Tony Schwartz is an investigative reporter who investigates what's available on the spiritual path in America. In his book, "What Really Matters", he visits all the American gurus and gives every practice a shot.
During his endeavor, he trains with several sports psychologists. Sports psychologists were among the first to pay attention to positiive feelings and their mastery, as a path to winning while having more fun.
Much of western psychology, since Freud, has been paying attention to the Shadow, bringing into consciousness the unacceptable libidinal impulses, so that that powerful energy can be sublimated, brought to the light, transformed. However, as my shaman says, you want to make sure you have enough light to handlle the kundalini energy before you call it up. She feels that there are people out there who don't know what they're mussing with, or come from cultures that call up the kundalini from at traumatized place, and that isn't ideal. I think she is referring to practices like voodoo and shapeshifting, powerful healing modalities, that sometimes due to the practitioner's trauma history, get used for destruction rather than creation.
Anyway, the sports psycholgists had something fascinating to say about the people who spend all of their time listening to the Channel Positive Happiness (vs. Channel Fear or Channel Rage or the Shadow). These people lack dimension, depth. One psychologist, who trains insurance salesmen to stay in positive thoughts, says he can't stand to spend an evening with them They fail to see the negative. They live in denial. They cannot consider the pressing questions in the universe They are supremely boring.
The saavy sports psychologists recommend that we learn to redirect our thoughts to improve our lives and change our mood, if we become immobilized with negative thought, but that we develop the capacity to feel the full range of our feelings, that we live in reality. If we live in denial, life begins to feel one dimensional, empty and flat. Esther Hicks, channeling Abraham, says that we need contrast to build true appreciation for the experience of allowing and manifesting. I would argue that we need contrast in order to develop empathy.
People who have been traumatized do need to practice tuning into the Channel Positive Happiness, so that they are able to begin to see that reality is light, as well as shadow. Both those who ignore suffering in reality, and those who see only suffering limit their existence.
Posted by Dakota at December 14, 2003 07:57 AM