209: My Thoughts on Toxic Positivity: A Solo Episode with Light Watkins

In this solo episode, Light delves into the concept of toxic positivity, increasingly prevalent in wellness circles. Starting with the parable of the farmer and the horse, he illustrates how excessive optimism can dismiss genuine emotional experiences, leading to a superficial understanding of growth and resilience.

Light explains that toxic positivity involves the ineffective overgeneralization of a happy state across all situations, invalidating real emotions. He emphasizes acknowledging positive and negative experiences as part of a balanced approach to inner work.

The episode explores how social media amplifies extreme viewpoints, creating pressure to conform to unrealistic standards. Light advocates for embracing a middle ground, where multiple truths can coexist, fostering a more nuanced perspective.

Throughout the discussion, Light highlights the significance of spiritual maturity and empathy in validating others' experiences while recognizing growth opportunities. He shares practical advice on engaging in inner work, such as meditation, gratitude practices, and acts of service, to maintain a balanced outlook.

This episode thoughtfully explores the complex interplay between positivity and realism. It's a must-listen for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of emotional well-being and cultivate a more genuine, empathetic approach to personal growth.

Tune in to gain insights and practical tools for fostering a balanced, authentic life amid societal pressures to maintain constant positivity. Light's unique perspective and engaging storytelling make this episode enlightening and inspiring.

Transcript

LW: “We don't want to forget that negativity can also be a toxic experience. In fact, you could even make the argument that it's more toxic of an experience than enforcing yourself to be a little bit more positive about it. And that's from a psycho physiological perspective, right? Because negativity implies that to some degree you're experiencing distress. Distress means you're experiencing fear. It means you're experiencing maybe sadness or anger, or even things like boredom are considered to be distressful. And how the body responds to distressful emotions is it releases very toxic chemicals in the nervous system. And this is what initiates what they call the fight flight reaction, which is where the body interprets fear, sadness, anger, as you are under attack by a that's trying to kill you. So the stakes are extremely high under the influence of those stress chemicals, the fight or flight reaction. And so automatically within, you know, a split second, everything in your body starts to get rearranged. The priorities change from whatever the long term survival functions happen to be, such as reproduction, hormonal balancing, digestion of food, et cetera. And everything gets rerouted to preparing the body for battle. Hello there. It's Light. I'm back with another solo episode. And in today's solo episode, I'm going to be exploring the topic of toxic positivity, which is one of the buzzwords today circulating around, particularly the wellness and the therapeutic communities. I want to start though by sharing a story with you.”

[INTRODUCTION]

Hey friend, welcome back to The Light Watkins Show. I'm Light Watkins and I have conversations with ordinary folks just like you and me who've taken extraordinary leaps of faith in the direction of their path, their purpose, or what they've identified as their mission in life. And in doing so, they've been able to positively impact and inspire the lives of many other people who've either heard about their story or who witnessed them in action or people who've directly benefited from their work. The goal of these conversations is to expose you to as many people as possible who've found their path and to humanize them through their story. And after hearing story after story, hopefully eventually you give yourself permission to move further in the direction of whatever feels like your path and your purpose.

Because what you'll see is that anyone who does that has had to overcome many of the same obstacles that you might be facing right now. And this week we have another solo episode where I'm exploring the subject of toxic positivity and its spiritual relevance. The questions that I'm going to be unpacking are as follows: 

Is there a place in the world in the conversation for toxic positivity? 

How do you know if you are being toxically positive, either directly or indirectly? 

What's a healthy way to be positive without being toxically positive? 

Are there any exceptions to toxic positivity? Are there times when it's called for?

What is the alternative to toxic positivity? If I want to be positive, but I don't want to be toxic, then what's the best way to do that? 

What if you're just a naturally positive person? How should you navigate not being toxically positive? 

Could you be wired for negativity? And if so, how do you liberate yourself from that? 

What about the placebo effect, right? Just believing that something is true or something is possible. How does that mesh with being positive? 

And so I'll weigh in on all of these different questions and much, much more. This is a fascinating topic. To explore, especially as the phrase toxic positivity seems to be increasing in popularity and in usage.

So I was delighted to share my perspective on how I relate to positivity and also to share the spiritual perspective, which is something that I like to talk a lot about when it comes to the subjects of being positive, being negative and everything else in between. I truly hope that this monologue resonates with you as well.

So without further ado, let's get into it, shall we? Here are the ins and outs of my point of view on toxic positivity on The Light Watkins Show. Enjoy.

[00:04:50] Hello there. It's Light. I'm back with another solo episode. And in today's solo episode, I'm going to be exploring the topic of toxic positivity,  which is one of the buzzwords today circulating around, particularly the wellness and the therapeutic communities. I want to start though by sharing a story with you. And this is a very common story. You've probably heard it before, but I just want to share the story as context for what, how I want to approach this topic of toxic positivity. And this is the old classic story of the farmer and the horse. And so there was once a humble farmer who owned bony plow horse and one spring afternoon, the farmer's son happened to be tending to the stable and he accidentally left the gate open and the lone plow horse ran away.

[00:05:30] And upon hearing this news about the plow horse having escaped, the farmer's friends came over and they tried to console him and they were saying things like, we're so sorry, you no longer have your horse. What awful news. What bad luck. And the farmer's reply surprised them. He replied saying, you know, bad luck, good luck, who knows.

[00:05:58] And then a few days later, the horse returns with a herd of wild stallions, which basically quadrupled the farmer's lot. And all the neighbors heard about this and they came around. They were filled with with jubilation saying things like, this is great news. You're so fortunate. And the farmer whispers to his son, good news, bad news, who knows.

[00:06:29] And then the next day when the farmer's son was trying to ride one of the wild stallions, he was thrown to the ground and his leg broke. All the neighbors heard about it came around. Oh, no, that's horrible news. Such bad luck. 

[00:06:45] The farmer thinks to himself, bad luck, good luck. Who really knows? 

[00:06:50] And then a short time later, war broke out and all of the young, able bodied men in the village were drafted to fight in this war, except for the farmer's son due to his broken leg. The neighbors came back around. Oh my God, what an amazing stroke of luck. Good news, bad news, who knows? 

