling? Am I defending my existence right now? And eventually the inner grip lessens and I begin to see the world around me.
Life need not be continuously worrisome. It can sometimes be enjoyed, appreciated, and valued.