Life reminds me how we all can feed negative thoughts so much that they fill our souls and then spill out into our words and actions.  We remain fixed in our negative beliefs and continue to defeat our best intentions and wishes with our own never-ending supply of negative energy.  We may want and wish for the best for ourselves and for others, but our own negativity impedes any chances for an improved life.  To make things harder, when groups of people get together and share negative energy, each person’s negativity flows and fills and spills into each groups member’s soul that build a huge reservoir of bad juju.

Too many times, I’ve encountered families with members who struggle with alcohol and/or other substances.  Though the family wants their loved one to overcome his or her substance abuse, down deep they hold a preconceived idea that the person will not change.  If more than one of the family members holds that belief, its energy is reinforced between them and then the negative thought becomes words like, “He’ll never stop drinking” or “she’ll never stop using.”  Those words then become behaviors like ignoring pleas for help or giving up on their loved one.  Changing behaviors is hard enough without having to overcome free-flowing negative energy.

In order to disrupt the negative energy flow, I think we should periodically empty ourselves of negative beliefs about a given situation.  Really, I spend a fair amount of time trying to neutralize the power of addiction such that people might empty their souls of the fear that’s such a real part of addiction.  I try to re-fill people’s minds with the idea that addiction progresses like most diseases and, also like most diseases, it can be treated.  But, all too often, people use words like “junkie” or “alcoholic” or “loser” or “addict” to describe people they claim to love.  Though I try, I do find that the flow of negative and limiting thoughts can be almost as hard to overcome as the addiction itself.  It’s almost like the source of negative thoughts is so deep that the negativity will fill and spill forever.

But it doesn’t have to flow forever.  I encourage everyone to take a second before they say something like, “What’s the difference, he’ll just use again” and try to think that maybe the person to whom they’re about to speak may be in trouble and need real help.  Maybe in that second, the negative energy will be disrupted and we can try to listen and learn instead of judge from our self-righteous preconceived thoughts about addiction. Really, we should seek to empty ourselves of bad juju, period. It’s free-flow prevents us from seeing the real beauty that surrounds us.