Update about blogCa

Who knew all this would happen afterwards! A past visit to the Atlantic beaches.

Monday, July 14, 2025

Negativity vs. positivity

Posting all of this daily "inspiration" from which I often just take the header statement and use it as a quote. But today I have a reason for doing so.

For the last several years, there has been a lot of focus on the power of positive thinking. Many people have come to misinterpret this wisdom to mean that it is not okay to have a negative thought or feeling. This can lend a kind of superficiality to their relationship with life and relationships with other people. It also can lead them to feel that if a negative thought or feeling comes up, they must immediately block it out. When they do this, they are engaging in the act of repressing a part of themselves that needs to be seen, heard, and processed.

When we repress parts of ourselves, they don’t go away so much as they get buried deep within us, and they often come out when we least expect it. On the other hand, if we allow ourselves to be fully human, honoring all the thoughts, feelings, and moods that pass through us on a given day, we create a more conscious relationship with ourselves. Instead of blocking out thoughts and feelings that we label as negative, we can simply observe them and then let them go. They only get stuck when we react to them negatively, pushing them down and out of sight where they get lodged in our unconscious minds. A healthier solution might be to develop a practice of following any negative thought we may have with a positive thought. This works well because positive thoughts can be more powerful than negative thoughts.

Rather than setting our minds up in such a way that we become fearful of the contents of our own consciousness, blocking out anything that is less than 100 percent positive, we might resolve to develop a friendlier attitude toward ourselves, trusting in our inherent goodness. When we recognize our true inner worth, a few dark clouds passing through our minds will not intimidate us. We will see them for what they are — small, dark figures passing through an expansive sky of well-being and truth.



But the point to this post is to consider negativity. The forces of evil, if you will.

We do have lives of judgement, at all times...considering whether something is good or bad. That's survival. But also we tend to put everything into those categories.

My question is (and my friends are really tired of talking about this by now) ... where does an evil or negative force come from? Is it really bad?

This is my attempt to understand if we're locked into a dualistic way of seeing things. Or is there maybe a more unified was of looking at things, circular perhaps. Or Yin/Yang? Where the heart of each opposite contains that one's opposite. And they are considered male/female aspects as well, not negative/positive.



Magnetism works with two poles.

We have night and day (except at the earth's poles where there's lots of twilight).


Without yin no yang
Without opposites, no harmony.
And so the Master, cultivating the practice of harmony
Accepts good and evil as necessary to each other.

Tao te Ching


Today's second quote:

We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full. -Marcel Proust, novelist (1871-1922)


The thoughts above have been around for a long time! But below is a physiological healing approach with the sense of emotional safety.


This approach of the psyche reassembling itself when its "Right Brain" feels safe gave me pause.

It's looking at safety fostering cellular restructuring. I like that. Maybe not cells becoming different structures, but the relationships between them perhaps

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I found more to express...soon. About binary functions, and just think, without a world of "ones and zeros" we'd never have achieved computers! 


12 comments:

  1. There's such a thing as toxic positivity. When people insist you should smile through everything! Cheer up! Don't give in! It's all good!
    It's not wise to try to force other people, particularly, to act as if. Your quotation is thoughtful and it's a wiser approach.

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    1. Oh yes, the fake positive is indeed toxic. But I am looking at the sources...the real emotions, and where they come from deep inside. That's why the negative emotions are being encouraged to be expressed for the sake of sanity, though within expressions which don't do damage.

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  2. ...some days staying positive is a challenge.

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    1. Looking for the good is sometimes pretty darn difficult.

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  3. Face reality and then plod onwards.

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    1. Yes, and we sometimes must just take baby-steps. As well as have friends to bounce ideas off of!

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  4. I may have commented this before but I read once that the things we see as evil are things we just don't understand and I admit it's hard to understand the evil of people that can produce something like the Holocaust or genocide or find some sort of personal enjoyment through cruelty. I guess another way to look at it that the Universe, and every expression within it, is the All That Is, the full range of possible expression, the yin/yang. We do live in a duality...good/bad, light/dark, strong/weak, etc but there is also a vast range in between. When does good become evil and vice versa? And yeah, stuffing bad shit is not healthy mentally or physically. Look at it, face it, recognise it, let it go and then remember all the good in yourself.

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    1. Thanks for your thoughtful response. I was curious about your take on this subject. It’s pretty deep, and I keep considering it.

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  5. It's a challenge to stay positive all the time.

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    1. Looking for a silver lining when the storm clouds take over...a good goal.

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  6. I'm one course short of my Master's in Counselling. This is what we talked about. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. It is great.

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    1. It's been almost 40 years since my Counseling degree...some things are worth keeping around.

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There is today, more than ever, the need for a compassionate regenerative world civilization.