Why We Should Embrace Negative Experiences

Over-indulgence, Repression and Balance

I recently wrote a post about Archetypes. It was about how we can use Archetypes as a tool to help us reflect on how we are showing up in the world and create more meaning by giving us an ideal vision of ourselves to work towards.

But there’s another idea from that post that I’m still thinking about, and that is the concept of over-indulgence, repression or balance.

It’s an idea that we can consider in all areas of our lives. What we eat and drink, how much sex we’re having, what we buy, how much we work, our spiritual journey… whatever really. In every part of life, there’s a sliding scale and a hypothetical ideal that we’re dancing around, whether we’re aware of it or not.

And this will be different for everyone, and in relation to everything else we’ve got going on. Some people simply need more food, some of us have a higher sex drive. It’s why there’s never a one-size-fits-all solution in self-help books, dieting, any advice that we take on from the outside world.

That’s not to say that external advice isn’t useful – whenever we turn to self help books, workshops, coaches, we’re looking for advice from people whose lives are functioning better than ours in specific areas, or at least they can point us to more helpful perspectives to consider in the context of our own lives.

Most of us are striving to find this point of balance and often make judgments about ourselves and others when we’re not on track. But it’s helpful to remember that it’s impossible to remain in the sweet spot indefinitely. Forward momentum is literally generated by the flow back and forth, cycling between too much and too little.

The Kybalion is a book on the Hermetic wisdom of Ancient Egypt, and one of its seven core principles is that of polarity. It says that everything in existence is dual and has its pair of opposites. These apparent opposites are actually one and the same – both just points on a continuum, differing only by degree.

Just as there is no specific definable point on a thermometer where hot becomes cold, our perception of any of these scales is in relation to our starting point.

Courage or fear, love or hate, right or wrong, order and chaos. They are all relative and you can’t have one without the other. So often we experience one extreme in response to the removal or denial of its opposite.

We’ve seen plenty of people at the top of their field implode with extreme behaviour that occurs when their attempts to deny the opposite swing of the pendulum become too great to contain. These states are connected, relative and constantly in flow.

So you could say that over-indulgence is like chaos – it’s all consuming and wild. Conversely, repression is like order – it’s still and calm, but lacking in life energy. Too much of a good thing becomes boring and gets taken for granted, while too little creates an irresistible thirst for novelty. When we suppress our desires, they get stronger.

This is also what the yin/yang symbol represents, the eternal dance of order and chaos, including the seed of chaos we find in order and the seed of order in chaos.

Polarity

We find this polarity and flow in everything. All of life is a constant cycle back and forth between these two poles, over and over again in every possible situation, all at once.

Moving from enthusiasm to procrastination on a project. Healthy eating to binging. Presence to distraction. My biggest breakthroughs have happened when I’ve allowed myself down time, cheat days, space, factored into a rhythm that keeps me on track with my goals.

We need to give ourselves this permission, because forward momentum requires this tension and pull between both poles to create the energy to remain in motion.

Emotions are the experience of that energy moving through the body, usually felt as sensations of contraction such as tension or expansion, like calm and openness. Your nervous system literally cycles between expansion and contraction every few seconds, with every breath you take.

Breathing in raises your heart rate and increases the flow of energy within your body, while breathing out decreases your heart rate and brings calm. This is why we can regulate our system by manipulating our breathing – like long, slow exhales to calm us down in response to the shallow breathing we unconsciously default to when experiencing stronger emotions.

And the word emotion itself comes from the latin, ’emotere’, which literally means energy in motion. I like to think of this flow of energy within us like a magnet, and our bodies are actually within an electromagnetic field already. With a magnet, the more potential energy there is stored at one pole, the stronger the pull towards its opposite.

So it is with our emotions, the more positive and happier you are, the more energy there is, the more you have to lose.

“The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.”

- C.S. Lewis

So it’s literally the higher you are, the harder the fall will be. But also, the deeper you are buried, the higher you can grow. This is the journey of life – flowing back and forth.

If you try to deny and limit the negative emotions, or bury and don’t express them, you’re pushing them into your shadow and they will still come out in other, less desirable ways.

You’re also limiting your chance to reach higher levels of ecstasy by not allowing the full range of emotion to move through you. They are inextricably linked and, speaking of ecstasy, every raver can tell you about the existential comedown that hits in the days that follow the best night of your life.

This is also not an excuse to let our emotions run riot. As we’ve already discussed, there are two sides to everything and everything is contextual. Sometimes we need to keep them on a leash and do what needs to be done. But we also need healthy practices to be able to process and release stuck emotion fully, so it doesn’t come back to bite us.

Spirit/Soul

People commonly talk about spirit being the light. The spiritual journey being a move towards the light, towards higher consciousness. You might have also heard the term, The Dark Night of the Soul, which is used when talking about periods of deep, existential depression. I have had my own experiences in that realm and I can tell you it’s certainly dark.

Nobody would choose to go there but, at the same time, the process of moving through those moments of complete despair have been the forge through which I’ve come back to finding meaning and purpose, and reconnection with the world. Again, it’s the cycle of life, from dark to light, soul to spirit. And we live in the flow between the two.

When you’re stuck in depression, it’s a sign from your mind and body that you are not in alignment with your values and there’s something that needs addressing.

It can take a lot of hard, painful work to get honest about how you are negatively impacting your own life. To begin to understand yourself and what you stand for, and to take deliberate action towards that aim.

The energy you put in during this time is stored and builds up, and the longer you are able to withstand that darkness and keep working on yourself without numbing out, the higher you will soar on the other side.

So if we go back to the concept from earlier, depression and the dark night of the soul would be chaos – the moments when your life has fallen apart, your hopes and dreams shattered, you no longer know who you are and what you stand for, disconnected from the people around you.

Spiritual enlightenment would be order – moments of absolute presence, stillness and calm, unconditional love. So many of us on the spiritual path can default to only chasing the light, wanting the everlasting bliss that we often only glimpse. But too much of a good thing and we’d still get bored.

Really it’s in the darkness where we learn the lessons. When we fail, when things don’t go our way. These are the moments we learn the most, when we figure out how to grow to the next level.

So life is a constant cycle of descending into chaos, facing those difficulties, where we become stronger by figuring out how to overcome them. We learn the lessons that help us straighten things out and return to order. And then the process starts again.

Alan Watts said:

“There is order in chaos. The difference between chaos and harmony is a matter of scale, and perspective.”

When we look at it this way, we can see that the chaos of our apparent depression is also the seed for our further enlightenment, and the dance between the two is the energy that drives our life.

Don’t be so fast to reject or numb out from your depression. It has so much to teach us about who we are and what we truly want.

When we’re down in the depths of it, remembering and holding onto this fact can make all the difference in helping us to keep moving forward. And when we’re riding the crest of the wave, it’s worth trying to stay humble, remembering that nothing lasts forever and that we also have further to fall. But we’ll be back.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your perspective and if there’s anything else you’d like me to talk about then let me know in the comments too.