[00:07:16] And so by today's standards, that farmer might have been accused of being toxically positive or of spiritually bypassing the terrible circumstances that he kept finding himself in and and so that brings us to today's topic, which is the idea of toxic positivity. 

[00:07:44] And that brings us to what I would like to explore in this solo episode, which is the idea of toxic positivity. Okay. So what is toxic positivity? It is described as the excessive and or the ineffective over generalization of a happy optimistic state across all situations. It tends to dismiss the emotional experiences that are not positive and it implies that people should maintain a positive mindset regardless of the emotional pain or challenging circumstances that they happen to be facing.

[00:08:26] And one of the reasons why I like this farmer and the plow horse story is because I think it's a really great example of what starts to happen when one begins practicing their inner work on a regular basis.

[00:08:45] You tend to move away from the extremes, right? Which is, hey, everything that happens is good. It's on purpose. There's a reason for it and all of that. And you're saying it, but you haven't really gotten to the point where you're truly embodying that yet. And so it can come off as being a bit condescending unintentionally, mostly. 

[00:09:13] Or the opposite side, which is to kind of lean negative and to harp on the bad things that have happened and, you know, toe the line of victim consciousness. And I think that's what you see a lot of in the world today is either people are playing the victim or you have these sort of caricatures of motivational speakers saying to suck it up and people have it worse than you and you know, it's not all that bad and just get on with it. And both of those extremes can come off as being a bit kind of toxic or a lot toxic, right? To people who are more so in the middle that is, and there's a couple of things we need to understand. Right? Most of these people who we come across who are toxically positive or toxically negative we may be seeing their content on social media. And the thing with social media is that the way the algorithms are configured is it pushes the extreme point of view of anything to the search feed, to the for you pages. 

[00:10:28] And so as we're just kind of mindlessly scrolling, we may tend to come across content that feels more extreme. And of course, the more of that stuff you come across, the more pressure you may personally feel to adjust your thinking to what the majority of those influencers are saying, or how they're thinking about the world and you may end up dismissing your own natural tendencies to kind of veer more towards the gray area, because here's, what's never really happening in social media, the people who have the more nuanced point of views, the people who are able to see both sides of things. Their content usually is not getting the same kind of traction as the people who are more so on the extreme side of things, the people who are more nuanced, the people who have more considerations, their content, if you look at it, it's mostly crickets. 

[00:11:32] And again, this is a function of how it works because that's what humans are psychologically geared towards is to to be the observers of extremities. That's why when you look at the news, the quote news, I put it in quotes because oftentimes it's not really the full story of anything. It's the editors who write the news and who published the news are looking for stories. If it bleeds, it leads, they're looking for the most extreme stories, right? There's billions of things happening on a daily basis. That are positive that are nuanced and that have maybe a little bit of both positive and negative aspects, but that stuff doesn't sell. And when you remember that news organizations are private companies which means their bottom line, their main focus is not to report the news. Their main focus is to provide a profit for their shareholders. 

[00:12:38] If you are a private company, then that is your main focus. And everything that you do as a company is in service to that particular goal, right? Because if you weren't focusing on the goal of profit, then you wouldn't have a company to report the news.

[00:12:59] So you have to pay your reporters, you have to pay your rent, you have to pay for the engineers and whoever else is involved in publishing the the media, whether it's print, magazine, online, whatever it is, right? There's a whole infrastructure involved. That is required in order to publish that on a regular basis. And all of those people who work on that infrastructure have salaries and pensions and all kinds of things. So there needs to be money coming in and ideally more money coming in than the money that's going out. So on top of. of sourcing news to report, they need to run advertising and they need to come up with clever ways to run advertising so that the people who are consuming the news on their particular platform don't feel like they're just watching ad after ad, but they feel like for the most part, they're able to just, you know see the news.

[00:13:56] And if they happen to click on an ad or see an ad that falls into alignment with what they're looking for, then that's icing on the cake, right? So the user experience is also something that needs to be considered by these media organizations. 

[00:14:11] But at the end of the day, in order to get eyeballs on the news so that they can potentially click on those ads, the headlines need to be somewhat sensationalized. And you learn this whenever you are personally promoting something and maybe you hire a public relations person, right? I did this when I wrote my first published book, Bliss More: How To Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying. I hired a publicist and the publicist's job is to write these press releases and to distribute the press releases to the media, right?

[00:14:49] Obviously as an author, you want to get your book reviewed in journals like the New York Times or The Times Of London or the Wall Street Journal or these kinds of major media publications. So you can imagine that these publications are getting hit up by, you know, potentially, I don't know, thousands of authors a week, maybe millions of authors a year.

[00:15:12] And so their editors naturally are a lot more discerning than the editors at the Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama or some little, you know, hokey doke newspaper in South Carolina or somewhere like a much smaller market where maybe they're getting tens or maybe a hundred authors every couple of months looking to get their books written up in the in the magazine, in the newspaper.

[00:15:41] And so those New York Times editors, what they're looking for are the books that are going to produce headlines that get a lot of clicks. So there's gotta be something really compelling. And if your book is just teaching people how to meditate, it's not really as compelling as somebody doing a tell all book on a politician.

[00:16:02] So you have Robert Kennedy Jr. sister, trying to get people not to vote for him. Now that's interesting to an editor at a magazine, right? And if she has, I don't have no idea if she has a book out or not. I wouldn't be surprised if she did because she could get a book deal in two seconds as somebody from the Kennedy family who is openly against her brother running for president for whatever reason she thinks are important that a publisher will look at that and go, Oh my God, we can sell so many books, right?

[00:16:37] No, one's asking, Hey, are you a good writer? No one cares, if she has read a bunch of other books and none of that really matters. What matters is that she has a very sensationalized angle. And so, if she were to write that book and then reach out to the New York Times, And say, oh, this book on against my brothers coming out in two weeks, that's going to shoot right to the top of the list for the New York Times editor. And they go like, oh my God, we're going to run that for sure. Because they're going to get a lot more clicks. Therefore their advertisers are going to be happier. They're going to make their money to pay the editors, pay the reporters and et cetera, et cetera. And that's just kind of how it works. Right? And that's the world that we live in. We live in a world that pushes the negativity to the forefront because it just gets more eyeballs. There is no publication on the same scale as a New York Times as a Washington Post that's only about positive things that happened.

