Analyze, Accept, Act – 3 principles for dealing with negativity

[Talk at Yoga Studio, Chicago, USA]

Thank you for coming today evening.
Am I audible to you behind? So, I’ll speak today on the topic of dealing with negativities in our life, especially with respect to negative emotions and how to overcome them. When we go through life, often things happen which hurt us, which can depress us, which can dishearten us, which can agitate us, which can create negativity within us. And when such negativity comes up, how we deal with it determines the trajectory of our life.
As we are moving deeper into 21st century, more and more we are recognising that our inner world affects us as much, if not more, than our outer world. Since the advent of science in the 16th century onwards, we have focused enormously on improving things in the outer world. And today, comforts that were unimaginable for people a few centuries ago or even few decades ago are widespread.
Air conditioning is one example. Mobile technology is another example. So, even royalty in the past did not have these facilities.
So, in terms of our capacity to improve the externals, we have changed enormously for the positive in terms of our controlling capacity. But somehow our external progress has not translated into internal happiness. Martin Luther King said almost half a century ago, we have guided missiles and misguided men.
We have been able to control externals very well, but internals unfortunately are going haywire. And this is the cause of a variety of mental health problems, depression, anxiety. All these are not so much problems that necessarily arise from physical situations alone.
It is not necessary that people who are very poverty stricken are the people who are the most depressed. So, depression is universal and even people who are well-to-do also tend to be depressed. The cause of this is that beyond the physical situation that we are in is our mental disposition.
And negativity comes into our life inevitably. So, a big part of what is wrong is the attempt to set everything right. A big part of what is wrong is the attempt to set everything right.
As our capacity to control externally has increased through technology, along with that has increased also our inner conception that we are meant to be controllers. And unless things go our way, it’s not just that something is wrong with the things, we think that something is wrong with me. When things don’t go our way, it’s not just that things are wrong, it’s also that something is wrong with me because of which I’m not able to make things go the way I want.
And so, in the past, when we did not have so much technology, we did not have so much capacity to control things around us. People had a greater capacity to live with things not going their way. That capacity to live with things not going our way is today not seen as a strength, although it can be a strength.
In every situation in our life, some things are in our control and some things are not in our control. In the past, if we look at the success and self-help literature, which is a genre which started maybe in the last 100 or so years, prior to that, failure was seen as an event in a person’s life. It is just a bump on the road of life.
Now, however, failure is often seen as the end of the road, not as an event in a person’s life, but as the epitaph of the person’s life, as the life story of that person, basically. So we, either society invests too much in our capacity to make things go our way or we invest too much in making sure that things go our way. And when they don’t go that way, we are unable to deal with it.
One of the insights that the yoga texts from India offer us is that this world which we live in is a place of distress. The Bhagavad Gita is an ancient yoga text and it describes that this world is Dukhaalaya. Alaya means abode, Dukha is distress.
So this is a place of distress. Now this can seem to be very disheartening or very pessimistic. What do you mean this world is a place of distress? Does that mean that we just have to accept distress passively and do nothing to be happy? Does that mean that we all have to be just miserable? No, that’s not what its implication is.
There is a starting point from which we begin. And from that starting point we can move forwards. Say, if we were to compare in terms of metaphors, when the yoga texts tell us that this, whether it is, whichever yoga text traditions if we study, yoga is not just a physical posture.
They are important, but beyond that it is a process for the evolution of consciousness. And the foundation in that is that the world we live in is like a hospital. In a hospital, distress is just a fact of life.
Distress is almost unavoidable in the hospital. However, although distress is a fact in the hospital, distress is not the purpose of the hospital. It’s not that the doctors and the nursing staff are heading a torture department where they are inflicting pain on the patients.
No, there is a system in the hospital to minimise the pain. And eventually to cure the pain. But the starting point is that if somebody is in the hospital, that means they are sick.
And if there is pain, pain is never pleasant. But pain becomes even more unpleasant when it is unexpected. Say, if we are meeting a person and we know that person is hostile to us, that person is our enemy, then they are going to attack us.
Even if not physically, they may speak harsh and hurting words to us. So now, anybody who speaks harsh and hurting words hurts us. But we are prepared.
That’s what we expect from that person. But if similar harsh and hurting words are spoken by a loved one, that hurts much more. Because it’s unexpected.
