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People involved in wellness sometimes make the mistake of giving the impression that anything negative is bad and that we should aim to feel positive all the time. But that’s not realistic.
Negative feelings often are telling us something that we need to know.
Something you need to do
For instance, if you feel anxious about a particular undone task, maybe there is something you need to do about it.
If you feel guilty, maybe there’s something that you did that wasn’t right, and that you need to try to put right if you can.
If you feel bored, maybe you need to do something different in your day or in your life.
But the key thing is not to get lost in it, not to be overwhelmed by it. We need to be able to step back and see if there’s anything useful here.
If there is, the question then is what could I do about it?
If there isn’t anything useful, you can try to change your focus to something else. For example, feeling very negative over things that happened in the past that you can’t do anything at all about now often isn’t a very useful thing to do. And in such a case, you would try to change your focus to something else.
Mindfulness and stepping back
Mindfulness practice makes it easier to do all of these things. Mindfulness helps you develop the skill of stepping back, through the repeated practice of coming back into the present moment. And that makes it much easier to see what is useful and what is not useful.
That awareness then helps you to, as I said, move your focus to something else; or wait for the feeling to pass by itself; or if there’s something you can do about the issue, to do that something.
So negativity is not always negative, especially when it’s coupled with mindfulness
My Easy Mindfulness online course (15 lessons in your own time)can help you develop that vital skill of stepping back. Payment is by donation, so you can afford it. Learn more here.
Image by LeoHoHo