Stay Off the Wall!

Imagine a race car driver who's going around the track at 200 miles an hour, when he suddenly spins out and loses control. Lots of drivers have died from that sudden loss of control at high speed, but the ones that came out of it knew that they could only escape from that potentially fatal situation in one piece if they didn't look at the brick wall they were about to smash in to. Those drivers knew that you don't look at the problem – the brick wall – you look away, because where you focus goes is where your energy flows. Life is a series of tests, and all of us have to know how to come out of the “tail spins” that we hit on our journey round the track.

Even once we identify our mission in life, or recognize the issue we need to work on, and we're working hard to make our vision a reality, we're still going to be tested. We have to expand our blueprint to include those tests, and to make sure that our expectations can accommodate the conditions of real life. When we have expectations that the world can't fit into, we get upset, angry, scared, sad, jealous – all those psychological conditions that psychotherapists make their livelihood from.

When we're building our new template for life, we want to make it inclusive of everything that G-d is sending our way, even anger, fear and negative emotions. We can do this by internalizing the idea that everything that happens to us is always and only good. Most of us don't yet think that way. We find ourselves in challenging circumstances, or we find ourselves dealing with very intense negative feelings, and then we add to our problems by looking directly at the “brick wall” and the telling ourselves how terrible and awful it all is. But as soon as we do that, we've made it so much harder to get out of that negative “crash” state.

So now, the question of questions is how can a negative emotion be “good”? One answer is that when a person is fearful, or angry, or jealous, when the adrenaline is flowing and their blood is boiling, they are suddenly in possession of a great deal of energy that can be channeled into positive movements, speech and actions. Once the negative emotion has brought all that energy to the surface, it can be utilized by channeling it into something healthy and positive.

Most of the people that I speak to are aiming for the relaxed, calm, content state of being, but how much do relaxed, calm people actually do in the world? It's much harder to get off the couch and be productive when you're in a state of relaxation then when you’re in a state of rage or when you're scared. Emotions like fear and rage are more activating than “nirvana.” Suddenly you have the strength to change things that you resigned yourself to accepting; or to try things that everyone told you couldn’t be done. So you see, even negative emotions can help us to move forward in our lives in a way that will enable us to have success and enjoyment.

Every single action that we take is based upon a decision. You are making a decision every second of your life, regardless of whether you are making the decision consciously, or unconsciously. Right this second, you are deciding what to focus on. Are you really focused on this sentence right now, or are you focusing on something else from your past or in your future? Wherever you decide to put your focus, that's where you'll be. If you want to focus on all the positive things in your life, you'll surely be a positive person.

Even if a woman is yelling bloody murder at her husband, telling him all kinds of horrible things about himself and that she wants a divorce – if he has developed a positive belief about his marriage and believes that this woman really loves him, he'll have the inner strength and conviction to stick around, and sort his marriage out. Maybe he's done our “Ultimate Marriage” program, and he's learnt how to have a strong, positive image of what his marriage really could be if refuses to fight back. If he knows what he's aiming for, and he's got the tools to achieve it, then he doesn't need to talk or fight back. That husband is giving off powerful spiritual vibrations of certainty, and positivity and love for his wife, that can't logically be explained, but that are going to turn his marriage around 180 degrees.

It's all about having a focused mind. Most people simply don't know what a strong focused mind can achieve. In our marriage example, what's going on with the wife? She's just let her husband have it, no holds barred, and he's responding with solidity and unconditional love – and that's exactly what she's looking for! The husband doesn't need to come up with a brilliant speech to win her back, he just needs to believe in his marriage, and believe that right now, he needs to be yelled at. Instead of bristling with anger, the husband's strong focus on creating a good marriage helps him to accept all the verbal chastisement calmly; and when he does that, life starts to respond to him in turn, doors that were locked and bolted shut start to open, and it becomes a cycle of progress. And he's seeing real movement not just in his marriage, but also with his children; and with his career; and in his belief in himself. He's stopped the vicious cycle in its tracks, and now everything is starting to turn in a positive direction.