Learning to become an optimist wasn’t a massive shift for me, because I’ve never been a huge pessimist. But my optimism lens got a very obvious upgrade when I rewired my brain through mindful drawing.
Now, no matter what negative situation comes up, after the event has sunk in, I can see it from a ‘higher’ perspective. I’m able to invert every negative situation into a potential positive.
Even the terrible stuff.
If I was going to destroy my life with addiction and lose everything I cared about? After I scraped myself up from rock bottom, I’d turn it into a positive and spend the rest of my life working to get this beast off our planet.
If I lost my dad to suicide? I’d use my voice to speak about suicide and mental health.
I’ve become determined to use every ‘negative thing’ for fuel to push me further than I would ordinarily be able to go.
I cannot accept that ‘bad things’ happen – and that they just stay bad FOREVER with nothing good coming out of it. No lessons, no different life path, no new layers of empathy, or nothing positive coming from it whatsoever.I’m too stubborn to accept that, and it does not align with my deepest truth.
When you focus out to the big picture, every difficult or ‘negative’ thing has the power to crack you open to new levels of consciousness.
To become an optimist does not mean that straight after life throws you a curve ball made of shit, you're positive about it.
Hell no. When huge challenging things happen to us in life, we need time to process the event. Sometimes lots of time.
The big things usually revolve around the theme of loss. The loss of a loved one. The loss of a marriage or partner. A child. A home. Your mental or physical health. Your career, all your money, your reputation, your freedom, your purpose or your identity – that persona that you thought you were.
First we go through at time of ‘processing’ this huge event. Stages of processing include numbness, denial or disbelief. Then it moves onto “why me”, then often anger, fear, grief or sadness. This is normal.
But once the event’s been processed you’ll either revert to back to being an optimist – and dig for ANY lessons you can get out of it. The hardest lessons contain the most gold – if your brain is wired to find it.
Or if you’re a pessimist by nature – even if something great happens – when the event is processed your view will settle back into one of pessimism.
Winning the lottery does not stop you from being a pessimist. Losing a leg does not change you from being an optimist.
They are hardwired programs of the mind. But the program can be changed.
To view your world as an optimist or pessimist are lenses through which you view the world.
Which view you see through depends on how you’re ‘wired’, and how you’re wired, can be changed. You can ‘rewire’ and reprogram your entire way of being (which is what my whole website is about).
When we delete the program of pessimism by expanding consciousness, the view shifts to a ‘higher’ perspective – which is the default view of an optimist.
To become an optimist is a trait of the high frequency, high gamma brainwave state.
Optimists are able to pull out the positives even with the worst thing that could happen to them.
Lose a loved one to overdose? Violence? Car accident? Those who are wired as an optimist, will, after a time of processing, use this situation to find positives. Maybe they go on to raise awareness and become a voice to prevent others from losing someone in the same way.
It may lead them to their purpose.
Or perhaps this situation changes them to become more considerate, or empathetic to others. Maybe it teaches them gratitude for the little things they couldn’t see before, because they know how fragile life can be.
After spending a few months practicing mindful drawing and tapping
into higher states of consciousness, I noticed my optimism grow from
it's current form, into something far more powerful.
Now I could apply it to the most horrendous things that occur in the world, whereas before, they used to get me down.
All negatives that come up, are now transmuted into positives. In all manner of shit storms, you begin to see potential.
Learning to become an optimist is a widely-accepted benefit of meditation and mindfulness practices.
You don’t become a ‘fake’ positive person. You become a realist-optimist. It stems from a place of authenticity. I have a huge aversion to “only Love and Light” or ‘it’s all good’ mentality because it’s a load of avoidant crap. That’s spiritual bypassing.
We learn, heal and expand by going into the dark. Not avoiding it.
Shadow work, is the highest form of Light work, because this is how we heal.
You still feel all the feelings like sadness, fear, confusion, grief, unfairness or deep sorrow – but IT DOES NOT STAY THAT WAY.
When you change the program, you flick the switch to turn suffering into growth and fuel. Just like a powerful spiritual alchemist, you learn how to turn shit into gold.
Image credit: @thecosmicfeminist
Here's a little experiment I did which showed me I'm unable to view the world through a pessimistic lens. EVEN WHEN I TRY REALLY HARD.
Recently I’ve been trying to record some brainwave sessions specifically to show how negative emotions suppress high-frequency gamma brainwaves.
I wrote down negative words like “hate, injustice, suffering”, and as I was writing, I tried to tap into the emotion of these words. I also also tried to focus on low frequency emotions like anxiety, anger, fear and sorrow.
But I found I’m not able to focus on suffering for long anymore – something weird happens. My brain has become hardwired in optimism and positivity. I can do it for a second, but now I have an immediate automatic reaction that flicks a switch into something else.
It
creates
a fire
for change.
I tapped into anger and rage, but instead of feeling it in its low frequency ‘violent’ (and disabling) form, I felt it this rage and fury transmute to become purposeful. It became aimed towards injustice.
When I tapped into chaos and destruction, I had the immediate awareness that this is the precursor to rebuilding better and reordering higher.
I tried to tap into suffering that so many humans and animals experience (which is a huge thing for me).
It fired me up so much that it lit a ferocious fire and fury to make positive change and DO NOT STOP until we exist in a world free from preventable suffering (or do my bloody best).
I tried to tap into grief of my dad’s death, and I could only feel it as the cathartic and healthy kind. It’s not stuck like it was for so many years, which is toxic and soul-wrecking.
I tried to tap into my anger and disgust at addiction, drugs and gambling which destroyed my world. It linked straight to a fierce fire to make change for those who are stuck in it now.
I tried to tap into words like, “I hate you, you make me sick, I want to kill you”, (thanks Dr Emoto), but it felt false and empty. They was just meaningless words, I couldn’t make it come from my heart.
I’ve lost the ability to feel hate for real, even when I try. Because I do not hate – not even those people who have committed the most heinous crimes. They are still creation. Underneath their programs there still exists a being will full potential to heal and love.
I know programs that create these abominable actions. I was stuck in one myself.
When you remove the programs, a person’s dysfunctional behaviour completely changes. I know because I did it.
Learning to become an optimist is just another example of how mindful drawing rewires the brain into a higher frequency.
It does it, by putting the brakes on our thoughts and programs, and in these new spaces, seeds of our true nature are able to get in.
As these seeds grow, it gives rise to emotions like gratitude, joy, love and compassion – all of which raise our gamma brainwaves.
Just like many benefits of a high frequency brainwave state, you don’t even have to try to become an optimist. It just happens. It is literally like turning on a light switch.
