When “Positive Thinking” becomes denial

You probably heard about the power of the mind and that the quality of your thoughts determines your reality. Maybe you are even practicing “positive thinking”. However, there are many “mistakes” people make in this realm that can do more harm than good. A major one is trying to deny thinking about anything “negative” out of fear that just thinking about it will call it into their life (or magnify its presence). A concrete example: When inviting one of my clients to enter a dialogue with his dis-ease, he told me that he was afraid to connect with it, because that would mean he acknowledges it and it would become more powerful as a consequence. In other words, he was saying that: “If I pretend it’s not there, it’s not there.” And yet his whole life is conditioned by the presence of this unwanted guest! In reality, it’s exactly the other way around.

The more we resist the existence of the “bad” stuff, the more we feed it with our energy.

The ultimate goal of the soul is oneness. However, the human consciousness cannot grasp the concept of unity. It can only experience the world through opposites: day and night, life and death, divine and human, yang and yin, male and female, Masculine and Feminine. Everything inside and outside of us can be attributed to one of these two poles. They are equally important, complementing each other, growing into each other and needing each other for their own existence. Neither is superior to the other. They just are. We could not live without rain just as we could not live without sun. We would not be able to enjoy the day if we did not sleep at night. We would not know what happiness was if we were never sad. We would not be able to value life if we never died. There would be no men without women.

Until we learn to embrace non-duality and to simply be at peace with all that is, we tend to separate things into good or bad, usually preferring light over dark, sun over rain, life over death, health over disease, happy over sad – and yes, Masculine over Feminine. However, denying one of the poles does not make it go away. On the contrary, the more we try to suppress it, the more we invoke it. It becomes our shadow, acting outside of our conscious awareness and control. In fact, the more we over-emphasize one side, the more we will have to withdraw into its opposite before we can eventually rebound into balance.

Disease is never just a physical problem. It’s an invitation to enter a dialogue with your soul, to look beyond the surface and to discover your deeper needs and desires. The physical body lives downstream of the spiritual body. It is the stage on which the theater script of your soul is played out. It makes the subconscious conscious. This means that your physical symptoms are really messengers from your soul. As long as you continue to look at disease as the enemy, as long as you fear it and – as a consequence – fight it, no approach, whether natural or conventional, will “heal” you. This include “positive thinking” because manifestation is all about vibration. Ultimately, you attract what you feel. If you try to think “positively” but you actually feel fear, rejection and hate, you are vibrating in the frequency of scarcity and disease.

So, don’t be afraid of thinking about your disease (or to think thoughts of violence, crime, sex, death…). You cannot change anything that you don’t first acknowledge as your reality right here and now. Accepting does not mean approving or acting upon. Your disease IS a reality right now, whether you choose to see it or not. Every single human being has hateful thoughts sometimes. If you use everything you feel or think simply as information about yourself, about your triggers and wounds, your needs and desires, where you need to set or assert boundaries, etc., you don’t have to fear them. To the contrary, they can become your best ally. And you will be healthier too.

The more proactively and courageously you face your shadows and challenges, the less your body has to take over in order to force you to do so. Just like a warning light in your car, your symptoms indicate an issue not directly visible to you. If you do not stop in time to check what is wrong – not with the light itself but with what it is indicating – your car will eventually break down.

Looking at your shadow, on the other hand, brings light into the darkness. You can integrate those unwanted parts of yourself. This usually implies changing convictions and beliefs about yourself or the world and, in doing so, changing your thoughts, feelings and actions. The symptom can disappear because there is no longer any need for the body to compensate.

The louder the wake-up call, the greater the need to respond usually is. Where there are accidents, chronic or severe disease, or symptoms that can only be managed with medication or surgery, the life change required needs to be rather profound.

In my book I describe a powerful and empowering process for manifesting your goals and intentions.