Like you, I’ve read my fair share about positivity and choosing positive emotions. Both sides of the topic. As a HeartMath trainer, Jin Shin Jyutsu practitioner, and self-care coach, I share ways to harmonize our attitudes, emotions, mental distress, and energy. I also teach how to intentionally generate renewing emotions. Or what some may call positive emotions. I see value in this, especially given the chronic stress levels many people face. So I have wanted to respond to positivity’s negative press. Here’s why.
Positivity is not being positive for the sake of being positive. It is not a way to wish away whatever you don’t like in the world. I’m not asking you to erase, suppress or deny how you actually feel. Whatever it is that you are feeling. These are all real. I’m not disputing this. The question though is – are they true?
Here’s the thing. We perceive reality as we are; rather than as it is. Our perception is based on our beliefs, past experiences, conditioning, filters, inherited family patterns, unhealed wounds. Our brain searches this database for the information most closely matching what is going on, including an emotion. How we feel, how we view the situation – this is not a pure response. It is filtered through a multitude of datapoints. There is so much information, so many stimuli, in our environment that filtering is an evolutionary mechanism. Imagine navigating and making choices otherwise. We cannot currently process this volume of information. We shortcut it.
So the feelings are real; are they true? Are we being responsive to what’s at hand or are we being triggered? Perhaps we are living from survival mode? Through our senses? Are we existing from an unhealed and unintegrated wounding pattern? Or are we sourcing from zero field?
The techniques from the Institute of HeartMath or Jin Shin Jyutsu Self Help are some of the ways to create or discover a space, a stillness, from which to better observe and witness our patterns, projections, and identity at play. This way we can more easily choose to stop identifying with our pain body, pain, the past, or only with our physicality.
Dr Joe Dispenza writes in Being Supernatural how people are identified with the physical body, the environment, and time. This focus pulls people into the density of a sensory reality. You see, everything is energy and a frequency. Including emotions. What Dr Dispenza calls survival emotions – anger, guilt, and shame – have slower and lower vibrations. So when people identify with the physical body, the environment, and time, they are identified with the sensory reality, perpetuated by the lower vibrations of survival emotions. We feel more like matter than energy. We feel only the physical.
When We Practice Positivity
When we practice harmonizing these states and generating elevated emotions as Dr Dispenza calls them, or renewing emotions as the Institute of HeartMath calls them, we move into greater heart coherence. This information is sent from the heart to the brain and the nervous system, bringing it all into a coherent state. This allows us to function from a different place. Our autonomic nervous system, which controls 90% of our internal processes, comes into balance and harmony. This includes our sleep, breathing, and digestion.
Renewing emotions also promote repair, growth, and regeneration. They initiate different biochemical changes than do depleting (or survival) emotions.
So when we intentionally generate a state of renewing emotions, we are not denying how we feel, we are coming into a coherent state to better understand what is it that we feel and where do these emotions arise from. We are breaking our old habit of believing the illusion as the truth. Because while our feelings may feel real, they are not necessarily true. Being positive also reflects a resilient mindset as well as a belief that there is more than meets the physical eye. Positivity is knowing there is always a silver lining because the universe’s got your back.
