How to handle negativity around you?

All of us at some point or the other in our lives have encountered varying shades of negativity in several forms. No matter how good you are, there will still be some people who will speak ill of you and run you down.

Negativity can spring from your home, workplace, toxic relationships – from anything and anyone that drains your spirit. So, how do you handle it?
 

Six simple steps to tackle negativity that has worked for me:
 

First, take a step back
If you wish to counter attack negativity, you got to first take a step back to re-assess and regroup the energies of your soul.
 

Get out of the fighting ring
Second step, come out of the fighting arena and ask yourself what battles are you fighting? Are they big enough to matter and small enough to win?
 

Gather all your energies
Third, once you have ascertained the nature of your battles, gather all your energies. Replenish your drained energies through silence, prayer, mediation, etc. Find time to be all by yourself and gather every ounce of your energy.
 

Increase the power of your goodness
Fourth, you cannot counter negativity by being bad to others.

You can only counter it by increasing the power of your goodness. Do not allow others to take you down to their level. You raise your level higher, so that they will be unable to reach you.
 

Understand
Everything happens for a reason, even the so-called negative things. Once you have understood the higher purpose of why certain things happen with you, life stands explained. It becomes much easier to accept and handle.
 

Allow karma to catch up

Do your best and leave the rest to God. Trust me when karma catches up you need not have to do anything. Karma does everything for you in ways you can never imagine or expect.

By the time you have gone through these six simple steps, you realise you are much more calm and at peace with yourself. You will join the league of those people who will be very difficult to unfaze or rattle.

get a hold on your ego

Ego is neither good nor bad. Ego is false.You cannot reach the truth without passing through falsehood, for there is no other way to perceive the truth directly. When a child is born, he is not aware of himself. He does not see himself as a body or mind or any such entity. It is through his senses that his awareness grows and he creates his identity.All his senses open outward, whether it is sight, touch or smell. Through these, he develops a concept of himself that contrasts with the outside world.There is no way for him to know his own self.

Usually, a child’s first encounter is with his mother and through her he becomes aware of his own body.Thus a centre is born, which is in reference with the world outside, in this case, the mother. If the mother caresses the child and treats him with love, the child feels loved. If the mother rejects him, the child feels he is worthless.This is how his concept of self develops.This concept of self which is based on perceptions by the outside world is ‘ego.’ It is not our reality,but is the image of ourselves that is based on how we are treated by the outside world.

It is a reflected awareness. Hence, it is false. Gradually, this centre becomes the kingpin. If you go to school, your teacher perceives you in a certain way. If you have friends, they have opinions about you.When your parents interact with you, they express their opinion about you.Everybody adds something to how you perceive yourself and it gets reinforced day after day.You start living your life from this centre and believe it to be yourself.

Thus, when someone suggests that you drop your ego,you cannot.You cannot drop your ego, but it can drop by itself. It’s just like a leaf of a tree.When it matures, it drops by itself without causing any damage to the tree. But if you try to remove a fresh leaf from a tree,you will damage it. Our ego or self-image is our social need. If we have a healthy ego,we behave appropriately in society,whereas, a weak or an ill-formed ego makes us behave either as a victim or a victimiser. All that comes to the conscious from the unconscious passes through the filter of the ego. If this filter is not strong and healthy, then all kinds of desires and wishes will come to your conscious mind and will confuse you.Your pleasures are false and so are your sufferings. They all relate to a centre that is not your own and this centre demands a lot, and therefore, you have to give it constant attention.So you make efforts to get attention. It’s like trying to feel the fragrance of an artificial flower. However beautiful an artificial flower may be, you always know it’s not real. Your ego helps you get success in this world, hence, you are always attached to it. However, a slight turn of events can change everything and leave you confused.

In the Mahabharata,Arjuna got confused in the beginning of a battle that was most crucial for him. You were always in the state of ‘being’ before your birth and will return to it again after your death.This state of being is your true centre.The moment you are free of your false centre, you are in the space of your being.And that is true freedom, your home. No suffering can bother you in this centre because it is irrelevant in the space of being. The wise try to make you understand, but your false centre blocks your vision.You have to just explore a little more and see the false as false. By this very ‘seeing’, ego becomes transparent and loses its grip over you.Then ups and downs of life will not affect you.

The Key To Positive Change

The New Year is a time to look ahead towards the accomplishment of our goals. As we move forward in the months ahead, we may find that the biggest obstacle to growth is falling back into old patterns of behaviour. To avoid this pitfall, let us make a new resolution to become more successful in fulfilling our dreams by forgetting the past. We do not want to erase our good memories as they encourage future growth,but let us forget the bad memories. Thinking about painful incidents from our past often leads to dwelling on thoughts of anger, hatred, revenge, regret, and other negative thoughts.Time is wasted in reliving what has already happened rather than in moving forward to implement our future plans.When we keep replaying the same painful remembrances — which become like bad movies — we lose precious time to write new, happier movies for our future.Conversely, when we forget the past,we can begin the New Year with a clean slate to write the good we want in our future. The tendency of many people is to repeat the same negative patterns of behaviour.

In doing so, the same forces that may have led to failure in the previous year repeat themselves.


