Working With Negativity

Pema Chodron talked last night with Bill Moyers on pbs's "Faith & Reason" series.

See this site to watch or listen to the interview:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/watch.html

During the interview Pema spoke of Chogyam Trungpa's writing on "working with negativity" which can be found in "Myth of Freedom" pg. 73.

Here is an excerpt from the chapter entitled "Working with Negativity":

"We all experience negativity--the basic aggression of wanting things to be different than they are. We cling, we defend, we attack, and thoughout there is a sense of one's own wretchedness, and so we blame the world for our pain. This is negativity. We experience it as terribly unpleasant, foul smelling, something we want to get rid of. But if we look into it more deeply, it has a very juicy smell and is very alive. Negativity is not bad per se, but something living and precise, connected with reality.

Negativity breeds tension, friction, gossip, discontentment, but it is also very accurate, deliberate and profound. Unfortunately, the heavy handed interpretations and judgements we lay on these experiences obscure this fact. These interpretations are negative negativity, watching ourselves being negative and then deciding that the negativity is justified in being there. This negativity seems good natured, with all sorts of good qualities in it, so we pat its back, guard it and justify it. Or, if we are blamed or attacked by others, we interpret their negativity as being good for us. In either case, the watcher, by commenting, interpreting and judging, is camouflaging and hardening the basic negativity.

. . . . . The basic honesty and simplicity of negativity can be creative in community as well as in personal relationships. Basic negativity is very revealing sharp and accurate. If we leave it as basic negativity rather than overlaying it with conceptualizations, then we see the nature of it's intelligence. Negativity breeds a great deal of energy, which clearly seen becomes intelligence. When we leave the energies as they are with their natural qualities, they are living rather than conceptualized. They strenghten our daily lives...."

Read the entire chapter in "Myth of Freedom"

http://books.zaadz.com/2449/the_myth_of_freedom/by_chogyam_trungpa