Cultivate the opposite

I am reading Dona Holleman’s “Dancing the Body of Light” Chapter 6 (yes, I am doing my homework very last minute for the Boundless Teacher Training program!) and I am struck by this idea of deliberately and intentionally cultivating the opposite emotion when we are faced with stress, anger, anything negative. Acknowledge the negative and then, cultivate – in your heart, your mind, your actions, your behavior towards others – the opposite. So simple, and yet so unbelievably hard. There is a four alarm fire going off in my brain right now. This is a skill I must work on! I want to begin to create my own reality by figuring this out. How have you cultivated the opposite? How has it helped?

1. 
   On June 18th, 2010 at 8:17 pm Leslie Said:

   I’ve been chewing on this, too, though not terribly successfully. I try not to let my triggers get pulled at work or in traffic, for example, but … there they are. So familiar and yet so draining. I need new patterns, too. Sometimes it’s as simple as doing something I normally resist, like the dishes. There! That wasn’t so bad! Donna Farhi describes the idea of cultivating the opposite nicely in “Bringing Yoga to Life,” on p. 173. She points readers to two of the sutras that deal with this concept and says, as an example: If you are fearful, consider the opposite possibility of courage. If you are lethargic and pessimistic, contemplate vitality and optimism. Put another way, I guess, is to be the change you want to experience. Farhi also says something really profound on p. 33: We cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it. I mean, how huge is THAT idea?

2. 
   On July 4th, 2010 at 12:55 pm Jody Said:

   To some degree, this is the crux of the matter, isn’t it? I learned from some very wise people one technique of practicing. It is, perhaps, a little more concrete, which I always find useful. It goes like this: (As always, it’s start small.) Pick one thing you’d like to change or work on. For example, I don’t like to make mistakes and used to really beat myself up for some silly, inconsequential error. So, when I find myself getting in to that with thoughts like, “How could you have been so stupid?” or any sentence that starts with “I can’t believe you…,” I ask myself, Does anyone need an ambulance? Is anyone dead? Is anyone going to die? This helps me get perspective- the error may be something that does not even require a correction! Then I can laugh, remind myself of good things I have done well, do some kind of positive affirmation if needed and figure out how to rectify without putting myself down in the process.

3. 
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