HOW TO LEARN FROM NEGATIVE EXPERIENCES

Negative experiences tend to influence our daily thoughts and actions long after their event. Life is supposed to be a wonderful collection of always new experiences but too often we focus on the negative experiences of our past and so live our lives in their presence and create our future in their shadow. Each of your experiences has taken place only once but you may have re-lived them a thousand times in your mind, thereby giving them a thousand times more power than they are due; a thousand more places in your life than they are due; and a thousand more strings to pull you with than they are due. Ultimately, negative experiences can be transformed into positive lessons and so can become the ticket to your success rather than the excess baggage that prevents it.

The Deception of Perception

Everything you experience in life is in itself neutral. It is your perception that labels your experiences as good or bad, positive or negative, happy or sad in accordance with your beliefs, which themselves are a product of your perceptions of your past experiences. Perception can be very misleading because it colours your experiences and reinforces your beliefs, irrespective of whether they serve you or not and irrespective of whether they hold true or not.

Re-Experiencing the Experienced

You cannot experience any reality other than the one you perceive based on your core beliefs. In this way, you create something of a cycle where your experiences validate your beliefs and your beliefs, in turn, validate your experiences, with the cycle being virtuous or vicious depending on the nature of your core beliefs. All this takes place at the level of your subconscious mind without the participation or agreement of your reasoning conscious mind.

This is why most people tend to repeat their positive and negative experiences whether it is in their relationships, their health, their finances or in any other area. Ask yourself how many times you have drawn the same negative experiences to yourself over and over again. The people or the setting may change but the fundamental experience, or how you felt as a result of it, is the same. This is not a coincidence or the luck of the draw. You are always the only common denominator and your inner world the only cause.

You may find that a specific experience from your past has negatively affected your general outlook on life or your belief in yourself. You may have even forgotten how you felt about life and yourself before it. The influence of past negative experiences may feel very real to you today but this is only because you have carried it with you beyond the one time that it occurred, and also because you perceived it to be negative to begin with without learning its inherent lesson so as to change that part of you that attracted it. And the longer you carry something, the heavier it becomes.

Finding the Positive Lesson in Negative Experiences

The bottom line is that an experience is what you declare it to be and you can change the past declarations about negative experiences by looking for the positive lesson within each. Whenever you have or recall those negative experiences that cause you pain, they are telling you something is 'wrong'—not with your outer world but with your inner. Just as physical pain alerts you to a physical problem so you can correct it, so mental pain alerts you to a mental problem that needs correcting.

Think about it. Had you touched a hot flame or stove as a child and burnt yourself, the pain you felt would have taught you not to do it again. Were it not for the pain, you would have been severely burnt. In the same way, the pain in your mental or emotional world is trying to prevent you from getting severely burnt in your life, or else prevent you from repeating negative experiences. Learn to see each and every one of your so-called negative experiences as a dear friend coming to tell you what is wrong or what needs your attention.

So, What is 'Wrong'?

You can discover what is 'wrong' in your inner world once you recognise that you create your reality through your thinking. You attracted your past negative experiences in accordance with your core beliefs that determined your mental frequency at the time (and most likely still do) and hence what you attracted through the Law of Attraction. The experience is doing nothing more than alerting you to the opportunity to see and change your negative beliefs so that you do not repeat the experience.

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Finding the 'Belief Culprit' of Your Negative Experiences

Write down your similar negative experiences in a journal and look for the common thread. You will usually find that one or several negative beliefs come up repeatedly, whether it is that you are not good enough, not clever enough, not attractive enough or perhaps that wealth is only for the lucky or that you are not cut out for success—the list is endless and personal to you.

If the underlying negative belief is not obvious to you, then look at how you felt or reacted during those negative experiences and work backwards from there. Ask yourself why you felt and reacted that way. You can also examine your daily habits, your fears and those outcomes that you desperately want to avoid or that you are otherwise desperately attached to seeing manifest in your life. Your subconscious beliefs drive them all and they are on auto-pilot without your conscious participation.

Take Charge of Your Beliefs

By finding the belief(s) behind negative experiences, you can easily understand how and why you perceived them to be negative and why you attracted them in the first instance. The experience is then positively transformed because you have learnt something about yourself that you can change. Even if you attract those negative experiences again you will be able to instantly see the lesson without the associated pain, or at least less of it, and take steps to change the belief.

Changing the Future

By changing your beliefs you are effectively changing your future because you will have changed your mental frequency in that area of your life, and hence will not attract those unwanted negative experiences again. Instead, you will attract what corresponds with the new belief that you have adopted. Even if you do attract aspects of the same experience in the short-term, do not become frustrated. This is allowing you to perceive it in a new light, otherwise, how would you know that you have in fact changed. By reacting differently this time around, the new belief will become more and more ingrained until such time that the old will feel foreign to you.

How to Change your Beliefs

To change a belief that does not serve you, you must first learn how to identify your core beliefs, both positive and negative, more so since the former can help you overwrite the latter. When you know what beliefs you want to change and in what way, you can use a number of techniques to reprogram the subconscious mind, including creative visualization, affirmations, autosuggestions, scripting and other techniques.

Know Thyself

When all is said and done, the most powerful way to transform any belief and let go of your past negative experiences is to begin to 'Know Thyself' as inscribed on the Ancient Greek Temple of Apollo in Delphi. Your ultimate aim is to remember who you truly are. Remember, you are your Higher Self having a human experience in a dream-world that is the illusory 3D Physical Plane. As your God Self, you are one with the All-Powerful, All-Knowing Absolute and your mind is one and the same with Universal Mind in Its entirety. Do any negative beliefs or past negative experiences stand a chance in the face of knowing and remembering who you truly are? Of course, they don't.

IN A NUTSHELL

Written by Tania Kotsos — Updated NOV 2020