I have read a loooooot of New Age and self-help books. More than enough for one lifetime. I generally appreciate and agree with the overall sentiments expressed in many of them, especially when it comes to taking responsibility for one’s life and realizing one’s empowerment to improve it in areas from health to spirituality to finances.
But I have to tell you honestly that when such books (or Facebook memes, or inspirational quotes, et al) tell me that happiness is a choice, I tune out.
I don’t believe that one’s decisions have no bearing on that person’s mood, but saying happiness is a choice basically says that happiness is nothing but a choice, and being happy is as simple as making the right choice.
This is, in my view, invalidating, unfair, and a vast oversimplification of human emotions, not to mention powerful barriers various individuals may have toward experiencing happiness, as well as love, joy, and other positive emotions and states of being.
I didn’t like that advice before I found Pranic Healing, but after I learned MCKS’ Pranic Psychotherapy, I realized in a concrete way why whittling down one’s emotions to a choice was an even grosser oversimplification of the complex factors at play.
Let’s take sadness as an example. It doesn’t matter what the reason is for a person’s sadness, whether it is sensible to you or me. If a person feels sad, there is a buildup of this type of energy in their system, and it is therefore nearly impossible not to feel it!
In case that statement sounds vague, let me specify that emotional energies are specific and concrete types of energies. With experience in energy healing, most any healer will come to recognize them when they are working on someone. First of all, you start to feel the emotion of the other person you are working on. The healer starts off feeling calm and peaceful and then has moments of being hit with a wave of a certain emotion. This is the energy coming off the other person as it is being expelled during the healing process. (In Pranic Healing, we have specific methods for disposing of it so it does not just get absorbed in our systems.)
Next, the healer can simply scan the energies present. Sadness, when scanned (felt with the hands) has a distinct feeling–it is very heavy. For a person who can see energy, they will observe that the energy of sadness, while variable based on other emotions present, will generally look like an irregular, clumpy, or asymmetrical cloud of grayish energy. Positive emotions look and feel completely different.
Once negative emotions have clouded the energy system and gotten stuck in the chakras (energy centers) and meridians, simply choosing a different state of being, while possible, is unrealistic and certainly unfair to expect of someone. The best hope for most of us is a distraction to get our mind off of our negative emotions and switch to different ones. However, this is not a long-term solution, as it doesn’t get rid of the negativity (aka negative energy), and only distracts us from it until it just gets stirred up again, as it is bound to do.
The better option by far would be to extract the negative emotional energies from the person’s system. As I hope you are concluding by now, it is not possible to feel sad without sadness energy in your system. It is not possible to feel anger without anger energy in your system. You won’t feel depressed without depression energy in your system. Or anxiety. Or anything else.
Most people think that when bad things happen, they feel a negative emotion in response to it. A much more accurate way to put it for those of us who habitually feel certain things like anger, anxiety, fear, depression, and other emotions, is that certain situations trigger what is already there. What is already there might have been created or generated decades ago–or last week. In any case, old emotions have to be released if we are to feel peaceful and go through life without quite a bit of turmoil.
Your options are “letting go,” either subconsciously or consciously (lots of us do this with small things naturally anyway, but it’s pretty hard with big stuff), therapy, Pranic Healing, or another healing technique.
In Pranic Healing, we can pluck the things that we don’t want out with the flick of a hand (or a crystal)! We can even implant positive energies in their place. I know this because I have seen it work countless times, on countless people–not to mention myself.
Will the person feel that negativity again? In other words, is the healing permanent? Will doing Pranic Healing mean I won’t feel stress anymore?
Habitual, long-term negative emotions are highly likely to be caused by a huge buildup of them over time, or resulting from a traumatic experience that continues to get triggered. By getting Pranic Healing on those emotions, the person will be substantially or completely healed of them. They won’t get triggered at the drop of a hat anymore. And this is huge. Frankly, most people never even get that relief.
When years of old stuff is cleared away, it is simply far easier to be calm, even when stressful situations arise. We still feel stress and negative emotions, but as I have said in other posts–it is extremely common for us that we aren’t feeling the stress of that day– rather, the stress of the day stirred up the stress of a couple of decades that has been sitting in our system for years. So small things FEEL massively stressful!
Once years of negative emotional energies are extracted, our thoughts are free to go in a new, positive direction, and it is extremely easy for them to do so! This is when it could be fair to say happiness is a choice… But by then it is so easy to feel happy, choosing it would be redundant!
One exception to this: anger toward someone who has hurt you. Healing this is very difficult until the person forgives the “wrongdoer”. The energy system holds on tight to this anger and hurt and a healer will have a very hard time extracting it unless the person has either consciously or subconsciously let go of the situation and any anger toward the other. Even if the healer was able to extract the energies of anger and resentment, the person would re-create them soon enough until they have let the person and situation go. In this case, you need to do Master Co’s Forgiveness Meditation video. For difficult or traumatic hurts, you may need to do the exercise for 30-60 days.
After a healing, you may notice in a few days you are feeling that negative emotion again. Has it “come back”? No. There was simply more stuff buried deeper in your system that has come to the surface. In Pranic Healing, we strongly suggest follow up sessions until the negative thoughts and emotions are healed.
So while we can say happiness is partly a choice, and refusing to take responsibility for one’s life certainly is, I strongly dislike statements that make it sound like happiness is nothing more than a choice. I strongly feel we all need much more help in life than hearing we just need to change our mind about our emotions.
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