{"id":721,"date":"2016-10-24T22:34:06","date_gmt":"2016-10-24T17:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ashwita.com\/zen\/?p=721"},"modified":"2016-10-25T16:57:48","modified_gmt":"2016-10-25T11:27:48","slug":"why-we-attract-negativity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ashwita.com\/zen\/why-we-attract-negativity\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We Attract Negativity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/callthecompanionator.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/attraction1.png?w=640&#038;ssl=1\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-size: 200%; color: #777777; text-align: center;\">&#8220;Good things happen to good people&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I have often wondered if there&#8217;s a bigger lie than that. Or a more ruinous one.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">All the fairy tales we&#8217;re told as children, tell us how the innocent, good and the brave live &#8216;happily ever after&#8217; and the demons are killed. Our parents often reward us for good behaviour and we&#8217;re punished for our misdemeanors. And this makes us want to be &#8216;good people&#8217;. Not for the sake of being good, but because we want the benefits of being good.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">&#8216;Spiritual&#8217; people often have it worse. Most people on the spiritual pathway want to be &#8216;good&#8217; people to fit in with the stereotype. Many of us genuinely believe that being positive and happy and accepting of life is how a spiritual person is supposed to be, and strive to get there. Then why do we\u00a0end up being surrounded by &#8216;negative&#8217;, &#8216;toxic&#8217;, and &#8216;narcissistic&#8217; people? When we seem to have the capacity to attract whatever we want, how is it that the negative people still seem to seep in?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Because we want to be good people.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Our mind only understands the value of things through comparison. For example, when compared to a homeless person, our life looks very plush. But when we meet a person who owns a jet, suddenly we seem to be living drab, meaningless lives. Neither of the ideas of our lives is the truth &#8211; if we tried to assess the true status of our life, it would be very hard if there was no benchmark. The mind needs something to measure things against.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: justify;\">The Paradox<\/h2>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Now, to be\u00a0surrounded by deeply loving, kind, generous and brilliant people sounds like a wonderful thing, but the gratitude for such a life is quickly going to fade once the comparisons come in to the picture. If everyone around us is a better person than us, then we eventually become the not-so-good person. We&#8217;re the lazy one, the dull or the slow one, the negative one &#8211; in comparison. But we&#8217;ve grown to believe that to get the best things from life, we need to be &#8216;good&#8217; people!<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">So what&#8217;s the easiest way to become a &#8216;good&#8217; person? To simply change the benchmark we&#8217;re comparing against. The moment we are surrounded by negative, horrible people, we can immediately relax in the knowing that we&#8217;re good, and therefore our future is secure &#8211; because only good things happen to good people. Of course, this happens at a subconscious level, none of us consciously wants to be surrounded by who we think are bad people. And yet that is exactly what we end up with.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: justify;\">Let go of the labels<\/h2>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">When we crib or complain about a person, if we bring our attention to how we&#8217;re really feeling about ourselves, we can start shifting things around. Really deep work will even reveal how we <em>want<\/em> people to hurt or let us down so that we can continue making them &#8216;the bad guys&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Working with our shadows and integrating them goes a long way in this direction too. There is no such thing as a good person or bad person. Not only are these terms relative, but we&#8217;re all a mix of both, yin and yang. Whether we choose to call it good-bad, spiritual-unspiritual, conscious-unconscious, empath-narcissist or anything else, we&#8217;re getting into the same pattern &#8211; that of comparison. On the other hand if we view everything and everyone as a celebration of life, and if we realise that nothing is ever really as it seems, we dislodge ourselves from this mess and become truly free.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Good things happen to good people&#8221; I have often wondered if there&#8217;s a bigger lie than that. Or a more ruinous one. All the fairy tales we&#8217;re told as children, tell us how the innocent, good and the brave live &#8216;happily ever after&#8217; and the demons are killed. Our parents often reward us for good behaviour and we&#8217;re punished for our misdemeanors. And this makes us want to be &#8216;good people&#8217;. Not for the sake of being good, but because&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"btn btn-default\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ashwita.com\/zen\/why-we-attract-negativity\/\"> Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[21],"class_list":["post-721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","tag-spiritual-journey"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5l0ch-bD","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwita.com\/zen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwita.com\/zen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwita.com\/zen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwita.com\/zen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwita.com\/zen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwita.com\/zen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":736,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwita.com\/zen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions\/736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwita.com\/zen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwita.com\/zen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwita.com\/zen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}