We are unprepared for it. If we come near someone and we expect a pat on the back, and they give us a punch in the belly. If we are in a boxing match, we expect a punch in the belly.
And even though it is painful, but we are prepared for it. So, distress is never pleasant, but it becomes even more unpleasant when it is unexpected. And when the yoga texts tell that the world is a place of distress, it is helping us to calibrate our expectation from life.
That the world we live in, sometimes relationships will go wrong. Sometimes our own body will let us down. We’ll have different kinds of sickness or health issues.
Sometimes the environment and the weather and the climate may be unfavourable. And these three things will cause distress. What are the three things? The yoga texts explain that we at our core are spiritual beings.
We are the consciousness that animates our body. So, you are looking at me. So, you are the person who looks with your eyes.
You are the person who hears with your ears. You are the person who thinks with your brains. You are different from your body.
You are a spiritual spark of consciousness present inside. So, this is called the soul or the conscious being. The soul is situated in three circles.
One is the physical circle. The second is the social circle. And the third is the environmental circle.
And all these three circles can sometimes become the sources of distress. And when we understand that the world we live in is a place where we are vulnerable. Where distress can come upon us anytime.
That is meant to make us prepared. A common word in the yoga tradition is Shanti. Shanti, Shanti, Shanti, Om Shanti we may say.
Now Shanti, when the word is said, often it is said three times. Shanti, Shanti, Shanti. The reason for this is the word Shanti means peace.
And the idea is that from these three circles, from the body, from society and from the environment, Ashanti, the opposite of Shanti may come. Agitation may come. Distress may come.
So, when the Shanti is invoked three times, let the body become peaceful. Let my relationships become peaceful. Let the environment become peaceful.
Shanti, Shanti, Shanti. That is the invocation that is being made. Now, once we understand that I am in a hospital, then we can focus on the treatment by which we can become better.
However, now as a part of the treatment, we may have to take a particular diet. And that diet may not have very opulent or delicious food. We, if we, even if we go to a hospital canteen, it is not going to, a hospital cafeteria, it is not going to have a variety of cuisines.
It is not going to have a ten course feast. It will have some simple food. And we take the food in a hospital to become healthy.
And as we become healthy, we start feeling better. We start, as we take the food, we take the treatment, we do recover, we do become better. However, if when we come to a cafe in a hospital, and we forget that it is a hospital cafe, we think it is a normal restaurant.
And then we start demanding, if we think it is a hotel, give me this food, give me that food, give me that food. And say we don’t have this, we don’t have this, we don’t have this. What kind of hotel is this? You don’t have any good food? So, when we go to a hotel, our expectation is very different from when we go to a hospital.
So, in the past, if we study recent history, we can divide historical epoch into three broad epochs. There is a pre-modern times, the modern times, and now we have the post-modern times. So, a defining difference between the pre-modern times and the modern times is that in the pre-modern times, almost every civilisation, whether it is India, Europe, Native Americans or China or wherever, everybody understood that the world we live in is a place of transit.
It’s a place of journey for us. There is some other arena of existence, some other world, which is our eternal destination. And we are meant to live in the world in such a way that we can eventually attain that world.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t strive to be happy in the world. But the understanding is that this world is not our ultimate destination. We strive to be as happy as is possible in the world while we are living.
But beyond that, there is another destination. With the progress of science and especially the progress of technology, the idea came up that why do we need to conceive of any paradise in any other world? Through technology, we can create paradise in this world itself. And the idea of any other world or any other level of reality became relegated into people’s backgrounds, far distant.
It became irrelevant. It became inconsequential. It started being treated as just imagination.
And then, now here I am not talking whether such a world exists or not. I am just talking about the psychological effects of this change of conception. So, when all our hopes became pinned on what we can experience in life in this world, technology itself can’t offer as much at the level of the psychological or the spiritual.
It can offer us a lot at the level of the physical. At the physical level, it can help us to improve things. If it’s too cold, we can heat things up.
If it’s too warm, we can cool things down. We can move around faster through trains and planes. So, at the physical level, it can make a lot of changes.
And as we started making more and more changes at the physical level, the notion started growing within us that we can control, we can change. And not just the physical, that we can change everything. And once we get the idea that we can change everything, then the idea that we are meant to control things in a way that will make us happy.
