When Bad Vibes Find You

There are times when we find ourselves surrounded by negative energy. Perhaps we have entered a resistance pattern to some activity we are engaged in or some circumstance in our lives, sometimes it’s a residual energy we encounter from another situation or person and sometimes we attract it to ourselves with our thinking. Everyone encounters negative energy at some point in their experience and it is a meeting that results in a feeling of powerlessness because negative energy cuts us off from our sense of well being and disconnects us from our true power. This unsettles us and causes us to momentarily lose our sense of peace. For some people the balance is easily restored, for others it is much more difficult to get back. In the following segment I will share some techniques I have found helpful while moving through negative energy patterns.

Grounding

I always start with one of the strongest methods I have learned to combat these situations. It is a technique that I call grounding. When I lose my sense of peace I know what I need to do is reconnect with my own power. A good way to keep emotions and thoughts from carrying you down the swift river to ‘out of control’ land can be found within the body. Go into your body and pay attention to its senses; feel the sunlight on your skin, the wind move your hair, watch your breath and follow each inhale and exhale, notice the warmth that will come into any part of the body you focus on. Your body loves your attention…it responds immediately to your focused thought…envision the soft luminosity of love flowing toward it from the sun, the sky, the trees and the earth beneath your feet. After grounding you should feel a sense of lightness and ease…your situation will feel less immediate and you’ll feel larger than what is troubling you.

Know What You’re Doing and Why

This past weekend we had to make a decision about repairing our car. The fuel gage was not working. My husband had purchased the part a few weeks ago but because the fuel tank would have to be dropped in order to repair it we needed to make the two hour trip over to his parent’s house. We had tried to get over there in the preceding weeks but various circumstances had prevented us from making the necessary trip and now my husband’s parents were leaving town for awhile, so this was our last chance to complete the repair before we reached the end of the thirty days we had to return the part if it wasn’t needed.

We chose to go over and do the repair; we had to wait until Saturday afternoon before we could leave however, because our son had a mandatory practice for a performance class he is taking, on Saturday morning. This made the time my husband would have for the repair somewhat limited and we were not very far into the trip before the negativity of the situation found us and soon neither one of us was feeling good about it. I sat back in my seat and wondered at how we were both feeling bad and thought about how the situation felt out of control. Many times when we find ourselves like this…we look around and wonder how in the world we ended up in this mess??? I can tell you exactly how we got there and more importantly how we got out.

We got there by engaging in an activity which we hadn’t noticed held a resistance pattern for us. How did we get out? As in any situation there are always several options. We could have said forget it and decided not to do this repair, but we did not; instead we looked at what we were doing and learned why we were doing it.

Step 1: Identify the Resistance

The first thing we needed to acknowledge was the fact that this was not how we originally wanted to spend our weekend. Don’t get me wrong, we love our relatives and enjoy seeing them but we did not want to have to rush over and back and have a limited amount of time to perform a repair. The situation was less than ideal according to the way the our minds have structured the parameters of how one should approach this kind of thing. The key word here is ’should’. We had an idea of how this ’should’ go and life was not conforming to that idea.

Step 2: Notice the Imbalance

So once we had looked at the fact that we had resistance to taking the action we were taking in the way we were taking it…the next step was to realize that the anxious negative energy we felt was trying to communicate something to us. It was telling us we were out of alignment…it was telling us our thinking and doing were not matching up and that was the source of the ‘this is all wrong feeling’ that was causing such discomfort and unease. This imbalance if not corrected, was in essence, setting us up for an unpleasant experience. In order to prevent this from occurring we had to make the action we were currently engaged in congruent with our thoughts about it…thereby turning it into a conscious choice.

Step 3: Own the Choice

When you realize your thinking is not lining up with your doing you really only have two options: you can change your thinking or you can change your doing to restore the balance…either way you must own the choice. Owning the choice means that the decision you make pulls your action into alignment with the thoughts you hold about it. When you own the choice, you enter it fully and take full responsibility for it. You are not at odds within yourself, you are solid and secure with where you are going. You can only own a choice if there is harmony between thinking and doing…you either have it or you don’t.

Since we were already on the road driving when we finally acknowledged our resistance…changing the doing was not as logical a choice for us as changing the thinking was. We had to acknowledge that the option that fit our ideals for a car repair was not the one that we were currently engaged in…we always had a choice though and it was our decision to go; we entered in this willingly because we did not want to spend money unnecessarily on a part. We had decided this was worth our time and our effort. This was the choice we made, so this is where we wanted to be and what we wanted to do.

By fully observing the resistance, we identified an unconscious thought pattern or belief that we held around car repair…by understanding the thoughts that were generating it, we were then able to move onto accepting what actually was our reality. This enabled us to move out of what I call ’should be’ thinking or thinking generated by unexamined beliefs. Once the ’should be’ thinking was acknowledged; we could see that this pattern was generated by a fear of not being able to get the job done and that the resistance we were experiencing was to a possible projected future outcome…not the real situation at hand. This allowed us to integrate into the current moment fully, re-frame our thoughts so that they were in alignment with our actions and accept the choice with no resistance.

Experiencing Good

By stepping through this process we became very clear on our situation and what we would get out of it. We had a great weekend, the repair was completed in plenty of time, the part turned out to be unnecessary and was returned with no issues and all of this was accomplished without the internal disruption of negative energy. That all stopped the moment we pulled our thoughts into alignment with what we were doing. So the next time you are experiencing a lot of resistance to a situation in life…take a moment and remember that transmuting negative energy is simply a practice of creating harmony between what you think and what you do.