No News Is Positive News; Choose Your Filter
Amber:
I delete any group or person on Facebook who is super negative.
L:
I stopped reading the newspaper or watching the news. The relief from the negativity and fear mongering of the press was so noticeable that I’ve never gone back to it. When I happen to be exposed to it, it feels so awful that I try to remove myself as quickly as possible.
Lia:
I don’t have cable and don’t watch the news as such, but I receive my news through news outlets via social media. And while I haven’t shut that off, I no longer dive into all the headlines. I try to just skim over, or scroll over the negative. So much of what we receive in news is from the USA, and while some can affect us, I think there is so much to be considered about Canada and places to be positively involved in this country. Focusing on this allows me to give the bad news less energy. I think it would be good to be away from it entirely, as you are, but I want to know what’s going on in a peripheral way at the least. I signed up for a few news aggregate emails, and it allows me to stay current, without diving in and getting caught up in the negativity.
Sabine:
I stopped digesting news on a regular basis, too, quite some years ago. Yet still there are these awkward moments when people start talking about prevailing happenings and I have no clue what they are talking about. That’s when I feel ignorant and I don’t like that much. I haven’t found the perfect balance there as I feel the negativity and fear that is presented in the news, whether on TV or in the papers or anywhere else and then is transported by the people talking about them, so strongly. And it is more important to me to not have to process all those emotions, esp. when I cannot change most things I would be worried about anyway. The occasional feeling of ignorance nevertheless has me wonder every once in a while about how I could be roughly up to date and still be blissful.
Amber:
This is good Lia. I went back and forth on this for years with all the animal activists around me sharing the massive amounts of cruelty in the world. When I started both the other animals rescues I started I had to eventually walk away. I was seeing horrific things happening to animals every single day all day. It made me sick. I could not sleep and I lived in anger. What I struggled with was seeing this daily, sharing it and wrecking other people’s lives who had to see it. I wondered if this was really making a positive change. At the time I thought if people could just see what I was seeing the news would spread quickly and this would come to a stop. What I had to come to terms with was my health in sharing and living these things. I was forced to stop. I needed to get away from it. I then talked to a healer who said something that changed my life. He told me that I should not put any energy in to the negative and only worry about me and those close to me living a positive life without hurting animals. Live a life of happiness and show them what animals can do to benefit our lives. That way I am sharing animals and their worth in a positive way that allows me to sleep at night and not take on the sickness of what I was seeing. He explained how I was not ignoring the issue I was just not going the route of negativity. He explained how incredibly powerful that is in changing the world. I thought he was crazy at first. How could me just living happily with pets change those who had hurt them faster than me sharing the negative? I have now done this for the past five years and I can see just how powerful the results are. It’s truly incredible.
Lia:
Thank you for sharing that experience. I too think about this way of looking at things, interacting, engaging. I’m listening and educating myself, but you’re right – to what end? I also need to sort out the action I want to take in my own life and how to positively impact, small scale as it may be, the world.
