Is it possible to be 100% optimistic?
Is it possible to completely avoid negative thoughts? Would it be right to think that life is only about feeling good 100% of the time and never feeling sad, angry or fearful? The obvious answer is No! The truth is that we are living in a world of duality and there will always be two polar opposite energies. Negative thoughts and energies will be there wherever we go, no matter what we do; but the good news is that positive thoughts will be too! We have all understood the experience of life by distinguishing between opposites; we only know what light is from experiencing darkness, hot from cold, wet from dry, happy from unhappy. So in this sense we would need to experience the negative feelings as a part of our life experience to know what the positive ones are, it’s a part of our lives that can’t be eliminated.
With that being said, wouldn’t it be easy to accept the negative thoughts when they come instead of resisting them? Knowing that they will always be there, it makes for far greater life experience to accept and observe our fearful, sad, guilty or angry thoughts and emotions. Accepting doesn’t mean we need to buy into the story of the fear and identify ourselves as a coward, it’s merely accepting the emotion that’s present within right now without judgment. It’s the act of merely watching and allowing the emotion to be fully experienced and in doing so, allowing it to go when it’s done.
It is inevitable that we will experience a whole spectrum of emotions during our lifetime, and we are as entitled to sadness and guilt as we are to happiness and elation. Both are just a part of our experience. Of course the frequency in which they occur, and how often we experience the so-called ‘negative’ emotions can be influenced by us.
We agree that it’s far more pleasant and comfortable to feel pleasant emotions, and these come from having more positive thoughts. The thoughts we have immediately produce emotions and that’s what we tend to feel. We generally have about 25,000-50,000 thoughts a day, and the nature of these thoughts vary depending on our outlook and beliefs. If we believe that we are not good enough, or the world is a scary place and we are not safe, then we will be feeling more fear, guilt, anger and sadness more often. If we believe that we are safe, we have faith in the universe, and we accept ourselves, we will experience emotions of faith, love, peace and contentment more often.
In either case we will always be experiencing the whole spectrum of what’s available, and our influence impacts where we live more often and what our default mode is. My invitation to you would be to create beliefs for yourselves that support empowering thoughts and emotions, expect to feel down some of the time as a natural part of your life’s experience, and when the darker emotions occur, watch them without judgment and allow them to be. It’s ALWAYS okay to feel your feelings, you have a right to them!
Photo Credit: Alexander Solodukhin