[00:17:40] And so, because we operate in these extremes, naturally, you're going to get some people who feel like, well, you know, I want to do the opposite. I'm a negativity contrarian. So I'm always going to point out what's positive about something. And I think that's where this term toxic positivity started to come from is because you have the extreme positive point of view, which also makes it to the top of the algorithm leaving behind the people who are experiencing a little bit of both or able to articulate a little bit of both not a hundred percent of the time, it may be one or two people that kind of break through. But for the most part, those kinds of opinions or those kinds of commentaries are getting screened out by the social media or the news media algorithms because that's just not what we're clicking on. We're clicking on all the sensational stuff. 

[00:18:40] But what we also don't want to forget is that the negativity, the content that is focused more on the negative, and even when we go through some experience that causes us to be more negative, we don't want to forget that negativity can also be a toxic experience. 

[00:19:02] In fact, you could even make the argument that it's more toxic of an experience than enforcing yourself to be a little bit more positive about it. And that's from a psycho physiological perspective, right? Because negativity implies that to some degree you're experiencing distress. 

[00:19:22] Distress means you're experiencing fear. It means you're experiencing maybe sadness or anger, or even things like boredom are considered to be distressful. And how the body responds to distressful emotions is it releases very toxic chemicals in the nervous system. And this is what initiates what they call the fight flight reaction, which is where the body interprets fear, sadness, anger, as you are under attack by a that's trying to kill you. So the stakes are extremely high under the influence of those stress chemicals, the fight or flight reaction. And so automatically within, you know, a split second, everything in your body starts to get rearranged. The priorities change from whatever the long term survival functions happen to be, such as reproduction, hormonal balancing, digestion of food, et cetera. And everything gets rerouted to preparing the body for battle. And those priorities are very good if indeed you are having to fight a bear off, or you're having to climb a tree to escape from something, or you're having to run into a burning building and rescue someone. 

[00:20:47] But it's only meant to be temporary, which means after the stressful, incident is over, then the body needs to revert back to the long term survival functions in order for you to continue living your life and thriving while you're doing so. Otherwise, if you find yourself in negative situation after negative situation, and you're interpreting it as a fight, flight circumstance, then over time, what will happen is your body will start to hard wire itself to stay more or less in the fight flight reaction, which causes you to have experiences of low grade anxiety, bouts of depression or other sorts of mental health challenges. So a mental health challenge for the most part, there may be some exceptions to this, but for the most part, a mental health challenge is the by product of a nervous system that has been exposed to more stress than homeostasis, then balance over course of the lifetime.

[00:21:52] And at one point the body said the body, which has its own algorithm said, you know what? It's way more effective to just lock this into place than it is to keep going out of the stress reaction and coming back into the fight flight and coming out and then coming back in evidently because There is a moment of fear, anxiety or anger happening on a fairly regular basis, maybe every few hours, then evidently we live in an environment that we're always vulnerable to being attacked and to let's just stay in the the fight flight reaction. 

[00:22:32] And once you stay in, now you're starting to experience more symptoms that are associated with the fight flight reaction. And I don't want to get into all of that because that's a whole other conversation, but you can Google fight flight reaction symptoms. Just Google that fight flight symptoms and go to any one of those pages on any one of those links on the first page. And you'll probably see, I don't know, a hundred, maybe 200, maybe more symptoms of what all happens in the body under the influence of stress when you're in the fight flight mode, and I'll guarantee you that any weird, inexplicable symptom that you may have experienced in the past, or maybe, someone who's experiencing now, everything from dry skin to blotches to hair falling out to an inability to produce saliva, like all these little weird things that most of the time, the doctors don't have an explanation for, they are on that list of fight, flight symptoms, and it becomes pretty apparent when you are operating under the influence of stress that physiologically speaking, things do not go very well, and that's not a situation that anybody wants to find themselves in. 

[00:24:00] And so, coming back to toxic positivity, right? We call that toxic because it invalidates people's one sided experience which is that when I'm having a bad life experience, my version of the horse ran away or my version of my son fell and broke his leg or my version of there's a war that just broke out when we're having our one sided experience now from a spiritual perspective, the opportunity there is to not invalidate that part of the experience, but to expand our perspective to maybe there's other things that are also happening at the same time, right? 

[00:24:47] And that's where you get these concepts that we're all familiar with like karma, like dharma, like this idea of a life purpose, the idea that everything is happening for a reason. tTese kinds of concepts that you hear a lot and read a lot about in spiritual books. And it's easy to dismiss them when you haven't been exposed to very many spiritual practices. Right? In other words, you're just sort of intellectualizing these ideas. And the moment life gets quote, real, right? In other words, something bad happens, that's what we call real life, this bad stuff and the idea of positive things happening we kind of dismissed that as delusional in our society.

[00:25:42] If you were to start a business and you were to focus on all the wonderful things that were going to happen in and around your business over the next few years, people would dismiss you as delusional. Right. If you went to go get a loan for your business and they sat you down in the bank and they said, okay, tell me, how do you plan to make the money?

[00:26:02] And you lay out the whole plan and it's all just positive thing after positive thing, they'll go, you know, we'll tell us why, what are some of the bad things that can happen? And if you said, well, There is no bad. That's going to happen. That's, I believe that we're going to experience this. I'm putting my focus on that. It's the law of attraction. Haven't you heard of the law? They would laugh you out of that bank. You would not get that loan because you wouldn't be considered a realistic individual. And and so again, that's an extreme example where It's we're indoctrinated to come into the loan officer's office and lay out the whole quotes realistic plan.

[00:26:45] This is probably not going to happen. I've already counted for that. I have these stop gaps in place. I have these guardrails in place. In other words, your whole plan is catered to the worst case scenario because that's what the bank ultimately wants to see. They want to see in the worst case scenario. Am I still going to make my loan back? Okay. Are you still gonna be able to make your loan payments? And if so, I'll give you the loan. They're not interested in the best case scenario. 

[00:27:13] And so again, when we talk about inner work and practices like meditation practices, like gratitude practices, like being of service, you know, random acts of kindness, stuff like that. It's interesting because when you engage in those kinds of practices and you do that on a regular basis. What starts happening is you begin to produce the hormones that the body is not experiencing under the influence of stress.

