Love and Light. Really?
12 minute read
That positivity is a good thing and that it feels better to hang out with someone whose vibe is high rather than someone whose energy drags you down seems self-evident. But what if not being on the uptip all the time is actually a sign of superior functioning? Maybe we actually need to focus on shadow as well as light. Maybe relentless positivity is actually toxic.
I’m coming up on sixteen years of Los Angeles living and I do have to say that overall the vibe here feels high. What’s not to love about palm trees, the Pacific Ocean, avocadoes and citrus on tap and sunshine 284 days per year? Life is good out here. But look a little closer and the cracks show. Rents are going through the roof and there is an epic homelessness problem. City boulevards have blocks’ long tent encampments, freeway underpasses serve as makeshift cities, street litter is a big problem and societal inequity is rampant.
Don’t get me wrong, LA is amazing. It’s a nexus of creativity, opportunity, stunning beauty and ferocious nature. And there is a lot of shadow here, a lot of dysfunction. A lot of fronting, Botox, leased sports cars, designer apparel. Massive credit card balances. DUI’s (driving under the influence), depression, substance abuse. I suppose that makes it like lots of other places, where’s the light, there’s shadow. It’s just that with so much sun, there’s a LOT of shadow. As the old adage says, the brighter the light, the longer the shadow.
The problem is that a lot of the time, people don’t want to dwell in the shadowlands. Who doesn’t want to bathe in the warmth of the sun? But the sun can burn and wither; it gives life but it can also cause desiccation, exhaustion. Relentless positivity is also exhausting. I don’t mean that being in a good mood is tiring, I mean having to pretend that everything is great all the time. Sucks the life right outta ya.
I read somewhere that toxic positivity is refusing to acknowledge or be empathetic towards, others’ suffering, rather than insisting that everything is fine. Offering platitudes or feel-good catchphrases is a poor substitute for acknowledging what someone else is going through and might actually make them feel worse. And it shuts down connection. If someone is looking for connection and trying to be seen in their struggle, ignoring that need can be unkind and make them feel unseen.
People who are toxically positive often mean well but underneath is suppressed shadow, things that are lurking in dark recesses where they don’t make waves. But maybe they do.
If it’s easier to pretend that everything is great all the time than to admit that sometimes life is crap, bad things happen to good people and much of life is just not fair, then you have to wonder what exactly is it that TPP’s (Toxically Positive People) are avoiding?
I have a friend who's very sweet, very loving. I’ve never seen her get angry or post anything remotely controversial or socially engaged on social media. Of course, there is no mandate to do so, but here in the US we have lived through extraordinarily tumultuous times during the Trump presidency, not to mention the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter movement. Oh and there’s the pandemic and the societal havoc that has wrought too. Call me confrontational, but to not post anything that acknowledges what’s going on in the world around you feels like a cop-out.
So, this lovely friend of mine the morning that violent insurrectionists overtook the symbol of democracy that is the Capitol in Washington DC wrote on Facebook that we should “offer prayers for everyone at the Capitol.” Just think about this for a moment. An armed mob has overrun police, charged the building, is busy vandalizing and terrorizing elected officials while openly taunting police and brazenly displaying white supremacist paraphernalia. They are doing this to prevent the results of a democratic election from being ratified, in other words they are trying to instigate a coup d’état. This is all happening in front of our very eyes via live TV broadcast and my friend suggests we pray for the insurrectionists!
Okay, listen I know God (assuming there is one) is all-forgiving and has the big picture such that He can afford to forgive violent mobs intent on overturning democracy, ready to kill and injure in the process. Not to mention deface state property. But none of us is God. To refuse to condemn the insurrectionists, to take a stand against such tyranny is to opt out, to bypass. This is toxic positivity.
My friend is part of the yoga community here in LA and I hate to say it, but the yoga community is rife with TP. Weird because there is nothing in the teachings of yoga that says that life is a bed of roses the whole time, no attempt to whitewash the presence of suffering. The Bhagavad Gita, considered by many to be the seminal text of yoga, opens on a battlefield with warring factions facing each other. Nihilism and destruction feature heavily, the crisis is real and the stakes are high. Kind of like at the Capitol. So why do so many people in the yoga world and New Age circles bypass? Why is the ‘it’s all love and light’ doctrine so prevalent?
Look, I’m not saying these are bad people. It’s a beautiful thing to want to emphasize the positive, to bring more light. But one of the purposes of light is to illuminate shadow, to bring clarity.
If we pretend that everything is fine all the time, what happens to the stuff that’s not fine? Where do the feelings go? How do underlying issues get resolved?
Big questions. My hunch is that there is a lot of suppressed shadow, a lot of unwillingness to explore the discomfort of dark places. When it comes to societal issues to take a stand and risk being called out for doing so. If we cannot be present for someone else’s pain and cannot say that the insurrectionists were wrong, then what exactly is the purpose of a so-called ‘spiritual life’?
Spirituality is not about avoiding making judgements and pretending things don’t go wrong, insisting that there is no shadow. It’s sometimes about discernment, making hard choices and radical honesty. It’s about doing things that might cause discomfort because a higher value, like kindness, or generosity, or fairness, is being prioritised. It involves looking at your own shortcomings, failures and brokenness and taking steps towards wholeness. For some people it’s harder to acknowledge the shadow than to ‘stay in the light.’ Maybe acknowledging shadow means stepping out of it and bringing the illuminative force of clarity a situation or relationship to actually see what’s going on.
