:: The Deliciousness of Dealing with a Negative Person ::
1. See this person’s’ pain, with compassion. If the person is being negative,
it’s because they’re feeling stress, pain, unhappiness, insecurity, uncertainty.
You certainly know what it’s like to feel these things — in fact, you might be feeling some of them right now. See the negativity as an old habit that is masking their pain. See if you can feel compassion for that pain,
which you have also experienced.
2. Feel love for them. If this person is a loved one, it’s especially helpful to practice pouring your love out to them, even if you say nothing. Just feeling it in your heart is enough. They might feel the love, but they might not — even then,
it transforms /you/. You then shift how you are towards them, coming from a place of love. If this person isn’t a loved one but a colleague or even a person you don’t know well … can you open your heart to feeling love for others who aren’t close to you? This might be a heart-opening shift for most people, well worth the discomfort of stretching into something new.
3. See the beauty in them, and love that as well. They have negativity, pain, old patterns … but they also have a beautiful heart, and lots of amazing qualities that can get obscured by the negativity. See this beauty, behold their hurting heart, and have your breath taken away by this human being in front of you.
4. See the deliciousness in their negative energy. When someone is being negative, there is an energy that is pouring out of them and into you. It can be an energy that we don’t like … but it doesn’t have to be. We can open up to this energy, and savor its taste, learning to appreciate its little nuances. We can find the deliciousness in it, dropping our old characterization of this energy, and seeing it afresh. It’s just an experience, just like it’s an experience to feel the sensations of basking in the sun, feeling a breeze on your skin, submerging into a warm bath. Relish this experience, and you’ll be open to a much wider range of experience than ever before.
It’s a transformative practice that will shift your relationship to others.
And when someone gives you a negative energy, you can delight in the opportunity this gives you to practice.