The ‘Think Positive’ Misunderstanding
A Journey with Light Codes & Liberation from Blame
There are moments when we experience deep bliss and delight from within.
Absolutely no-thing makes us smile.
We are at ease and flow with life within and around us.
We feel grounded and yet strangely brave to new unknown things.
Maybe we are still on a high from our amazing date last night.
Maybe we blew our own minds and created something we never thought we could.
Maybe we just woke up and felt ourselves as a part of brilliant beautiful conscious planet.
These are expansive and delicious moments.
And then, sometimes someone comes along and ruins it with their d**che baggary.
This may be a person who says or does the thing that gets under your skin.
It could be some sleazy politician being themselves, acting in perfect self-interest under the guise of ‘for the people’.
It could also be reading or watching something so purely horrible and vile taking place in the world done by someone (or group of someones) so far away from the vibration of Love and Compassion.
Our delicious moment feels like a distant memory, even though we were just there. We had it, we held it, we were flowing in it, and now here we are - inflamed, angry, disgusted, afraid, wanting to blame and hate, doubting ourselves and the world - wondering how it goes so wrong so fast.
If you’re like me, you then experience a barrage of ‘bad, negative, horrible thoughts’. These are followed by a sinking feeling of dread about the Self or the interconnected world we live in.
In Spiritual communities, we are often taught to keep our thoughts positive, since they create our reality. It is a deep and powerful teaching. However, I grossly misunderstood it.
I saw the memes and images around positive mindset and the power of positive thinking around me and I took this literally.
I practiced positive thinking for a long time as a mental activity.
When I would have a dark or hard thought. I would stop and yell at myself and would distract myself with happier thoughts.
This led me to unknowingly denying my denser, darker and non-positive emotions.
In a way, it did work; in the immediate moment I would think a happier thought and would feel better. I thought I was creating beautiful and loving thoughts and that would help create a beautiful and peaceful world.
But I could never maintain it.
And in truth, I did not feel peace or love when I did it.
I would feel judgement and stress at my negative thoughts and hope to God that I could keep the happy thoughts for longer. This kept me swinging like a pendulum from those blissful delightful moments to these denser ones.
In those denser moments, I was completely overwhelmed by my bad, negative and shameful thoughts. When someone did something ‘wrong or bad’ to me or in the world, the heaviness and negativity it would greatly intensify.
When you’re in a swing like this, it’s hard to see the simplicity of what you are missing.
Light Informs
Positive thinking is supposed to create positivity. And this was what I was missing.
I was doing the positive thinking practice, but disregarding my emotional truths. I was not feeling anything.
So, I prayed on it, asking for help through this moment, on a day where I felt particularly heavy and angry at the world.
Help came while I was in surrendered prayer in the form of a visualization. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was recreating this experience of positive and negative in my visualization, so that I could see it is a different way.
Visualizations work for me because I feel them first and see them later. They are an immersive and sensory experience for me engaging all the senses, not just sight.
I started with the feelings of delight, lightness and bliss. I felt weightless and possible in my body. I found myself in a stunning, lush vibrant forest; and I was also a part of this forest - living, breathing, exchanging, contributing.
It felt like nothing ‘bad’ could possibly exist here.
I knew I was here for a particular work though - the work for learning a new way through my swinging experiences.
As if in response, I felt something at the corner of my eye call my attention.
It was a darkened area in this otherwise luminous Forest.
As I moved closer, it started to smell like sewage. The air is heavy and dank. The trees were rotting and zombified. There were creatures around - vile, base, aggressive, loathsome and scary.
I walked right up to this area and was overwhelmed by it’s slithering, beckoning heaviness. And yet, I was still in the luminous Forest. I couldn’t see it anymore, but I knew it was there behind me and I felt it within me.
This is the space of both-and (rather than either-or).
In this moment beyond time, I felt what lived within me - what was beautiful, lush and alive along with what was rotting, horrid and gnarly.
This idea of Light in the Spiritual context, does the job of informing us that we are a mixture of a great many things - often conflicting.
Most people get this.