[00:27:46] What stress is, is it is the absence of serotonin and dopamine and other feel good hormones. and it is the presence of stress hormones. So you've heard of adrenaline, you've heard of cortisol and these kinds of hormones. That's what puts the body into the fight flight reaction. So in order for that to become very effective, it has to also block any of the serotonin and the dopamine and the oxytocin and those kinds of feel good hormones that makes you want to go and hug something.

[00:28:19] And instead, those stress hormones make you want to run away from something and or fight something or become confrontational. So what the meditation and the gratitude and all those other inner work practices do is that they reintroduce the serotonin and the oxytocin, which then makes you want to feel connected to something and it makes you want to go and hug something. And it makes you want to see the bright side of something. But it also doesn't deny. Whatever else is happening in and around you. And so just taking it one layer deeper than toxic positivity or toxic negative negativity is we want to start to look at it in terms of pain and suffering, because what people typically label as negative experience is an experience where they are suffering this experience where they are suffering. Right? 

[00:29:09] So for instance, you have a toothache. Okay. Let's say you have a cookie fetish and you just love eating cookies and you eat cookies all day long, but you don't floss your teeth properly. And let's say you don't brush your teeth effectively, and your teeth are susceptible to the refined sugar content that you may eat in food. Some people's teeth are very strong and resilient. My teeth are not that way. My older brother has never had a cavity. He drinks soda. He eats sweets all day long, never had a cavity. I don't even know if he flosses to be honest with you. Myself, on the other hand, I can just look at a cookie, and I'll start feeling like I'm getting a cavity if I just look at something that's sweet and I have to floss and I have to brush and just go above and beyond to take care of my teeth. And I've had literally every dental procedure you can imagine over the decades that I've been alive. 

[00:30:18] But in any case, if someone gets cavities and it comes out that they've been eating cookies all the time, right? No dentist is going to be surprised. And if they start to feel sorry for themselves because they have a cavity, right? And create this whole story around what it means to have cavities, and I'm such a bad person, and oh my God, and blah, blah, blah, they're adding a layer of pain on top of the pain that they already may be feeling with the cavity itself.

[00:30:52] And so what you obviously want to do is go get the cavity fixed, but also you may want to put some more attention onto your protocols, your eating protocols, your tooth care protocols and see if you can clean that up. And if you focus more on what you can do as opposed to what's not happening, which is I'm not pain free right now, then you can actually minimize the suffering, if not eliminate it altogether, because your focus is on what you can do and what's possible.

[00:31:29] So again, some people may relate to that approach to whatever suffering your experience in life as toxic positivity where they're being reminded, Hey, this didn't just come out of the thin blue sky. This happened because it's connected to other things that are either happening or not happening in your experience. And it's not to deny that the cavity is painful, but the cavity came from somewhere and there's something that you can do about that. So I think what a helpful protocol would be as someone on the other side of listening to someone complaining about their experience is you always have to start with validating the other person's pain and or suffering. You have to validate that, right? Even Gandhi said a message that isn't delivered with love is not going to be received. It's going to be rejected every single time. 

[00:32:25] That comes just from being spiritually mature, right? Spiritual maturity is when someone who has a spiritual practice is able to embody the attributes of that practice in such a way that they can hold multiple truths in their awareness at the same time. So there's the so called positive aspect of the experience, which is, hey, there's something we can do about this. And there are other things that have led to this, that we can change as well. And it's the acknowledgement and or the awareness that something or someone is suffering, right? And there's a reason why that suffering is happening.

[00:33:05] And the awareness that, hey, maybe now is not the time and the place to get into why the suffering is happening. Maybe now is the time or place just to listen. Maybe now is the time or place to ask questions. Maybe now is the time or place to get permission to offer any feedback. And so when you bring all of that into the discussion, then you will be honoring that other person's experience.

[00:33:38] You'll be validating their experience, and then you'll have a an ear that's more attuned to hearing. Whatever else you have to say that may be considered positive or more positive than someone is willing to hear in that moment. And so that's our opportunity. And that can't be an intellectual exercise. It can't be something, Oh, I read it in a book and I'm applying it now. It's gotta be something that is embodied. 

[00:34:05] And what that means to embody it is you are able to empathize with the other person's experience because you've been where they are. You've been someone who has also experienced pain and suffering and someone has come in and tried to fix you by just giving you information that they themselves have not embodied.

[00:34:30] And what do we do in that case? We start looking for evidence that they have to demonstrate that this person who's trying to fix me is a hypocrite. That's what we do. You know, why are you telling me to do this when you haven't done it yourself? That's where we go with it. It's not about whether what they're saying is valid or invalid.

[00:34:49] It's just that naturally, if we feel like someone's trying to just come in, swoop in and fix us we start looking for reasons why they don't know what they're talking about. And how they've been out of integrity with the things that they're saying, whereas when we're being empathetic, the way in which we're presenting the information or the solution is sort of wrapped in this ability to relate to one's experience. I've been there before and and I know how hard it is. I know how painful it is. And then shut up and just listen, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. It's so difficult. Oh my God. I don't know if I can do X, Y, and Z and blah, blah, blah. And so again the more immature, impatient person is wanting to get to the point where they offer the solution.

[00:35:42] They know what the problem is. They offer the solution. And in their mind, the other person is going to be fixed. And if you're having a conversation and you're engaging with that sort of. outcome oriented thinking in mind, again, it's not going to go well. It's not going to end well. You will be accused of being toxically positive perhaps.

[00:36:04] And obviously that's not what you want because that's counterproductive to your true aim, which may be just to be friendly or to be supportive with this person who obviously you care enough about to even listen to what they have going on and to offer that solution. And so it takes a lot of spiritual discipline to sit there and to be more process oriented and to understand that, Hey, this is going to be a dialogue. This is not just going to be a single conversation where we're going to arrive at the solution today or in five minutes, this may require a series of conversations where I am artfully allowing this person to arrive at the solution for themselves, which is always really the best way to find a solution for whatever we're going through is to feel like it's our idea. Or it aligns with where we were going with it anyway. 

