Picture this. You’re busy at the office when a colleague arrives.
He’s late, and no sooner does arrive than he loudly shouts a bad word, slams his briefcase on his desk, and kicks the trashcan.
A coworker tries to calm the him. Another coworker slips out to the break room. Another lowers her head and waits for the storm to pass.
Your distraught coworker created a powerful disturbance. And people reacted in their own unique ways.
The point to be taken is: Energy is contagious!
Dolphins are socially well-adjusted creatures. In a classic experiment, scientists separated a dolphin from his pod buddies. That was cruel enough. The experiment happened years ago. It would be unthinkable in today’s more compassionate scientific environment.
Once separated, the scientists jumbled the solo dolphin’s schedule with erratic feeding times, random periods of light and dark, and deprivation of social contact.
The lone dolphin quickly began to demonstrate neurotic behaviors. And when the dolphin was reunited with its pod, the other pod members almost immediately started exhibiting the same behaviors. The point is: negative feelings are powerfully transferable. Energy is contagious.
Of course, the “rest of the story” is that positive energy is ALSO contagious. Even more so.
When Dr. Connie and I lived in Japan, we had a spiritual center where we held weekly gatherings. People from many countries, including many Japanese, would come to the meetings, to interact with other intelligent, high-energy people.
An American guest was married to a lovely Japanese woman. Yet he couldn’t keep negative thoughts from tumbling out of his mouth. He criticized everything, including the Japanese culture and people.
Dr. Connie and I decided that for every negative utterance, we would gently counterbalance it with a positive one.
After several go-rounds, the man broke down in tears. He had tuned into the energetic disturbance that he was creating, perhaps for the first time. Our relentless positive energy shattered his negative energy pattern.
The point? You guessed it! Energy is contagious.
And here’s a very, very important point: positive energy has more power than negative energy.
When we study the happiest people in the world, we find that they make it their life’s work to stay consistently in a positive energy space.
Many of the folks Dr. Connie and I socialize with would probably call it something else. They might say that as human beings our life’s highest work is to express “our loftiest vision.”
However we say it, our friends understand that staying positive is extremely important for our spiritual (and physical) survival.
Really, it’s a question of life and death.
People tend to become like those they hang out with. So we’re very careful to associate with positive people – and to strictly avoid perennial grouches and complainers.
Your own Energy Story is yours to write.
Can you remember a time when you were uplifted by another person’s mere presence? When you felt genuine joy flow through you? When you wished that the moment would never end?
The positive moments need not end. Positive energy is yours to create, to share, and to radiate to your surroundings.
Positive attitudes of kindness, compassion, cooperation, support, and good cheer are your God-given birthright. And it takes only a little regular practice to make positive energy a dynamic, life-changing feature of your day.
For more on Dr. Marcel’s work, follow this link.