What do we do when we're so ingrained in our past that we can't get away from it?
A lot of people will say that time will alleviate the ailment and you should press on with attempting to forget the problem. In fact, fairly recently, a religious zealot and I had a fairly long exchange about this particular subject. Clinging to an arbitrary verse that he took out of context in Isaiah, his stance was that we should forget about the speed bumps in our lives.
I contested that the only true way to transcend the elements of your life that are not palatable are by first accepting it and that by accepting it as part of your life, you learn to grow from it. When you hide from it, all you do is compact it more and more until it explodes.
The debate ran its course and I'm not going to go into full detail here, but suffice to say, I proved my point. Ironically, sometime later, I found myself anecdotal evidence for my very theorem.
Again, I won't go into details on the elements that occurred, but in short: Something was bothering me, I compacted it and it wouldn't go away. Eventually, I spoke to a friend about the problem and it led to a chain of events that is leading me to this article.
So, now that we covered the groundwork, lets segway into what Mental Aikido is. If you're familiar with what Aikido is, you'll know that Aikido is a form of martial arts that differs from others. It roughly translates to "the way of unifying life with energy" and differs from other forms of martial arts its primary offense is a form of defense that redirects an aggressor's own energy against them. Rather than blocking and executing a strike of your own, you sidestep in such a way that the momentum of your attacker sends them to their knees.
I'm not going to spend too much time on actual Aikido. Instead, I'll link you to a short description of Aikido that will give you an idea of what it is. [Click here.]
As you can see, one of the most important elements of Aikido is to accept the attacker's energy and blend it with your own. That's quite similar to how Mental Aikido works.
The key element for Mental Aikido is to stop resisting your emotional needs. Your emotions are the "attacker" in Mental Aikido and the only way to overcome them is by accepting them. Often times, we have a habit of fragmenting our thoughts on the negative, which only leads to elongating the problem. It's quite similar to how an alcoholic who drinks to escape their problems never truly gets over it because they don't face it and stagnate their growth from it.
So, much like they teach in Alcoholic's Anonymous, the first step is admitting that you have a problem. Sit down and iron them out. Stop running away from them and pretending that they're not there.
When you have a little problem, do you think about it for a second at a time? Of course not. You sit down, figure out all of the key ingredients to solving the problem and then execute. The only difference between that and a big problem is that it takes longer.
Essentially, what you're doing here is the exact opposite of what you've been doing to solve the problem before. Instead of trying not to think about it and having it come up, you want to force yourself to think about it as much as you possibly can. I know this sounds like it's going to put you in a crazy home, but bear with me. It's a lot harder to think about the problem every waking second than you think. Just try it.
Be mindful that thinking about the issue does not mean to be sour with those around you. This is Mental Aikido, which means that you are internalizing the negativity and redirecting it as positive energy. And due to the fact that you're actually trying to force yourself to think negatively, you will find that what creeps on you is positive thoughts rather than negative.
For me, when I began to undergo Mental Aikido, I felt the love of my friends, family and how lucky I was creeping up on me in place of those negative things that I was forcing myself to think about. I actually began to have trouble thinking about the bad stuff.
In your thoughts, you have to empty out all of the weights dragging you down. This is the hard part because it requires you to admit everything -- even the things that make you look bad. The things that make you feel bad about yourself. The areas where you're wrong. Looking at the problem from the perspective of the other person. All of those things that impregnate themselves in us and begin to weigh us down.
Don't skimp out on this part. It's the most important part even though it's the hardest. You have to be totally committed to throwing down all of your emotions and accepting wherever it leads.
You can attempt to make logical sense of the situation however you wish, but it's not going to get the job done. You know how that one person who always tries to argue a logical subject with their emotions always looks like a clown? That's because emotions should not be used to explain logic and logic should not be used to explain emotions.
Keep asking "why?" You may feel that your logical mind tries to block certain answers from coming out, but those are the answers that you absolutely must confess.
You don't have to admit any of this stuff to anyone in particular as of right now. The important part is that you can admit it to yourself and let it all out. Then, ultimately, you must honestly (and honestly is the keyword here) accept it all as a part of your life.
When you do this, you allow the negativity to become a part of you, but the difference is that from that negativity, you create positivity. Accept, blend and redirect.
Congratulations. You have just learned to turn negative energy into positive energy.