'NEGATIVE THOUGHTS': A NAVAJO PERSPECTIVE

Here is a good traditional way of seeing all that stuff that bugs us, our wounds and our paranoia and our depression and our anger and all the rest of it. It's from a Navajo shepherd called Wolfkiller who lived from about 1855 to 1926: 

"The Navajo knew that thoughts create your reality. This was the central teaching that Wolfkiller's grandfather passed on: to focus on the powers of nature instead of falling prey to ongoing 'evil' thoughts. 'Evil' in this context is equivalent to what, more than 150 years later, we would term 'negative'.

In the process of facing such thoughts within him, the young Wolfkiller asked his grandfather, 'Why do we have evil within us?' The elder replied: 'We must have evil in us to make us strong. If we did not have the evil, we would never have gained the strength that we have now. We must have the evil so that we will fight. A struggle always gives us more strength, and the harder we fight, the more we gain in strength. The ones among us who are too lazy to fight never get anything. At times we are tempted to sit and wait for what might come, but it is not right to do nothing. Everything is made to fight its way through life. We must work to live, and this life is not all there is, as I have told you before. If we can control ourselves, we can do anything we set out to do. Day after day we must work to gain strength to go on until the time comes when we will go out of this body.'

This quote is from Chris Luttichau's "Calling Us Home". It was a much tougher life that these guys had, but the inner struggle that is being referred to is perennial. I think it can also be problematic for us, as our Christian background is one of damning ourselves: we are 'original sinners', we still carry that strongly with us. So to carry out this struggle - which is the stuff of life itself - we need the basis that we are fundamentally spirit, divine, that we are aligned with 'the powers of nature'. Otherwise we will be damning and judging of ourselves, and that is counter-productive. A better - and again traditional way - to look at it is which wolf we feed, the black wolf or the white wolf.