So, we unwittingly wedded our happiness to our capacity to control things. Of course, we do need to control things to some extent. But the idea that if somebody is not able to control something, that means something wrong with them.
That idea started gaining mainstream prevalence. And that’s how mental health problems started shooting up. Because if I think I am meant to be a controller, I am not able to control anything.
There are many things I can’t control. Then I start feeling as if I am deficient in some way. I am lacking in some way.
In the English vocabulary itself, before a hundred years ago, the word called inferiority complex was not there. Did people not have variable abilities in the past? Obviously. Some people were very talented, some people not so talented.
But the notion that we, because we are not able to do, we are not able to control things the way we want to, that’s why we are deficient, we are inferior. That became a psychological complex. So, the yoga texts explain that there is a three-level reality.
Physical, mental and spiritual. That’s like if you have a software in a computer, the body, the mind and the soul. So, the body is like the hardware of the computer, the mind is like the software and the soul is like the user.
When we have progressed in science and technology, that means we have improved the hardware. We improved things at the physical level in a very significant way. At the same time, at the psychological level, our inability to control things has caused more and more anxiety to us.
So, if you want to overcome negative emotions, broadly, we could say there are three steps. We analyse, then either we accept or we act. Analyse, accept, act.
I’ll explain these three things. Now, what I did till now was the analysis. The analysis is that we don’t necessarily have to have everything going right in our life for us to be happy.
How is it possible? I made some plans and if my plans are not working, how can I be happy? If I intend things to be this way and they’re not that way, how can I be happy? Here, it’s important to understand that happiness is not a one-step process. It is a two-step process. Two-step means that we often think that this is the situation and this is the emotion.
Because of the situation, this is the emotion I’m experiencing. Because this person is acting like this, so I’m angry. However, in between the situation and the emotion is something, that is the conception.
So, the situation, I talk about three-level reality, body, mind and soul. So, the situation is at the physical level of reality. The emotion is at the mental level.
And, sorry, the conception is at the mental level. And the emotion is experienced by the soul. Suppose, to understand how the emotion is determined not just by the situation, but by the conception.
Let’s take a few examples. Suppose you have bought a new car. And you’re riding proudly in that car.
And you want everyone to see how beautiful the car is. And you stop at a signal. And then suddenly you sense somebody hitting your bumper on the backside.
How dare you hit me? For us, if it’s a new car, a scratch on the bumper of the car will be like a tear in our heart. How dare? Now, actually speaking, we have not been injured. But we will feel very strongly about it.
Suppose, say you had a car. And you sold that car. And you’re driving in a new car.
And you see the person who has bought your old car is driving next to you. And then somebody hits their bumper. The situation is that the car is hit on the bumper.
But in the second situation, do you experience much emotion? No, it’s not your car. So, you don’t experience much emotion because of that. So, the situation alone does not create the emotion.
It is our conception. So, the situation does matter. If the car is damaged, it’s a matter of concept.
But how much emotion is created by that depends on the conception that is there in between, within us. So, if the conception is that the world is like a hotel. Where my enjoyment depends on whether I get the menu I want.
And the menu is cooked the way I want. And I get it at the right time, in the right quantity. And I eat it and I enjoy it.
Then the food will not give us pleasure. Even if it is nutritious, even if it is decently delicious. But if there is some little thing wrong somewhere.
Then we will feel annoyed. If we are in a hotel and we are eating a 10 course feast. If one item doesn’t taste good, we will feel I am entitled, I am paying money.
How dare you have this item not good. So, on the other hand if you are in a hospital. And we are eating some food over there.
Then our understanding is this food is meant to be good for my health. It’s nutritious. And even if one item is delicious, we will appreciate you.
Oh, this tastes good. Out of 3-4 items, even one item tastes good. Oh, very nice.
In a hotel, out of 10 items, even if one doesn’t taste good. How dare it be made like this. So, the food that we are eating alone doesn’t determine our emotion.
It is the conception that is there which sets our expectation. That determines the emotion that we experience. So, for us to deal with the negative emotions that arise within us.
First of all, often we think only if this thing changes. Oh, this person is behaving like this. Only this person starts behaving like that.
Then things will be right in my life. Only if this, I get this job, I get this car, I get this raise. Only if this thing works out, then I’ll be happy.
But that is something which may or may not happen. And as long as we think my happiness depends on this situation. Then we will be sentencing ourselves to unhappiness.
