“Don’t fight the darkness.  Bring the light and the darkness will fade”

Maharishi Mahesh – Founder of Transcendental Meditation

Both the light and the darkness reside only in our thoughts and given we have complete control of our thoughts we have the power to change darkness to light.  This is a life altering message for all of us to understand and believe and providing this information to our children will help them realize their emotional strength to bring light to dark thoughts, thus changing the emotional outcome of situations.

Most of us are familiar with having felt sadness, anger, despair, loneliness, heartbreak, helplessness, jealousy, envy, rejection, worry, disgust, fear or even hatred.  These are all very dark emotions but there of course is a logical reason human beings were endowed with the capacity to feel such a wide range of negative emotion.

But in keeping with the message of this post we will not focus on science of negative emotion because we already know we are capable of feeling them, sofor now we need only acknowledge we can feel them

The cause behind the emotions we feel can only be the thoughts racing through our mind.  Thoughts are our first reaction to what happens around us or what words someone says to us and many of us will blame what happens or what someone says for the way we feel, when in fact it is our reactions by way of thought that is responsible for our emotions and feelings.  We may also place responsibility on our own possible character flaws or made up inadequacies as the cause for the “what happened” and self-esteem plummets.  We start to search for the “why” this happened and without truly knowing the answers we make things up in our thoughts.

Here is a small but perfect example of how this can happen to anyone…

On Halloween evening my teenage son was waiting for his girlfriend to return his text message to make plans to trick or treat together, but he didn’t get a response from her.  His mood began to change and I could clearly see he was upset about something but he didn’t want to talk about it.  When he finally opened up to me and explained why he was feeling upset he began to search for possible reasons WHY she wasn’t returning his text message, and he started thinking…

“She wants to be with her friends instead of me”

“She doesn’t like me anymore”

“She’s out with another guy”

“I should have made plans sooner and I blew it”

“Maybe her parents don’t like me and won’t let her go out with me”

“Maybe her friends don’t like me and want her to break up with me”

Of course these are all possible reasons his girlfriend did not return his text message but the truth is right now they are all made up in his thoughts.  His thoughts are his reaction to the situation to which he does not have the facts so he has to make them up, but the possibilities he created in his thoughts do not serve him in any positive way but rather the opposite. He began to have negative thoughts about himself.

The Emotion Coach

The first rule in “emotion coaching” is to acknowledge and validate their feelings.  I told my son I can tell he is upset about something and if he wanted to talk about it I’m here.  It took a few minutes of silence but he then opened up.  I told him that it’s understandable that he would feel sad if any of the reasons he created were actually true.  Then I shared an experience were I made up reasons for something that happened to me that turned out to be untrue.  I asked him if there were other possible reasons for what happened that might feel better.  He started thinking again, but this time his thoughts were filled with positive possibilities and his mood shifted in a positive direction.

Point being, if we are going to make up reasons for something happening that was out of our control or make what others choose to say or do effect us, and we understand that we can control are our own thoughts, it makes sense to make up reasons that feel good rather than feel bad.

My son suggested that it is certainly possible his girlfriend had to go out with her parents or siblings, or she wasn’t feeling well or there was another logical explanation, and as it turns out, there was.  She got her cell phone taken away that day for using it in school and she was grounded from using Facebook.  OMG!  All her lines of communication with her boyfriend and her bff’s were suddenly completely cut off.

Though this obviously sucked for both of them, this was a wonderful opportunity for my son to recognize that letting in the light (positive assumptions) will cause the darkness (negative assumptions) fade away quickly, but we need to recognize the difference when it happens.  He mentioned to me how he has allowed the darkness to take over many times but now he can clearly see that he gets to choose his reactions (thoughts) about what happens around him.  Knowing that “what we think about comes about” and “what we resist, persists” he can shift his thoughts to shift his feelings about anything.

This is by no means a simple thing to do and it takes great strength and effort, but like exercising our muscles to build physical strength, we build emotional strength by exercising our mind when the opportunity arises, but the difference being emotional strength does not fade or diminish with age and no apparatus or special diet is required to become emotionally powerful.

I have personally put this to the test many times over the past three years while going through a challenging divorce and this “knowing” has allowed me to recognize my own power to at will allow the light to envelop my thoughts and darkness to disappear.

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