[00:37:04] And in order to do that, you may just offer prompts, you may just ask questions. You may ask the other person to consider things that maybe they haven't considered. And if they have, maybe you ask for permission to explore other areas that they may find helpful.

[00:37:25] And I have this one friend of mine who comes to me often to talk about things they're going through. And I will give my perspective on these things, which I obviously think, you know, it's a pretty helpful perspective. I try not to fix people's situation. I try to follow my own advice and just ask questions.

[00:37:45] But at the end of the day, she rarely takes my suggestions. But what will happen is she'll go and ask other people in her life. And those other people will give her similar type of feedback to the one that I gave her. And after they give her that feedback, then she'll make the connection with, Oh, this is something that I think I should seriously consider and explore.

[00:38:14] And she'll come back to me and say, guess what I've decided to do. I've decided to do ABC and I'm thinking to myself, why? I kind of told you that's the best course of action based on what you said you want your goals were, but she won't give me the credit for it. She doesn't give me the credit for it.

[00:38:31] She says, oh, I talked to so and so, and this is what they said. And this is what makes the most sense. And initially because I'm a human being, it would be frustrating. And I want to say things like, I told you so. And I can't pretend like I've been perfect in that sometimes I have said, you know, I, that's what I suggested to you as well.

[00:38:49] But for whatever reason, when she hears it from me, it's not enough for her to say, okay, that's what makes the most sense. She has to hear it from two or three other people. So I've realized that, oh, her coming to me, it's just one body of evidence and she needs two or three different bodies of evidence in order to make the decision. And the person who gives her the solution first is not going to be the one to get the credit for the solution. 

[00:39:20] So again, talk about spiritual maturity, the ability to hold multiple truths in your awareness at the same time. So holding the truth that I'm being helpful and the truth that she needs to come up with the solution on her own.

[00:39:37] Those two truths on the surface can sort of negate one another. And it could put me into either or an either or mentality. But if you can hold those to truths in your awareness or multiple truths in your awareness at the same time, it's fine. She got the solution in a line with what I also felt, right? And I didn't get credit for it. And that's all fine because at the end of the day, guess what? It's her life. It's not my life. And everyone has to do what they feel is best for them to do in the moment. It'd be great if everybody did what we thought they should do all the time, but that's just not the reality of a real life situation.

[00:40:23] So we're happy, from that spiritual perspective, we're happy for people to take our information and then do whatever they want to with that information. And the moment we start getting caught up in what they're not doing, that's a good reminder for us to come back to how invested am I in someone else taking my suggestions because now I'm operating from my ego right now, I just want to be right and that's, they say in the Veda, that's the last barrier to liberation is you needing to be right. When you can transcend your need to be right that's where you experience true freedom. And that's something I think that's like a lifetime worth of practice is transcending the need to be right. But then now you have that opportunity. Okay. I'm going to indulge myself in this opportunity to go beyond my need to be right.

[00:41:20] And to come back to my ability to hold two truths in my awareness at the same time. And that's how I'm engaging in my spiritual practice. So all that to say there's no thing that we're experiencing that's either all positive or all negative. And our opportunity in those moments, whether we're doing this with ourselves or whether we're doing this with other people, is to entertain the idea that, hey this situation might be a little more complex than we initially thought. First of all, let's take some space to just be with that, right? Take some space to just be with that. And that's where, again, your meditation practice comes in. 

[00:42:07] When people say stuff like, go meditate on it, it doesn't necessarily mean go sit down and close your eyes, and rehearse what happened and think about it from multiple angles because you're only able to think about a situation from the state of consciousness that put you in that situation.

[00:42:25] Einstein said that, not me, Einstein said that. He said, you can't find a solution to a situation unless you expand your consciousness beyond the consciousness that you were in when you created the situation. And so meditation, what it does is it expands our awareness. That's all it does. It expands our awareness beyond where we were prior to sitting down and closing our eyes, right? 

[00:42:53] In other words, it helps to break down that hard wiring of what we are more or less expecting to happen in life. And it expands our awareness of the possibilities so we can hold even more truths in our awareness at the same time, instead of just two or three, maybe we can hold five or six different truths in our awareness at the same time. And we can be aware of what our spirit wants us to do next because we have a spiritual we'll call it GPS, right? If you operate under the belief that we're here to grow spiritually and there's what, 8 billion people on the planet which means there are 8 billion individual spiritual agendas for being here on this planet, right? So you have some people who appear to be in some very lofty life situations, you know, living in mansions and fraternizing with celebrities and doing all this kind of fun stuff. And they have trust funds and endowments and all kinds of billion dollar estates. We may look at those people and say, Oh, they're so well off. They don't have any worries cause they have all this money. And then there's other people who live in these, you know, more underdeveloped places in the world who are, you know, what some people may consider to be operating in squalor and they have plastic soda bottles turned into flip flops and hand me down clothes and they're sitting on the floor eating and going to an outhouse to use the bathroom. They're sleeping five, six to a room and this kind of thing. And we may look at them and go, Oh, wow, they have such bad luck in life. 

[00:44:42] But from a spiritual perspective, everybody, no matter what your situation is, everybody's getting exactly what they need in order to grow and develop spiritually. So we are born into these various circumstances, and then we have our spiritual DNA which is constantly nudging us and guiding us into different relationships and different work opportunities. And we think on the surface, oh, this is happening for me to make money, or this is happening for me to have kids, or this is happening so I can, you know, Keep up with the rest of societal expectations, but on a deeper level, it's happening so that you can learn how to love it's happening so that you can learn forgiveness is happening so that you can transcend feeling abandoned, right? Or any other however many millions of spiritual lessons that one can learn. And I've equated it in the past to watching Netflix. We've all had the experience where you go to a streaming service to watch a film and there's like a million different options. But yet you find yourself paralyzed by all the different options. You don't know what to watch. 

[00:45:55] Oh, I've seen this before. I don't really feel like seeing an action movie right now. I don't know. Stand up comedy seems kind of boring, right? And you're just scrolling and then you end up feeling like, ah, let's do something else. I don't really see anything good on Netflix out of millions of different options. 

