This in no way is to put down the art of positive thinking.  Instead you might say it is positive thinking in a broader view that the human aspect often misses, but the soul doesn’t.

To begin with I will say that humans are very good at taking something spiritual and down sizing it to accommodate the human tendency of denial; including positive thinking methods.  So much so that denial becomes the lie that is conveniently put into the position of power in a life and called truth.

Why does this happen?  Before you came to earth in your physical forms, you all agreed to pretend you were separate from everything and everyone, including your own soul.   To make sure you believed that, you agreed to wear spiritual blinders, which have come to be known as the “veil.”  That “veil” hides your true Essence from your human aspect, which of course is the purpose.

The “veil” was put into place so that you would experience the physical world to its fullest extent.  This could only be done if you believed it to be the true reality.  In this way you took every experience seriously enough to find a way through it and survive another day; another year.  And if you hadn’t taken each experience as something you had to find your way through to have the life you want, your awareness would not have expanded to the point where it is now in your personal evolution.  Many of you have reached a spiritual awareness that now allows you to believe that you are not separate from each other; that there is a higher power/energy/force that created you and the rest of the Universe.  To a large degree that spiritual awareness has not yet been integrated

Your Essence is the real you beyond the physical realm and it is One with all Essence; with the I Am energy that is called God/Allah/Jehovah/Christ and all the other names given to the Source of that Universal energy, which is the One life of all life.

Experience is Essence at work in the world and as the world.  Essence works through everyone and everything in some way, in spite of the human labels created from judgments such as negative/ positive/good/bad/beautiful/ugly or indifferent.  All judgment labels come from the perception of the human aspect and are merely figments of each personal reality.  Though they are all from the same energy source, I will call Universal Energy, everyone uses the Universal Energy through their own beliefs, which creates many variations of personal perception. This is part of the game on earth.

Nonetheless, what each of you draws into your lives as experience, the human aspect is 30% responsible for.  The other 70% of your experiences are via your soul/spirit.  The experiences via your soul/spirit seemingly manifest into your life more unexpectedly than those from the human aspect.  All the information about positive thinking that tends to make people believe in money, power, greed and all the rest of the material world that the human clings to, is not the answer to all of your challenges.  It is not your salvation and protection from human struggles or pain.  Those that pretend it is will at some point be awakened to the reality of that. 

Let me tell you a story that will give you a better picture of what positive thinking looks like to many people.

Tom and Jenna went to a workshop to learn a positive thinking method, guaranteed to manifest all they could ever want in their lives.  They went home and practiced it daily the way they were taught.

They believed that if they had lots of money to spend on luxuries, that they would finally be happy and at peace. The money started coming to them gradually at first. They kept practicing their positive thinking exercises and watching the DVD they bought at the seminar, twice daily.  The money started coming in faster and more abundantly.  As it did so, Tom and Jenna were becoming more and more materialistic. 

One evening Tom and Jenna decided to invite all their friends and relatives over for a party to show off their beautiful new home and all of its expensive décor, as you would say.  They made sure their new sports car sat out in the drive way so every one would be the envy of them.

Their friends and family were definitely impressed with their obvious material wealth but they noticed Jenna and Tom had changed.  They were boastful, aloof and were acting like they were superior to their friends and family.   Though Jenna and Tom had taken time to share what they had learned in the positive thinking workshop, they no longer seemed to be the humble, loving people they use to be.

It didn’t matter though that Jenna’s and Tom’s friends and family began to gradually drift away from them. 

Jenna and Tom had decided that their friends and family were jealous of their success; they were too negative and they no longer had anything in common with them.   

Tom and Jenna didn’t want to be around anyone who had “negative thoughts” and challenges going on in their lives.  They couldn’t admit it but they feared that other people’s so called negative energy would somehow attach to them and manifest in their lives, if they didn’t stay clear of them.  You might be saying, “Well that’s true, it could attach to them and manifest in their lives.”   And I say that if it were to manifest into Tom’s and Jenna’s lives, that they had not truly been practicing positive thinking at all…instead, they had actually been practicing the fear of poverty and lack all along.

Unfortunately a year later, Tom became too sick to work any longer and had to quit his job.  His illness created a need for Jenna to stay home and take care of him.  Soon their medical insurance ran out and their bills drained their finances.  They lost their house and had to sell most of everything in it so they could move into a much smaller place.

The moral of the story is that manifesting material wealth, love, a type of work or anything else, does not erase fear from one’s life.  In fact, it may give you more reasons to believe in lack and fear of all kinds, if that underlying fear exists.  Why?  Because once you have everything you believe you need and want, then you could begin fearing you may lose it somehow, even it you don‘t acknowledge that fear..  Why, you say?  It’s because fear doesn’t go away by hiding it.  It has to be understood for what it is and why it exists for you.  

Fear began long ago from the belief that you are separate from others, separate from the world; from the higher powers that made you and separate from who you really are inside all your physicality.  It is the belief in dualities such as good or bad, rich and poor, Godly or un-Godly, worthy or unworthy, that keeps fear alive.  And that belief cannot be banished with material wealth, positive thinking or anything else that you use to pretend it doesn‘t exist in your belief system. 

When you were a baby or a young child, you didn’t know what fear was until something happened to you that caused trauma or pain to your being.  Though as an adult you may have forgotten the particulars of that event on a conscious level, the fear will remain a part of you until it is healed or mastered. To heal or master fear, it must be acknowledged consciously once it surfaces, and not be shoved down into the denial pile again.

