“The Power of Positive Thinking” by Norman Vincent Peale, “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill, and “The Magic of Thinking Big” by David J. Schwartz have one thing in common, THINKING!   I’ve even co-authored a book on thinking, “The 7 Keys to Freedom: The Ultimate Guide to Developing the Mind.”   We are trained to believe that how we THINK is the most important aspect of being human.   But what really makes us human is how we FEEL.

The truth is that our thinking and our feelings go hand in hand.  Our thinking creates a feeling, and the feeling causes us to act in a certain way, and how we act can affect how we think and feel about ourselves.

The problem is there is an epidemic of people who think so they don’t have to feel.

Holding back, or hiding your feelings is a major source of stress and stress causes disease.   We avoid conversations that have the potential to bring up negative emotions in us because we are unaware of the purpose and power of negative emotions and we are definitely not taught how to transmute the negative emotion into positive emotions.

This is the bulk of my coaching work these days, helping people overcome the addiction to doing, and thinking and really tap into their dreams and desires.  True dreams and desires live in the land of feelings and emotions, they are not the product of thinking.   Living your fullest potential is a feeling thing, not a ‘thinking’ thing.  In order for us to know ourselves intimately, we have to be willing to feel deeply.  What are the things we do that feel amazing?  What are the things we like that light us up inside?  This level of living is scary for a lot of people who have achieved a lot of success in their lives by doing, running, and taking massive action.   Effortless and flowing action is a result of deep heart connections to a desire, not thinking about it.

So what’s the purpose of negative emotions?     Why is it so important to allow yourself to feel the negative emotions when they arise?

Your negative emotions are simply an indicator of you being out of alignment with the divine vision of yourself and the world around you.  What does that mean?  Well, when you perform poorly and you feel negative emotions about yourself, it is simply an indication that your point of view of yourself differs from the point of view of Infinite Intelligence (God, Source, Creator…) In the eyes of Divine Love you are perfect and growing and stretching and becoming more and more and more of who you are designed to be, and when you feel or think differently than that you feel really bad.  And when you have negative feelings about yourself, everyone around you suffers because you snap at them.

Your negative emotions about yourself or anyone else is just an indication that you are not viewing the world as Life itself views the world.  You are viewing the world through the lens of the personality and not through the lens of divinity.

I had a client once share that they were so upset that their daughter was going to marry a man that she thought was horrible for her daughter.   She said he was too “Type A” uptight, and he was too domineering.  She told her daughter more than once that she didn’t like him and she was afraid that he was going to ruin her daughter’s self-esteem.   By the time she started working with me the daughter decided that she didn’t want my client seeing her granddaughter (from a previous marriage) as often as before because my client was acting too ‘controling’ and ‘domineering.’  Funny how it turns out like this.

When I shared with her that her she could use her negative feelings to show her where she had an opportunity to connect more with a divine point of view of her daughter, her future son-in-law and the situation, things started to change.  It didn’t happen over night, however she soon became a powerful leader of compassion and non-judgment in her family and began to embody the understanding of, “What we BIND on earth, we BIND in heaven.”   Instead of seeing her future son-in-law as a controlling & domineering person, she saw him as a compassionate, understanding and supportive man and treated him that way.  She spoke words of affirmation to him when she saw his actions line up with this new belief.  She saw him as perfect and growing and stretching and becoming more and more and more of who he was designed to be, without my client needing him to be who she thought he should be.  This is very tricky to get on your own, however it can be done.

This client understood the power of positive emotions, and she knew that Infinite Intelligence views us as being perfect, however she hadn’t recognized the power of the negative emotions to show her exactly where miracles are waiting to happen.  To this day, she feels this was a miracle in her life.  I agree.

Miracles happen in the space were we give ourselves permission to see things with divine eyes.

So next time you are feeling negative about yourself or others, ask yourself, “How does Source see me?”  “How does Source see others?”

I’m not saying condone bad behavior, I’m suggesting be willing to see the miraculous about life even when you don’t feel it.    The negative feelings are there to point out where miracles are ready to happen.

Appreciating you and the work you do!