The part I had to learn was how to engage with this - what to do next, how to experience both emotional places without being overwhelmed completely and without denying any one part.
I was also learning something I didn’t realize at the time - how to think.
Light as Medicine
If you’ve ever been at the doorstep of a creepy basement at night, you know that it can be daunting. That creepy chill of damp air and the weird sounds that live only in basements.
Then, you turn on the light and you can see the very steep steps that lead down to a damp room with a fussy furnace and a clanky laundry machine.
You take a breath and gingerly go down the stairs to finish your chores.
What is different here, is that the light switch turned our doubts into illumination. Maybe we were still scared of encountering a nest of rats in the basement, but under the light of the bulb, we still take our steps. We can see. We are informed of our surroundings.
Spiritually, Light does the same thing.
But the source of Spiritual Light is what emanates from within us. It has many names - Divine or Higher Self, the Soul, our Spirit, God, our Cosmic or Inner Self - but the feeling is the same.
At a certain level of Spiritual development, we learn to hold all that our Light shows us - the ugliness and the beauty.
This is great and deep work, and we have to come back to it, as it is layered.
Every-time we come back to it, our capacity to hold more and more duality and contrast expands. This is the basis for transmutation.
And every time we consciously work with our contraction and find expansion within, a brighter Light within emerges and reveals a new Truth, a new Path and a greater sense of identity beyond our material reality.
This happens because we finally get to see/ know/ feel that our capacity for Love is exponentially beyond our minds and bodies. It is internal, global, cosmic and eternal.
Light informs us of what is our current truth in an eternally changing cosmos.
It calls to the forefront all our necessary skills - our will, heart’s desire, discipline, patience, compassion, forgiveness, focus, and immense courage.
The Light in my Forest
One of the ways that I understood Light - whether from Inner Soul fire or from the Galaxy - was that it was a complex information package; of which we can see and experience only a certain part. That part is what we call Light. So, when the sun comes out on a cold morning, we feel warm and we see the flowers around us turn up to receive the Sun in response to dawn - this is us experiencing, seeing and feeling Sunlight.
Yet many other things are contained in this light information packet, which our natural senses do not register. These can be waves and frequencies and quantum particles that are still being explored as part of the science world.
But, we Being knows. Our Hearts, our Bodies and our Souls know how to receive and interpret the information in these light packets. Our Soul feels through and integrates what is required. Our Bodies discern, digest and metabolize. One Heart remembers and knows.
The discernment is important, because is unknowable to us is vast.
One one had this can be a scary notion that keeps us afraid.
On the other hand it can lead to arrogance, if we pretend to be always in the know.
My way through this is to set the intention of Absolute and Unconditional Love, as a frequential guide. It is like turning a radio dial to a specific channel where you only hear that and nothing else.
This is when, without ever meaning to, I started working with (what I later found out was aptly called) Light Codes.
In moments of pristine peace, I could connect to aspects of my Luminous Self and with the Heart of the Cosmos (as I intuitively called it) and started feeling what this digestion and integration process of Light was within my body.
I’ve always seen digestion as a form of alchemy.
The raw carrot on your plate, upon digestion, turns into energy for your cells, becoming the cell itself. So too, in the Spirit understanding, digestion of energy and energy packets happens, and as our cells ingest the Light of Truth they eventually become Light.
Most of us feel the negative side of this. Like when we are perfectly happy and walk by someone or into a room and feel a heavy energy. We call this a ‘bad or low vibe’. We have picked up some energy of a denser nature and now, even though the moment has passed, those thoughts and feelings stay with us. This is our system trying to digest this dense energy we have just picked up. Maybe we succeed in releasing it, or it causes us energetic indigestion or physical dis-ease for a while.
So when I found myself in my Lush Forest visualization, looking at this septic darkness and feeling all of it, I got to learn and experience the transformational power of ingesting Light Codes.
The only action I did in my visualization, was to take a step into the dark, dense and dank portion of the forest and let myself be overwhelmed by the heaviness, the smell and wailing and screeching in my mind. I was afraid, but more than that, I was inflamed, annoyed, angry and resentful.