When I was twenty-six my Mam died of cancer. I was utterly devastated. I literally felt like my whole being was slashed open, I was so raw and vulnerable from grief. When you’re grieving you don’t expect people to say magic words that will fix everything. They couldn’t possibly. But any gesture of sympathy, or words of kindness help tremendously. I did get wonderful support from friends and acquaintances, which helped a lot. What really hurt me was when I bumped into people who said nothing, even though I knew that they knew Mam had died recently and it was so fresh and utterly annihilating.
I don’t mean that other people had the responsibility to grieve for me or make me feel better, rather that it’s an act of kindness to acknowledge another’s suffering. And doing so may be very uncomfortable because it might force you to look at your own suffering, or your awkwardness, not knowing what to say, or simply wading through discomfort. But this is what empathy looks like. To see and feel another’s suffering as your own, if only for a moment. To reach across the divide and say ‘I see your anguish. I’m sorry’
Empathy is the ability to place yourself in another’s shoes, to take their suffering as real, to endorse it as fact regardless of your opinion.
Succinctly expressed: I am not you, I am something like you, I am nothing but you. You are in pain, I’m not going to try and fix it to make my own discomfort go away, or so that I won’t be reminded of my own unhealed pain. And I’m not going to ignore it because that’s easier for me, I will afford you the dignity of acknowledging your pain. I will not allow my attachment to positivity at all costs negate the reality you are experiencing.
It’s not that wallowing in pain and negativity is a good thing, I’m simply saying that getting complete, getting closure requires accepting what is and sometimes ‘what is’ is painful and inconvenient and might have all kinds of associated emotions, like guilt and shame, sorrow. But putting ghosts to rest requires inviting them in, making friends with them, not banishing them to the netherworlds where they can cause trouble.
So much for spirituality. Back to yoga and the ‘love and light’ brigade. It might be that over time key teachings from the tradition and from Buddhism got distorted and distilled into marketable soundbites that appeal to our inherent desire to avoid pain and go towards pleasure. Common to both yoga and Buddhism is the idea that controlling your mind is important if you want to avoid suffering.
A key tenet of yoga philosophy is pratipaksha bhavana, the practice of recognising thoughts that create suffering and alienation and replacing them with thoughts or attitudes that engender harmony and connectedness. In other words, choosing thoughts that have a positive somatic residue, that feel good. What’s not to like about this? You know when someone rubs you the wrong way, if you keep thinking about the thing that annoys you, it has the effect of amplifying the negative, but if you can focus on a quality or something you enjoy about the person, things shift.
Plasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganise itself in response to external and internal changes. Another way of saying this is that that the brain can weaken or amplify connections between different parts and thereby reconfigure itself. The more real estate a particular part of the brain takes up, the more influence it has. Following from this, the more happy thoughts you think, the happier you’ll be. What’s not to like?
I once heard a radio program about Daniel Kish whose eyes were removed before he was thirteen months old due to eye cancer. He taught himself echolocation, the ability to ‘see’ using echoes from objects, just like bats do. In other words, he trained his auditory cortex to do the job of his visual cortex. This is neuroplasticity and we all have the ability to rewire our brains and create sustained change with practice.
This is the fundamental insight of pratipaksha bhavana; replacing negative thoughts with ones that have feel-good changes your mind and your brain. You can use your mental resolve to change the hardwire of your brain. This is pretty phenomenal and offers a path to empowerment and thriving but it is not an endorsement for bypassing. Pretending that everything is always fine causes distortions. You can both acknowledge that a situation is problematic, or causes suffering and reach for a thought that feels better.
“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life tomorrow. Our life is the creation of the mind”.
How wise was the Buddha! Thanks to psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) and other scientific fields we know that our thoughts affect our feelings and general wellbeing. But you don’t have to be a scientist to know this, we all know it intuitively. It just makes sense that feeling good affects pretty much everything and thinking positive thoughts causes us to feel good. When I was applying to Ph.D. programmes in the US, my academic advisor told me to write my cover letter when I was feeling good about myself otherwise my lack of confidence would show through. I must have found the right moment because twenty years ago I was indeed accepted as a doctoral candidate in philosophy at a highly regarded university.
But here’s the thing, there were days when I felt like shit during the application process, when I doubted myself and questioned whether I had the stuff to get accepted. Those were the days I refrained from writing the letter and prioritised doing things to make me feel better about myself. I was not foolish enough to think that pretending I felt great would actually make me feel great. I needed to do things that got me back on the feel-good track and then keep accentuating the positive.
Maybe toxic positivity has to do with a fundamental inability to accept what is, a preference for projection over reality. There is a lot of toxic positivity in spiritual circles, yet acceptance of what is at is the heart of a spiritual life. It is only when we accept a situation that we can change it, after all. But change is hard, requires self-effort and stepping into unknown arenas of discomfort and growth, excavating shadowlands and cobwebby places. Staying in the light is so much easier, you get to keep the monsters at bay and pretend they don’t exist. And the light can blind you to other people’s suffering, to injustice and unfairness in the world around you; it can preclude empathy and prevent connection.
The leap to empathy is audacious and bold. To see yourself in another requires radical compassion and deep heart. It’s a call to courage, to de-centering and opening towards greater connection, the possibility of understanding the world through the eyes of another. In the words of Brené Brown:
Empathy has no script. There is no right or wrong way to do it. It is simply listening, holding space, withholding judgement, emotionally connecting and communicating that incredibly healing message of ‘you’re not alone’.
Dearbhla Kelly, November 2021
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