The casual observer can see the positive thinking movement everywhere. The core concepts get shuffled about and depending on the cards we draw we get things like Byrne’s The Secret, Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Emoto’s Secret of Water, or a vast swath of the New Age movement. A little positive thinking can help carry us through the tough times and help us achieve our aims. Dogmatic positive thinking is plain destructive.
Blindly adhering to the scriptures of Positive Thinking represses the not-positive thoughts and emotions that we encounter. Instead of accepting and seeking to understand them or address their causes, we must fight them off with yet more positivity. When things don’t work out, we have only ourselves to blame for not thinking positively enough.
We have a need to understand. To understand something is, in a way, knowing what it is not. We can understand “up” in opposition to “down”. Positive is not negative, light is not dark, good is not evil. (An interesting side note: all these terms are relative, not absolute). The point is, without negative experiences, there are no positive experiences. There is only the experience itself.
Transcending this duality and experiencing reality as presented, without giving the experience all these relative qualifiers. To get there, we need to integrate these dualities, recognize they only exist together, and not keep them separate. Denying and repressing the negative does not make it go away. It merely keeps it separate and ensures wholeness will continue to escape us.
No, to become whole we need to embrace and dance with our shadows.