However, we want to inculcate new positive behaviours. By continuously thinking about past failures, we tend to engrain deeper impressions into ourselves and reinforce those behaviours. Instead, we should practice new habits that will lead to better results.We can consider our situation in this way:When we have a wound,we have to leave it alone to let it heal. If we keep picking at it,we reopen that wound,making it worse. Similarly, if we have a wound from past failures or emotional upsets, by replaying them in our mind we keep the wound fresh. If we want it to heal,we must forget about what caused it. For those of us who are setting spiritual goals for the New Year, yet we have not put in appropriate meditation time in the previous year, let us forget about the last year’s schedule. Let us make a new schedule for daily meditation. Furthermore, if we have not lived up to the ethical virtues in the past, let us forget about what we did last year, and begin anew to lead a life of nonviolence, truthfulness, purity, humility, and selfless service. If we harbour any anger towards anyone, let us forget about our anger and the situation that caused it, and let us start anew with that relationship.

Each day in the classroom, teachers have students erase the previous day’s work from the board so that there is a clean slate to post the new lesson. Similarly,we can erase last year’s negativity, anger, and hurts to start the New Year with a fresh slate. On that slate we can write a future containing a schedule of regular meditations, plans to live the ethical virtues, and positive steps to achieve our goals. If we do so, we will find that we have more time to move forward instead of pedalling backwards. We will find that at the end of the year, we would have moved farther than ever to reach our goals, and we will have done so peacefully, happily, and filled with optimism and joy.

Imagine There's No Countries

Brexit, the electoral triumph of Donald Trump and the rise of politicians like Nigel Farage in Britain and Mar ine Le Pen in France are all signs of a backlash against globalisation. But don't exaggerate this. The world still resonates with positive outcomes of globalisation, which remains popular in all emerging markets and, hence, in most of the world.
Remember, globalisation is not just about commerce and investment. It is more fundamentally about a universalisation of values and ideals in place of the land-grabbing, moneygrabbing nationalism of yore. That shift to universal values remains strong, and is best exemplified by a place I was lucky enough to visit this month: Antarctica.

Whaled and Sealed

In the Arctic Sea, all the islands (such as Greenland, Svalbard and Ellesmere Island) had for centuries been populated and divided among nations like the Soviet Union, Canada, the US, Norway and Denmark. But Antarctica was so remote that it was unknown till the late 18th century .

Then some ships landed in the outlying islands of the white continent, such as King George's Island, and were wonderstruck with the discovery of wildlife -especially fur seals and whales -that promised millions in profits.

Other explorers created dreams of massive mineral resources, including coal and oil.

By the early 20th century, more than adozen countries had established whaling and sealing stations and made territorial claims on enormous chunks of Antarctica and its outlying islands. A few scientific stations came up too. But in the main, it was an imperial race for territory and resources.

The main claimants were Britain, the US, the Soviet Union, Japan, Norway , Argentina, Australia and France. But several smaller countries made claims too. Since Antarctica was unpopulated, anybody could establish astation and claim millions of square miles of territory around it.

The earliest plunder was done by the fur trade. Seal fur was of high quality and fetched high prices. Hunters could just walk up to unsuspecting seals and bludgeon them to death.Within a few decades, millions of seals were killed and entire islands were wiped clean.

Then followed a mad rush for whales. The Antarctic Ocean in summer generated vast amounts of plankton that provided food for billions of krill, ashrimp-like creature. These, in turn, were eaten by huge populations of whales, seals and penguins.

Commercial whaling was highly profitable in the 19th century , since oil from whale blubber fetched high prices. Whales stripped of blubber were mostly dumped into the sea in the 19th century . But gradually, countries like Japan and Norway developed a taste for whale meat. Whales are mammals, not fish, and yield red meat that is compared in some countries to fine steak.

Antarctic whales were decimated from the mid-19th century onwards, and many species became scarce and faced extinction. Meanwhile, the tech nological progress of the oil indust ry threw up possibilities of finding vast reserves in the white continent.

Given the sorry history of human plunder, we could have expected an imperial rush for land and natural resources in Antarctica as bloody and widespread as those that occur red when Europeans discovered the Americas. The race for Antarctic ter ritory was already a political fact by the early 20th century.

From Fights to Rights

Yet, a totally new set of global values was created by the horrors of World War 2. This led to the establishment of new global institutions, declara tions of universal rights, and global cooperation in place of never-ending territorial wars. Few realise that but for this foundation in values, globali sation could not have proceeded so rapidly in commerce.

In 1959, the 12 territorial claimants in Antarctica signed a treaty estab lishing scientific and technical col laboration in place of the old com petition. The treaty did not set aside territorial claims, but abolished mi litary bases to create a continent of peace. It did not prohibit mineral or animal exploitation.

But in succeeding decades, the for ces of globalisation beat those of nationalism. All countries agreed to abandon territorial claims, abandon exploitation of resources, and treat Antarctica as a special territory for all humanity , to be conserved and not commercially exploited.

Whale oil was made obsolete by petroleum and this helped forge an agreement to ban commercial whaling.Japan still kills a limited number of whales supposedly for scientific research, though actually to meet a declining local demand for whale meat.Animal populations have revived strongly in the continent.

Instead of hunters, tourists now flood into Antarctica in search of whales, seals, penguins, albatrosses and other minor fauna. Tourism is strictly regulated to check any intrusion of alien species and germs that might affect the natural Antarctic species.

Scientific collaboration in Antarctica led to the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer, and to the Montreal Protocol to solve the problem. This was the first-ever global agreement to meet an environmental threat to all humanity , and has set the pace for other global initiatives.

So, don't get demoralised by the triumph of Brexiteers and Trump. Globalisation is still going strong in ways that are not obvious, even as some of its rough edges are being smoothened.