Denial serves as a way to survive, but once it has served that purpose, denial becomes like a slow acting poison that eventually causes trauma in some form in a life.

Once the fear is acknowledged consciously and embraced as part of you, then you can begin to unravel its purpose for you and determine if it still helps you as an adult or hinders you.  Once that is understood and decided, you are able to take control of the fear.  That is when it has no choice but to relinquish its control over you.  The fear will now serve you and your needs and not the other way around.  Is that not positive thinking at work?

As long as experiences can cause one to fear, and those fears become beliefs, you will be given opportunities of all types that will help you chip away at the fear based perceptions that distort your view of yourself and your life.  That is a given.  Those experiences however, don’t have to swallow you up and destroy you.  For all fear can be healed or mastered once it has served its purpose in your life.  You need to be ready to embrace it and understand that you as a soul in human form have an innate ability to heal yourself and your life.  Having Faith in the soul/human process makes that easier.  Again this is positive thinking at work.

Challenge, fear, joy, love are all gifts of equal value, for each has the potential to teach one about compassion.  You never know which of these gifts will finally show you how to let go of controlling life and allow a higher wisdom to pave the way.  Any of these, whether it be a challenge, a fear, a feeling of joy or love, can show you how to have Faith in yourself and others; faith in a purpose not yet seen and a knowing that you are never separate from the One life; from the Light inside each of you that connects all. Your Higher Self will determine which gift or gifts will best serve you in each experience.

So let’s talk about Faith with a capital F.  The Bible teaches Faith in a Higher Power many call God.  But Faith in a Higher Power, can often feel unreachable to you.  The reason being is that you cannot usually see what that Higher Power has in store for your life.  In that way, Faith is a very intangible expectation that the mind has a difficult time wrapping itself around because it doesn’t know how it is suppose to look or feel.  None the less, Faith with a capital F is the most positive form of thinking and believing.  It is also the hardest to obtain for many, because it takes faith, with a small f, to trust in Faith with a capital F.

Life is a mass of experiences that you as souls agreed to process through, simply for the gift of knowing what you on deeper levels want to know as souls living in a plane of duality. You have come here to experience experiences and all that entails.  To the soul/higher self, experience in all forms is the gift of life.  Each experience has a gift inside of it whether you view it as bad, good, negative or positive.  Experiences will gradually or quickly, depending on your family imprinting and soul contracts, expand your awareness of who you are and how you connect to the rest of creation.

Because you focus more in your humanness, which is what this physical game is about, you want to avoid anything that doesn’t feel good.  You view what you call problems or uncomfortable challenges as something to avoid.  “If I only knew what I was learning from this, I would do it.”  That is what you humans say a lot.  The truth is, even if you knew what you were going to learn before hand, you wouldn’t learn it.  Why?  It’s because you can only learn through the process of each experience.  The learning takes place by not knowing what the experience is going to teach you as you move through it.  Through that process you are peeling off layers that reveal new aspects of yourself on other levels of your being.  You will not be aware of that during the processing period however.  Your mind, your thoughts, your feelings, your beliefs, your knowledge, your experiences, your spirituality, all play a part in the outcome and what you will have learned during the processing period. 

This takes Faith in a Higher Power, Faith is positive thinking.

Yes, I know all of you need money to live in a safe and comfortable manner.  And whatever tools help you to manifest that, whether they are talents and abilities, ambition and drive, and yes even positive thinking, use them.  But the tools you use, and how you use them, must connect with your inner most being of compassion, integrity and love.  In other words live from the heart as much as you are capable of in each moment.  When you can give all that to yourself first and believe it, you will be ready to give those qualities in the form of abilities, feelings, emotions, knowledge and wisdom to the world, in what ever way you choose.  The difference is that they will now be expressed through your heart center.    

Until humankind moves into the heart and works more consistently from that center, fear will continue to create suffering for the world at large.  Experiences that are negative, painful and challenging on feeling and emotional levels, unfortunate as it seems, move humans much more quickly into their heart centers. That is where the connection to the Higher Self/Soul takes place. It’s also where one can better understand the workings of the Physical Plane experiences, and receive guidance for self.

Hopefully you will now understand that there could be more to your positive thinking method then you may have believed.  To get the best results, I suggest that you first take time to look inside your heart and determine what it is you really want at this time in your life.  Then take a while to find out ways you can help bring that about.  For instance: If you are trying to manifest a type of work, be willing to go out and meet people in that particular field, do research on that type of work, take some classes if needed and whatever else you can do that will move you in the direction you are wanting to go.  As you expend your heart and human energy out into the world, allow it to have time to open doors for you without the expectation of how you think it should look or feel.

Know that because you as a human learn through the experiencing of the process…the doors that will open for you, at any given time, will bring the best opportunities that correspond to the page you are presently on in your life. 

With each step you take and complete in the process, your ultimate goal will be manifesting at the pace you have set for yourself on inner levels.  Let it unfold the way that your Higher Self knows to be the best for you.  If you do not, you will feel unhappy about the final outcome, because it will not look like what your human mind imagined. 

This, my friends is the soul's version of positive thinking.

In closing I ask that you listen with your heart and know your Higher Self is guiding you to what is best for you at this time.

Blessings,
Higher Self of Carolyn Gervais 
awakeningyou.com