http://www.care2.com/greenliving/are-you-out-of-balance.html
Get Yourself Back in Balance
Every living system that goes out of balance attempts to right itself. This is true of your blood pressure and your heart rate but also of the rain forest or a population of birds. Pressure on the system from one side–such as lack of food, absence of home ground, or the sudden intrusion of enemies–causes a reaction to shove the system back into balance. Violence is the most extreme response to imbalance.
When people are asked to make moral decisions, it is the emotional center of the brain that increases in activity, instead of the rational centers layered higher up in the cortex. Only after anger emotionally fires us up do we call in the cortex to fashion reasons, including religious reasons.
If you plot revenge against an evildoer, you are harming yourself: Not because the thought may come back to injure you, which is superstition, but because negative thinking reinforces the source of negativity. Darkness adds to darkness. The simple psychological fact is that the mind grows from habit and use, and as long as you habitually use those centers that send out blame, anger, retribution, intolerance, and violence, those centers will be nourished in their growth.
Nurture instead the light that you find inside. Transformation doesn’t come about by being touched with a magic wand. Habit and use apply here too. If you find even the smallest reasons for sending out intentions of love, tolerance, forgiveness, and peace, these centers will grow inside your mind. Spirit counts on this growth.
Adapted from The Deeper Wound: Recovering the Soul from Fear and Suffering, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2001).
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8 comments
add your comment »Perhaps focusing on negativity is like the law of attraction, and simply attracts more of it because we're contributing our energy to it. If we focus instead on what we want to replace the negativity maybe we will attract that and cultivate more if it.
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thank you for this inspiring article
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How do you just...stop seeing, feeling, and pondering about the negative? How does it solve it to ignore? Or must we see these things, know these things...and CHOOSE to make what changes we can?...and breathe...because we cannot change it ALL. This is quite a challenge for me, to not fret.
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Thank you Deepak. I really need this inspiration today.
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I want more of this. I am so trying to slough off the negativity that I generate in my own frustration at the shortsighted and the exposed weakness of man that I see all around me right now. I have been waiting to write a response to my latest onslaught of ignorance and blind power because I need to get to a pleasant place where I can pray for and shed light here- I don't know if it is ego, or some pattern reaction, or a giant pain body, resonance of another song, reverberation from the blasting? I absolutely need reprieve from my own thinking, my own negativity-- three weeks of just being nice to self will find me balanced, but everywhere I go, I am pushed, suppressed, lied to, okay stop stop- the disinformation campaign for clean coal is EVERYWHERE, the comments to the newspaper are so rude and simple, but wrong; I feel lost and alone in this imbalance, another week and three more ridges have disappeared!
my inability to find a true place to be
adds to my imbalance exponentially
I've taken to driving 55 on the freeway for a month or two; great stress relief, and no tailgating! they see me and go around pronto! but from this point I see the MTR miners in the huge trucks speeding together in small groups from the mine sites, going 90, racing each other, maybe after a beer? having fun with their toys... and I think who am I to tell them the mountains are more valuable than their 95K jobs, big trucks, beer money, plus medical-- how to reach the class bully ?
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Love this article. It is so true what you are saying. I notice how you think and react to situations is how it will be presented to you.
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I feel alot of negativity lately I think I picked it up at my job. I often get angry because of the chaos around me. My failure to see these images for what they really are draws me deeper into depressive mood. I forgot the best solution is to change my reaction to it. I need to constantly work hard to remind myself to be positive and happy.I need to put on my armor daily.
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When I teach the affirmation process, part of is raising your awareness of how you think, write, and speak about yourself. If is in any way negative or limiting, I ask people to do an immediate correction. I should add what you think, write, and speak of others should not be negative either. For some and sometimes for me this is a difficult task, but worth the effort.
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