Of course, we can and should work to improve our situations. But our situations alone don’t determine our emotions. If you understand this, then we can analyse our conceptions.
And we can decide what can I do in this situation. So, I said the first step is when I talk about analysis. It was understand that our happiness, our emotions don’t depend only on our situations.
So, accept is the first aspect. Sorry, analyse is the first aspect. Now, after analysing, there are two things which we could do.
One is either we can change the situation, which is what we’ll be, we’ll talk about in act. Or we can realise the situation is not in my power to change. So, we may accept.
Now, act and accept, both can be empowering. Can we do all this afterwards? You can keep it down also if required. Just keep it down.
So, act and accept can both be empowering options. How can they be empowering? If we understand that normally we think act is an empowering option. If there’s a problem, I’m going to act to rectify it.
That is empowering. However, accept can also be an empowering option. Because when we accept, then we release our emotional energy.
That is choked, that is pent up in dealing with the situation that can’t be dealt with. If we are trying and striving and craving and slaving to change something which is just not changeable. Then accepting it is empowering.
Often, resentment of reality hurts more than reality. Resentment of reality hurts more than reality. I was once at a place and I travel across the world.
So, in different places, we experience different environments. And I was at one place, I had a long day, I travelled, I had given two, three talks. And that night, when I was about to sleep, there was a huge grinding sound.
Somebody was mowing a lawn or something. And it’s just not stopping. I thought after five minutes it will stop, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes.
And I was so annoyed. When will this stop? I want to sleep. Next day I was also busy.
How will I manage it? And then as it is going on and on and on. And finally, I accepted this is not going to change. This noise is going to be there.
And then I just said, okay, this noise is there. What can I do about it? I can’t change it. So, I said, I just told myself, okay, let me hear this noise.
I couldn’t, the noise was so loud and somehow I had lost my earplugs. So, I couldn’t block it also. So, then I thought just let me hear the sound.
And then as I started hearing the sound, I found that within the mowing also, there are different kinds of sounds over there. And then, okay, the sound sometimes goes up, sometimes the grinding nature becomes more, sometimes it becomes less. Sometimes the grinding changes into a screeching sound, sometimes it changes into a squeaking sound.
So, as I was hearing it and I was trying to myself, think of what is the kind of the sound. Just put some words to it. I am a speaker and a writer.
So, I like to play around with words. So, as I started just hearing the sound, I found that within a few moments I started hearing the sound and describing the sound to myself, just trying to find words to express myself. And after I did this for 2-3 minutes, suddenly I found that all the resentment had disappeared.
Not that the situation had changed, but I had got some engagement to do. Before that, I was simply helpless. Why is the sound there? Why is it not going? But just accept it.
When I did that and I started, okay, accept, let me hear it, let me verbalise what is the sound. Maybe I did that for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, I don’t know how much, but then I went to sleep. I have been resenting it for 20-30 minutes and I was just making myself stressed and within 5-10 minutes I fell asleep.
As soon as I accepted, I started verbalising it. And the next morning I woke up and the sound was still there. When I woke up and actually speaking, I had put an alarm and the alarm rang.
I woke up because of the alarm and then I heard it. Actually, this alarm sound is not as shrill as the sound that is in the background. But because I had accepted that sound, that sound stopped agitating.
And the sound went on throughout the night, but I was able to go on with my life. So, the situation sometimes we can’t change. But if we learn to accept, accepting is not being passive.
Accepting is being intelligently active. Okay, what can I change in the situation? I can’t change the sound coming, but I can change my conception. I can change my attitude towards the sound.
So, accept means in no matter what situation we are in, there is always something which we can act on, something which we can change. So, analyse, accept and act. Accept means as long as we are thinking, why is this not changing? Till that point, we will be agitated.
Till that point, it will be almost impossible for us to manage our negative emotions. The negative emotions will keep coming, keep coming and just keep flooding within us. But once we accept, this is not changeable.
Then what is changeable? So, if nothing is changeable, still our conception is changeable. Even if the situation is not changeable at all, but the conception is always changeable and therein lies our great power. Now, to tap this power, we need to understand that we are not our conceptions.
Often, we identify with our conceptions. What does identifying with our conception mean? It means that based on our particular conception, we think of ourselves as being someone. If I think of myself as a good speaker and if I find that people are not being attentive,