“Our reactions cause a ripple effect. Keep it on the positive.”

My vocal chords plucked at my heart strings in kirtan as waves of people danced and sang around me in a collective cradle of elation.

I felt the power of positive energy spun through song and amplified by the community around me. We sang kirtan into the night—a soulful call and response technique that aligns vocal pitches with our chakras.

In between jam sessions, Grammy-award nominee Krishna Das and Radhanath Swami talked about the ripple effect feeding the collective consciousness at Omega Institute’s Ecstatic Chant. They said, like others have said before— including the Dalai Lama—the way we react to external stimuli (good or bad) directly influences those around us. Where we focus our attention makes all the difference.

Some have even gone so far to say that our energy transmits a ripple throughout the ether, so that even people you don’t come in contact with are influenced by your energy. Interesting, right?

All arguments aside, there’s tremendous power in projecting an optimistic and positive mindset when our dots don’t really line up the way we had planned. Because, well…plans don’t always work out no matter how hard we may try.

Dr. Wayne Dyer said that in situations like these, it’s helpful to “initiate a habit of choosing thoughts and ideas that support feeling good and powerful, and that elevate you to a higher level of consciousness.”

Here are three tips to help keep it on the positive and elevate your consciousness.

1. Meet negativity with love.

The other day, an employee at a friend’s company grew red in the face when on the phone with her boss. When the call ended, she cursed and verbally expressed (at a decibel well beyond what’s necessary) how annoyed she was at her boss for not scheduling meetings more effectively. Her negativity was nearly impossible to ignore. It was palpable.

Her negativity immediately changed the culture in the room and I felt my shoulders grow tight. I walked out of the room because I just didn’t want to be around that kind of negativity. “How rude to steal away other people’s happiness,” I thought.

Then, I remembered what Ram Dass and Radhanath Swami say in their classic book Be Love Now: “Embrace all things with love.”

Sometimes we need to try to understand that perhaps this person has had a really tough day. Or perhaps they have suffered a lot of loss in their life that led them to be quite negative. Or perhaps they just don’t have a lot of loving positive people surrounding them in life. The point being, offer loving kindness in place of feeding negativity.

2. Frantic energy helps no one.

Dr. Deri Joy Ronis writes in Bridging the Gap to Peace: From a New Way of Thinking Into Action that “Frantic mental or nervous physical energy serves no purpose in helping us get beyond the very things that frustrate us.” She adds that not being at peace isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but a signal that we need change and should pay attention to it.

Trust me—I understand that it’s far easier to say this than practice it. I constantly struggle to recognize my pitta fire energy and douse it with water when I need to chill out. Sometimes, however, when “crap hits the fan”—so to speak—it’s a lot easier to scream, shout and be frantic.

But it won’t really get us anywhere.

In yoga, we’re taught to dig deep into emotions and experience them so that you can understand them better. So, the next time you feel a deep surge to get frantic, dig into that emotion and really feel it. Indulge in it a bit. If you want to scream, really scream. Do what Angelina Jolie has said to work and scream in a pool so it doesn’t bother anyone. Just fully feel your sadness, anger, or jealousy and experience it without doing any harm to others. This way you can learn to let go.

The next time this emotion arises, it will be easier to recognize it and make a choice. You’ll be able to choose whether or not to go down that path. More often than not, it will get easier to say “no, thank you. I don’t need to go down that path.”

Another helpful trick when feeling anxious is a simple breathing exercise where you breathe in the mantra “I am a mountain” and breathe out “I meet my vulnerability with love.”

3. Where’s your positive fuel?

Having a positive mindset doesn’t mean being ignorantly optimistic. It means making a choice to place your focus on the positive with the understanding that negativity does little to get you anywhere.

After college, a lot of us lose our optimistic fuel.

How many times have your or your friends expressed nostalgia for the collective positive energy on a college campus? Academia most definitely is a stressful environment, but, for the most part, days are filled with people who are actively pursuing their dream career and having lots of positive social interactions with meaningful discussions.

After college, a lot of us enter into the daily grind. Perhaps you’re working a job that doesn’t fuel your purpose because you have a responsibility to provide for your family. I get that.

As you hop into your daily commute and fill up your car at the gas station, think about where you’re filling your positive fuel tank. Actively seek out positive people at work, have a weekly in-person or digital meet-up with a positive mastermind group, or read material that focuses on the positive (i.e. not the newspaper).

We’re animals, let’s not forget. We are an effect of our habitat. What makes us quite different from other animals, however, is that we have a choice to choose our habitat and those we invite to share it with us.

We have a choice where to focus our attention: what actions we will pursue, what words we use, what company we keep.

We construct our reality by the words we choose to narrate it.

At Omega Institute, Radhanath Swami used the analogy of a crane when picturing where to place focused attention. He said, like a crane, we have the choice to go after the big fish or go after the little fish. Big fish satisfy us far more than little fish, but if we just choose to go after the little fish, we can never focus on the big fish.

If we choose to focus on the negative annoyances in life, we can so easily ignore what really matters. The little fish that only feeds us for a short time will always keep on coming and get in the way of paying attention to the big fish. What really matters, Radhanath Swami states, is to try to live out the best version of ourselves through loving kindness. And that’s the biggest fish of all.

What are your thoughts? Like always, I’d love to hear what you think. How do you keep it on the positive?

Relephant:

3 Basic Tools for Creating Happiness.

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Author: Mark Guay

Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: Mia Nolting/Flickr