Not only did my emotions rise, but so did stories I hear or things I remembered and experienced. A lot of news stories of horrible things people do - polluters, politicians, evil people in the world - came to the forefront. These stories were a combination of fact and fiction.
In this dense place, all my darkness came out. Every thought and memory that lived here, that resonated with these stories - fear, disgust, blame, shame, greed, lies and manipulation.
I uncovered what felt like hatred towards face-less people because I was afraid of living in an interconnected world with ‘bad’ people who do ‘bad’ things that affect me.
In my lush vibrant forest of Life, I came face to face with my darkness.
The light that revealed the shadow, where light dissipated - the place of blame and shirked responsibility for how I experience my Life.
My disempowerment was illuminated in that moment - the reason I blame others when undesired things happen that reveal my subtle victim-mentality with Life itself.
Feeling your gnarly feelings isn’t a space to dwell or wallow in through. It is also not a space to allocate blame elsewhere. Or so I learned.
It was horrible. I emoted heavily - all sorts of sounds came out as I stood in what was so opposite to who I thought I was - a loving and kind person. It was deeply shocking and uncomfortable.
Working with Light Codes can sometimes feel like this, as they show us where our emotional and energetic gunk lives. We have to do some cleaning and purging and that can feel gross and painful.
Thankfully, I was more prepared for this challenging that I realized.
Through years of practice, I knew that my Heart and my connection to Source is strong, and in a moment of quiet revolution, I chose to Trust that connection, over the blame and disempowerment.
With the deepest breaths I could allow to steady myself, I felt into the strength of my Heart. Like the sun rising into a cold morning, I grew warmer, stronger and brighter.
Choice and breath are powerful portals of transformation, especially through our emotional muck.
The warmth within me grew and drenched the space around me including this dark, dank portion of my visualized forest. The memories, shame, anger, stories, beliefs were also drenched.
It wasn’t that I started feeling better.
It was that I started feeling like the heaviness was lifting, like a fog bending to sunlight.
This is a glorious gift of Light Codes, Intention and Trust. They form the basis for Light Alchemy and help us face and transcend our emotional heaviness - personal and collective.
The work of my visualization took some time to complete and I shook from the experience for a while, but there was a palpable lightness as well.
After I few days, I sat in meditation and revisited some of the stories that evoked such intense pain, hatred, anger and blame within me during my visualization. That is when I understood the ‘positive thoughts’ teaching in a different way.
That teaching is not about suppression of what we actually think and feel. And it is not only about the mind.
It is an invitation to go within within.
So that we visit with what is causing our thoughts and emotions, at the root, for they are related.
Only then can we expand out capacity for Self Love and Compassion and evoke the courage we need to face what is uncomfortable and Present within us.
Here we forgive, transform, transcend and emote - whatever we need to do.
Once the Light of our Knowing touches us, we alchemize our discomfort into liberation.
From a liberates space, we can revisit those negative thoughts, and release them, as they no longer have a hold in our core.
It is almost like the work is around purifying and refining our thoughts so that they are Life-giving, Life-affirming and imbued with Loving and Creative Power.
No longer are we pulled across the oceans of our emotions like a helpless drowning victim.
No longer does life ‘happen to us’ because other people do ‘bad’ things.
No longer do we judge or limit or blame ourselves or others because of a material belief in correctness and wrongness.
I realized that my blame patterns we not just global, but also personal. I didn’t always express it, but I carried a lot of this emotion with me through my life. It affected my relationships and formed a layer of mistrust of others within me.
And so, whether it is blame or anger or despair or another energy which is an emotional truth right now, our thoughts - positive or negative - may come from there.
And there is a way to uncouple and return to our most natural, Truest states of Love and Liberation.
Not by thinking positively.
But by accepting the fullness of what is, in the Present moment.
Because our thoughts do create our Divinely Perfect now moment.
Aarti, you seem to have the knack of going behind the scenes in my mind and take me to a different dimension; guiding my mind to bring about some bit of transformation in my thinking & my mind.
Keep it up 👍