[00:46:11] And that's because you've been there, done that. So the idea of watching another Denzel Washington movie or watching another romantic comedy just isn't that interesting to you at that point in time, right? And the same thing happens spiritually being in the mansion. I've done that before having all this money. You know, I've done that before too. Well, what about living in India and living, you know, eight to a room and driving a rickshaw? Huh? That's kind of interesting. I haven't had that experience yet. And that explains from a spiritual perspective why people are in different situations and we're all here to get what we need.

[00:46:55] And so the idea for that person who may have come into that lifetime in order to become closer to their spiritual practice in that lifetime, wanted to be in the part of the world that prioritizes spirituality. You know, you wouldn't be in Beverly Hills if you wanted to prioritize spirituality.

[00:47:15] If you want to prioritize materialism, perhaps then you'd be in a place like Beverly Hills and play that experience out. But the person who's in that Beverly Hills life, right? May have chosen that life because people are going to be coming after them for their money and they want to learn more about unconditional love or they may lose all of their money in some bad investment and they want to see who they are beyond their material possessions.

[00:47:45] And so that's what the setup to their life happens to be. So all these things are happening and on the surface, it's the farmer and the plow horse. Oh, that's good. That's bad. That's good That's bad. But on a spiritual level again, it's a lot more nuance than that because yes a bad thing happened, yes, a painful thing happened. Yes, suffering is being experienced and at the same time, there's an opportunity there to learn a spiritual lesson. The one that you came here to learn and a really good clue in what your spiritual lesson happens to be is you continue to have repeated bad things happen, but in different scenarios. Somebody may be experiencing abandonment, in a work context and a relationship context in a familial context, in a friendship context, people keep running away from you and you don't understand why do people keep leaving me high and dry in all these different situations? Well, that's an indication that maybe. You are here to learn how to rebound from feeling abandoned and to come back to yourself or maybe you're here to learn how to establish healthier boundaries, et cetera, et cetera. 

[00:49:06] So whatever the lesson is, it's not anyone else's job to tell you what that is. That's your job to decipher for yourself based on what you're feeling deep down inside. But in order to do that, you have to give yourself the time and the space to explore within. And again, that's where your inner practices come in very handy. You sit down and you do your meditation, you expand your awareness, and your awareness takes you beyond just what's happening at the surface. And it exposes you to what you're also feeling deep down within.

[00:49:43] So then your ability to hold those multiple truths becomes greater and greater. Okay. And then what happens is when you start to come into contact. With situations that normally you would have described as toxic positivity, you have a greater awareness to be able to decipher, okay, yeah, I could see how people would say that about this situation and there's some usefulness in what this person is saying, right?

[00:50:10] So your ability to extract the usefulness from these various situations gets greater and greater. And your ability to leave behind the nonsense or what you don't find to be particularly useful also gets greater and greater. And this is a very powerful way to move through life because what it means is that you can now find usefulness in almost any situation at any time, and you don't have to be distracted by judging the situation as toxically this or toxically that, right? But other people may look at you and go, oh, they're toxic. Toxically positive all the time, merely because they haven't yet done that same degree of work that allows them to see the nuances in a given situation.

[00:51:04] And here's another thing that even scientists are starting to acknowledge even way back in the 1950s and 60s is that there's this thing called the placebo effect, which is to say that when you believe that something is true. About 40% of the time it becomes true. 

[00:51:25] The way that they study the placebo effect is they would create medication that was made out of water or sugar and didn't have any inherent medicinal effects, but they would tell a patient that this medication is the thing that's going to numb your pain or it's going to solve whatever physical problem you happen to be experiencing.

[00:51:48] And 4 out of 10 people who received this sugar pill would. have the same medicinal effects as the people who received the actual medication, which is pretty impressive. And what it reveals is that there's something about believing wholeheartedly that something is the case that causes it to have a heightened level of efficacy over The actual thing only not say over the actual thing, let me say that again, causes it to have a heightened level of efficacy compared to the actual thing, which is pretty impressive. So reveals that being positive, even though there may not be hard evidence. That there's something good happening as a result of the horse running away can lead to a beneficial outcome or whatever the expected outcome could be. 

[00:52:51] But at the same time, it also means that when we're realistic and being negative and focusing on all the worst things that could happen as a result of this, we can also end up manifesting those conditions as well.

[00:53:07] And I was reading an article this morning about, this is in The New York Times, it's about this teenager who died of leukemia at 14 years old. He was Italian. His name is Carlo Acutis and he's going to become the first millennial saint. So the Pope and all these people the Vatican are going through the various protocols to make this guy, Carlo, a saint.

[00:53:34] And the reason why is because he had such belief in the power of miracles that he created this website documenting faith based miracles, meaning miracles that didn't have any sort of scientific backing to explain why they happened. And when he passed away, people who prayed to him in Italy began to also experience miracles that defied science.

[00:54:06] And people who went to his grave would experience miracles that defied science. And this happened so often that they decided, hey, we need to make this kid our first millennial saint. 

[00:54:18] That's, again, we can make the argument that is a by product of this idea of the placebo effect. Just thinking that something is the case, I'm not suggesting that miracles aren't real or are real, right? It depends on what we even define as a miracle. But somebody once said, in order to see a miracle, you have to believe in miracles. And so if you believe that is the case, then what the science says is that 40% of the time you're going to experience a miracle, right? Which is pretty remarkable, but a miracle could be, I want to go take a training and it's going to cost X amount of money and I don't have X amount of money. And then all of a sudden I'm in a situation where I have that money. And I didn't foresee that situation happening. Like one of my favorite movies, It's a Wonderful Life, which is a Christmas movie. I'm not going to get into the whole plot, but basically the main character ends up losing a bunch of money and it looks like he's going to go to jail at the end of the movie. And his wife goes out and because this guy is, he's such a good guy and he's been such a benefit to the community. She goes out and she basically crowd funds the more than the amount of money that the guy lost. And in the final hour, she comes back with this big bucket of money. And ends up saving the day and, you know, it's a Christmas movie. So he calls it, oh, this is a Christmas miracle. Right. But that kind of thing can happen. Just believing that something is possible. Doesn't necessarily mean that we have to know how it's going to happen, right? 

