Yesterday, I mentioned that almost everyone has an area of personal negativity that can use a bit of magickal elbow grease.  I also listed ignorance of your own negative tendencies as a risk factor.  Before we get into the nature of negativity, I’d like to talk about personal ignorance and its incredible ability to undercut our personal power.

To begin simply, you cannot change what you do not know needs changing.  Change is an act of will.  Change requires an understanding of the current state and perceived new state that is different than the current state.  Then it requires the energy to move from one state to the next.  It takes willpower. 

Willpower takes conscious thought and is most effective when applied in a specific direction.  We can use tools to help us do what we need to do.  Tools are useless without willpower — a fulcrum does nothing just sitting there, and a lever is just a bar without placement and correct pressure.  But when used with focus and a goal in mind, a fulcrum and a lever (or, let’s say, a Witch’s tools) can move very heavy objects.  Negativity, by the way, is a very heavy object.  Moving it can take all our willpower and every tool in our arsenal, but it can be done!

In yesterday’s article, I likened negativity to a tenacious vine.  I would like to stick with that analogy because it gives us the best understanding of how many aspects of negativity works. 

Every human being begins their life as benign as the soil.  Depending on the kind of person you are, your personal “soil” might be very rocky and not conducive to much foliage, or your soil might be rich and lush with nutrients and plenty of water and the ability to hold that water.  Negativity is like a plant.  It is born from another plant of like kind.  It might develop from a seed and have a chance of growing or not.  It might start from a creeper off another full-grown plant, or maybe a part of root that has broken off and come to life on its own.

Let’s apply that analogy to negativity. 

Some negativity is just a seed.  A stray occurrence or situation that isn’t your usual life.  Depending on the conditions of your internal “soil”, that seed may or may not get what it needs to grow. 

If you’re fairly rocky (meaning solid, less fertile to change, more defined in your internal conditions), that seed may not get much of a chance.  A negative moment drops into your life and then doesn’t even get a start.  However, we also know that negativity is a creeper vine.  It doesn’t need deep soil — even the most shallow person can be beset with negativity.  And creeper vines, with time, can split rock.  It’s just a little harder to get started in hard ground.

On the other hand, if you’re fairly lush and fertile, you have the makings of a perfect storm.  If you have plenty of water (emotional energy), plenty of heat/sun (creative energy), and plenty of depth (spiritual capacity), the chances of negativity worming its way in and doing a systematic takeover is almost a sure thing at some point in your life.  Witches are especially subceptible to negativity because our Path involves close work with creative forces of the Universe, because magick draws deeply on emotional energy, and because the Craft requires maturity gained through experience and spiritual depth.  

But seeds aren’t the only kind of negativity that can root inside us.  You also gather negativity from proximity to other well-established sources of negativity.  Negative family members, negative friends, negative spouses/lovers, negative coven  members, negative community members… each of these already has an established crop of negativity growing.  If you’ve ever grown a vine plant, you know that all a vine needs to spread is the promise of fresh, non-viney soil.  Similarly, you might have also noticed that it’s quite easy for you to pick up negativity just by being around other people who are negative.  Their mentality “creeps” into you and before you know it, you’re overrun.

Situations and experiences that are negative can also be the cause of negativity infestation.  In this case, a situation or experience is the root of the problem and this root breaks off deep within you, deep in your past.  This root can lie dormant and fail to live, or it can slither its way up through the soil in all directions, sprouting multiple plants simultaneously until you wonder how, suddenly, you got to be so negative all the time.  The plant looks nothing like the root, after all… hell, you might not have seen the root for a long time.  But it’ll be getting down and digging out that root that gets rid of the infestation.

If all of that wasn’t bad enough, negativity’s vine has one final, detrimental quality.  It doesn’t matter what beautiful things you have growing in your garden — how sweet, kind, honest, creative, talented, beautiful, or understanding you are — like a vine, negativity can cover these things up, pull them down, and destroy them.  When negativity overruns you, your good qualities are masked.  Other people can’t see them, and you can’t let them shine.  It’s not that they’ve disappeared, but good traits need air and sunlight and water, too.  Negativity sucks up all the nutrients your character needs, smothers them, pushes them down, and eventually, you can’t see them either.  If you’re not careful, negativity can outright kill some character traits, and you won’t be able to get those back until you deal with the negativity choking everything out.

Negativity can also be kind of pretty and useful.  There are some people that love negativity and wear it well — we go to them to bitch because we know we can always find a friendly ear and more fuel for the fire.  Sometimes it’s cool to wear that angst like a crown on your head, becoming the gothic equivalent of the May Queen or May King.  Negativity makes a very useful trellis and prop for your bad habits to where you don’t really feel like you have to change them.  And negativity flowers at least a few times a year – you know, when you expect the worst and you get the worst and then you can say, “See?  Told you so, at least I’m not disappointed!”  Ah, the sweet smell of negativity in full bloom!  Just pleasant enough to keep you from ripping that patch up in the garden, nevermind that you complain about it the other 340 days of the year.

I hope this helps you understand a bit more about what we’re actually dealing with when we begin to work on negativity.  Most of us are far beyond the ”have seed, might sprout” state.  When I came to the realization about my own negativity, you would have thought I deliberately planted the stuff — and I did, at times.  You probably have, too.  More on that later.

Tomorrow, though, we’re going to prep the gardener a little bit.  It can be daunting looking out your back window and seeing a jungle that you know wants to eat you waiting for you to step out and wage war against it.  For now, just give it a glance, know it for what it is.  Your negativity is not you.  You are bigger than it, beyond it.  It needs you to live.

That means that you are more powerful than it will ever be.  Take a moment and really get that.

You are more powerful than it will EVER be.

More tomorrow!

Photo by KudzuPlanet (via Flickr).