[00:55:56] For those of you who read the book man search for meaning, it's about Viktor Frankl, who's a concentration camp survivor who said that one of the ways that he was able to survive and that he observed other people surviving is they adopted a purpose. They adopted a, why they had a reason for surviving. And oftentimes this reason was something that they manufactured for themselves. It wasn't something that they were assigned. It's something that they created for themselves. And he ended up coining this phrase, and maybe it was a Nietzsche phrase that he quoted, but it says, he who has a why to live can bear almost any how. Right? 

[00:56:39] He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. 

[00:56:43] And they were exposed to the most extreme of circumstances, physical, mental, and otherwise in those concentration camps where anybody in their rational mind would have been broken, would have given would have even committed suicide if they could just to get out of the suffering that they were experiencing in those concentration camps.

[00:57:04] But his whole thing was, you know, he wrote this book while he was in the concentration camp. And obviously he had to employ so many tactics to be able to get, preserve the book because Nazis weren't a big fan of people walking around with manuscripts. So he had to write it in secret, et cetera, et cetera. And some, to some extent, memorize those details. But that was one of his wise. That was one of his wives. Other people may have a wife. I want to see my family again. I want to live to see my family again. And so that's also a powerful protocol that we can adopt. 

[00:57:38] In the spiritual parlance, we call it having a life purpose or believing that life is happening for you and not just to you, or believing that everything happens for a reason, right? Or believing in karma, which is, you know, things that go around, come around just. As a simple interpretation of that. And so one of the things that I have been writing about and encouraging people to do. Is to adopt beliefs that empower you the most, right? Because people can hear about these terms, karma, dharma, life purpose, and go, oh, there's no scientific evidence that proves that there's such a thing as Dharma or Karma, or that you have a life purpose. We're just like beetles. We're just like raccoons, we come here, we procreate, we protect our territory, we fight off predators, we're just animals and we just do what other animals do. 

[00:58:36] And yes, you can make the argument for that that's a truth that we can hold in our awareness. And at the same time, what makes us unique as humans is we do have the power to adopt other beliefs. Right? 

[00:58:52] A raccoon can't say, hey, I've got a life purpose. My life purpose is to build this nest and make sure that I take care of other raccoons. Or my life purpose is to study ants. Right? Other animals can't do that as far as we know. But we can. And the fact that we can gives us access to that placebo effect, which again has been proven to be at least 40% effective, which means that in some cases, it was 90% effective. It was 100% effective. In other cases, it was 10% effective. It was 8% effective, but the average was 40% effective effective. And because we have this ability, we may as well use it to adopt belief systems that can't be proved one way or the other, but it does allow us to tap into that placebo effect. And when we do that, then we may benefit in a situation that 60% of people haven't benefited from.

[00:59:52] We could be in that 40% and that could be enough to get us through that experience to allow us to learn whatever lesson we went through that experience to learn. And it helps to keep us where we need to be in order to show up for the next lesson, which is somewhere in the present moment, right?

[01:00:13] I talked earlier in this episode about how when you are under the influence of stress, it puts you into some sort of mental health  challenge. If it can, if it perpetuates, you end up with low grade anxiety or circumstantial depression or things like that when you're experiencing those, you're not in the present moment. You're not in the present moment. You're somewhere in the past. Maybe you're worried about something that's going to happen in the future which means you don't have access to the full repertoire of your ability to hold those multiple truths in your awareness at the same time. Mostly what you are able to perceive are dangers. It's what's not happening. You aren't able to perceive what is happening. And you can read a book about it. It doesn't matter because your default, your heart wiring is always going to go back to what's not happening. So you and you alone are responsible for turning that around for opening up your awareness for taking Einstein's advice and saying you have to expand your consciousness beyond whatever got you into this situation.

[01:01:20] And that's where your inner work is mandatory. And that's why I'm such a big proponent of inner work. It's not because it's something you can brag about. It's something that can help you in a real world way and a moment to moment basis with expanding your awareness, with being able to hold those multiple truths.

[01:01:39] At the same time without being distracted. And so inner work includes practices like daily meditation, like, you know, thinking of 10 or 15 things you're grateful for on a regular basis, like being of service, taking on a service project that allows you to help other people to think about. The experiences of other people beyond yourself.

[01:02:02] For me, what that looks like is I write this daily dose of inspiration email. That's the current iteration of my service project. Something that I do for free, meaning I don't get paid on the front end to do that. Sure. You could make the argument that I get people registering for my courses and whatnot, as a result of being on my email list but even those courses are all geared around helping people, right? And the money that I make helps me create the infrastructure. Just like those media publications, there's always infrastructure, and people need to get paid, so that's a part of the equation as well. But it's all in service to helping people. And we want to create some aspect of that for ourselves at all times. And that, will help to not only expand your awareness beyond yourself, but it also, I consider that to also be my health insurance. And this is another kind of an unexpected benefit that I found because I've been actively and consciously putting myself in the service position for many years, I would say probably for 20 years now in a conscious, intentional way. And as a result, I don't really get sick. I mean, yes, I get an occasional cold. Yes. I get an occasional headache. Yes. I get an occasional sore throat, but I don't ever get sick enough that I can't do the things here to do.

[01:03:29] So I, this is a whole other topic. Maybe we'll do a whole other solo episode on this, but I consider my service work to be like my health insurance, my real health insurance, right? The other stuff that you may pay on a monthly basis is kind of like your hospital insurance or your accident coverage, but your real health insurance is are you operating in alignment with a bigger purpose than just paying your bills, just making yourself comfortable, just taking care of yourself on a regular basis? Are you using your resources to help other people in some way, in some capacity that feels aligned with you, that incorporates many of the experiences that you've had in your past? And that is useful. That is useful for other people. That's useful for the world. And if so, then you are also, my prediction is you're never, you're not going to find yourself being compromised physically or even psychologically to the point where you're impaired from being able to do that service project.

[01:04:33] You're always going to have the resources, the awareness, the health, everything you need in order to perform that project in order to show up for your purpose. And so that comes the basic support package with being on your purpose.

[01:04:50] And again, maybe this is a placebo. I don't know, but I don't care if it keeps me healthy, knock on wood, I don't care if it's a placebo. I don't care if it's a real thing. Again, I could completely be making this up, but if I believe in it strongly enough, then 40% of the time it is going to work. And so far for these 20 years, it has worked. Beautifully. And I'm going to keep doing that. I'm going to keep adopting beliefs that I feel support me.

[01:05:18] And I strongly encourage you to do the same. And so bottom line here is that's why I am a big supporter of positivity. I do not condone invalidating other people's experiences which I think is where it gets to be in the toxic category of positivity. But I also don't condone apologizing for feeling optimistic for yourself and or for others. I'm not saying that you should express that. When you feel like expressing it, you need to have the awareness to know that, okay, this is not the right time or place to express this. For instance, if you get up to, to give a eulogy at a funeral, that may not be the place to talk about how, you know, death is not real and you're optimistic that they're going to incarnate into a beautiful life next time.

[01:06:10] And you know, all this kind of stuff, even though that's me, that may be something you believe in your heart of heart, that may be the place to reflect on a positive experience that you have with that person in their past, Because that's what is going to be useful for that moment. And then privately, you can entertain the idea that yes, you know, there's no such thing as death, and the cancer that the person suffered from was teaching them, you know, some powerful spiritual lessons, et cetera, et cetera. That's not something that you need to get up and talk about publicly. And being able to discern between those two things is something that you will benefit from with your daily spiritual practices, because you will have not just empathy with the person who passed away, but you'll also have empathy with the people who are there who may not be in the same sort of mindset, heart set, spiritual set that you may be experiencing at that moment in time. But maybe they're moving in that direction.

[01:07:08] If you have someone who's in third grade and you're a PhD student working on your doctorate in quantum mechanics and the third graders just learning multiplication, right? You don't go to the third grade math class and start talking about quantum mechanics and how two and two, two plus two actually is 8 because that's just going to end up bewildering everybody and no one's going to understand what you're talking about. Nor are they going to care what you're talking about? And you're probably going to put everybody off. So instead, just understand that where people are is where they need to be for the progression of their own evolutionary expansion of awareness. And the belief systems that they have right now are going to somehow lead to a more expansive belief, either through maybe a positive experience, or maybe it'll be through a so called negative experience, and both are equally useful for spiritual evolution. And that's where we want to be with ourselves as well. We're going through an experience that we consider to be positive and or negative. It's going to lead to something, some greater awareness at some point down the line and just again, just being patient with ourselves and holding the space for that to happen and to unfold in its own unique way is a part of the spiritual practice. It's about being what I said earlier, process-oriented as opposed to being outcome-oriented. 

[01:08:38] And getting online and debating about toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing, it's hopefully you've evolved beyond that point. You don't have to really do that because you have more important things to attend to, such as being of service to other people in ways that are being more empathetic and less combative, less destructive. 

[01:08:57] Trust there are going to be plenty of people who are willing to spend their precious time debating about what's toxic and what's not toxic. And for you, spend your time asking yourself, how can I be more use in positive ways and constructive ways in inspiring ways and motivational ways that can reach the most amount of people. And also allow me to be the most authentic to myself. So just want to leave you with that thought. 

[01:09:25] And if you haven't doubled down on your commitment to your inner work. Don't delay that either because the quicker you, you do that, the quicker you start to embody those principles and that awareness that allows how you move through the world to become more relatable to other people, more realistic and therefore more useful to the most amount of people, right? So you don't have to get in there and explain that you're giving them a spiritual solution. They conclude that, oh, this sounds like, or feels like a spiritual solution, right? Just based on who you are, just based on how you show up, just based on how you speak. If you have to get in there and explain that this is a spiritual solution, then it's not really a spiritual solution yet. It's still in process. The wheel is still spinning, so to speak. 

[01:10:16] All right. Hopefully you found this helpful. I've got a few other solo episodes, which are a little bit different from my interview episodes where I'm talking to guests about finding their purpose. I like to use these episodes as just a primer for helping you again, develop the skillsets that you are going to be relying upon from the inside out so that you can have a greater chance of finding your purpose sooner rather than later. 

[01:10:45] And by the way, my idea of purpose is you're already living your purpose. You just may not be aware of it yet. So getting to the point where you are aware that everything that you're experiencing, everything that you've gone through so far is a part of your purpose.

[01:10:58] It's a part of your path. That's helping to set the scene for you to become the best version of yourself, the highest version of yourself. All right. Hope you found it helpful. And thanks again for tuning in to my solo episode.

[END]

Thank you for tuning in to my solo episode on the ins and outs of toxic positivity. Of course, I'll put any links to any relevant things that I discussed in the show notes, which you can always find at lightwatkins.com/podcast. And if you enjoyed this solo episode and you found it. Inspiring and you're thinking to yourself, wow, I'd love to hear light. Talk about this other subject feel free to shoot me an email with your solo episode suggestion. My email is light@lightwatkins.com. 

And in addition to that, I would love for you to leave a rating or a review for my podcast. It only takes 10 seconds and all you do is you look at your device, you click on the name of the show, the light Watkins show. This really only works on the Apple podcast app. You scroll down past those first few episodes, you'll see a space with five blank stars. Just click the star all the way on the right and you have left a five star rating. If you want to go the extra mile while you're there, write a one line review of what you find inspiring about the show, and that's it. It goes such a long way to help me spread the word.

Oh, and you can also watch the solo episodes as well as my interviews on my YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube and type in Light Watkins Show Podcast, and you'll see the whole playlist. 

And I also post the raw, unedited version of each podcast in my Happiness Insiders online community. If you like hearing all the mistakes and the false starts and the bits that we edit out in each episode, you can listen to all of that by joining thehappinessinsiders.com and you can get an All Access Pass to all of my challenges, my meditation, moving, walking, squatting, healthy eating challenges, plus all of the masterclasses that I've created to help you become a better version of yourself. Find Your Purpose, Radical Authenticity, Manifesting Abundance, Preparing For The One, How to Move on From a Breakup, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

All right. I look forward to hopefully seeing you back here next week with another story about someone just like me, just like you taking a leap of faith in the direction of their purpose. And until then, keep trusting in your intuition. Keep following your heart. And keep taking those leaps of faith. And if no one's told you recently that they believe in you, I believe in you. Thank you so much. Sending you lots of love and have a great day.