The Magic of Embracing Low Vibration Emotions & Saying No
The Magic of Embracing Low Vibration Emotions & Saying No
In a world obsessed with using positivity to raise vibration, here's how to elevate vibrational frequency by embracing what we typically avoid.
*For your listening pleasure there is also a podcast version of this article read by the author. It may include a few sidebars ;)
An Obsession with Positivity is Often Fear in Disguise
I’d like to add a disclaimer before we begin. Low vibration emotions get such a bad rap, but there’s really nothing innately wrong with them. The term low vibration just describes something with a slower oscillation.
Yes, vibrating rapidly is an avenue for improving our lives. No, that does not happen by feigning happiness, and acknowledging only gratitude and positive emotions while suppressing others. Repeat after me: suppression = storage.
Pretending we don’t experience what we call negative or low vibration emotional states is just inauthentic. We are humans; it’s part of the assignment. Maybe Deepak Chopra is so zen he doesn’t ever judge someone who chews loudly, or feel fear when his bank account hits certain numbers, but that certainly isn’t my experience.
The problem isn’t in having low vibration emotional experiences, but in trying to pretend we don’t have them. When we gloss over difficult emotional experiences to focus on the positive, it’s typically because we’re too nervous or apprehensive to fully experience the sensations accompanying the emotion. We may even label ourselves as “bad” for having emotions like anger or annoyance.
At its core level, this avoidance stems from fear. Fear of experiencing the physical sensations that accompany low vibration emotions. Fear of who we might be if we admit we feel them.
Daisy: “Well Billy, life is full of sad things, and when I feel sad I take pills. What do you do?”
Billy: “I don’t know, I guess I just feel it.”
Daisy: “Ooh, that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
~Daisy Jones, from Daisy Jones & The Six
I encourage you to feel no shame when you let slowly oscillating emotions blow through your human experience. It’s ok to be authentic, messy and imperfect.
Attempts to keep your emotional state in perfect check create constriction- when what we want to cultivate for frequency health is expansion.
Humor Me. Imagine You Have a Vibrational Frequency.
Imagine with me for a moment that you have a vibrational frequency. That you've always had a frequency. Frequency is influenced by things like the way our inner voice lines up with our actions, the emotions we feel, and what we do when no one is watching.
A large majority of the emotions we experience in a day stem from our belief systems.
Truly experiencing a life full of high vibration emotions does not come from avoidance or suppression of what happens to us, but by reprogramming our beliefs that create fear, anxiety or depression within us.
If I believe I don’t have much to be confident about, my beliefs consistently create emotions that lower my vibration.
The vibrations from these self-created emotional experiences are just as impactful, if not more impactful, than whatever happens to me in the outside world. What I create for myself is persistent. It is the stew my cells replicate in.
Fear: A High Impact Place to Start
Fear is a vibration we tend to create on our own more than it pops up in reality. There are times we are being chased, and there are times we make our body feel like we’re being chased.
Most of the fear we experience in our lives today is self-created.
If we want to work on just one way to raise vibration, addressing beliefs or unmetabolized past experiences that cause us to take actions, or form thoughts from a place of fear, is a high impact place to start.
Vibrations from slowly oscillating emotions like fear affect our nervous system, immune system, organs and posture. So many layers of us up-level when we start ushering stored low vibration charges out of our body and psyche.
When paying attention to our body we are naturally guided home to a higher frequency state. Our body is always tossing us clues about what’s happening to our frequency. When we suppress an urge to cry we are simultaneously suppressing our vibration.
The Power of “No, Thank You”
So, why bother with elevating your vibrational frequency at all?
When we vibrate rapidly it's hard for other people, experiences, or emotions to enter our field if they are vibrating at a slower rate. We resonate externally with who we are internally.
We talk a lot about raising vibration, but clarifying our vibration is just as important. The more clarity we add to our vibration through tuning, the easier it is for us to hook up with people we find interesting, and experiences we find satisfying.
It’s not about being “better” than someone else by having a high vibration.
For example, if we aren’t very discerning and hang out with just anyone, we color our vibratory field with a mix of vibrations. Cool. There’s nothing wrong with this, unless we want friends who possess certain qualities.
What we accept in to our vibratory field registers in our vibrational frequency. So if we compromise on that we’ll get more of the same… and it won’t be what we want.
We often have to go through a phase of clarifying our vibration by saying no to people, activities, experiences etc. before new exciting things show up that match our updated frequency.
Matthew McConaughey has some great examples of this in his book Greenlights. If you don’t want to read the book, the podcast he does with Tim Ferris about it is rather hilarious.
He basically talks about all the rom-coms he had to say no to (for years) before he started being offered more serious roles like Dallas Buyers Club.
“No, thank you” adds clarity to a convoluted vibration. It’s like tuning your instrument.
Gratitude in Disguise
Some of the most unpopular videos I made on TikTok were about how humans have a tendency to use gratitude to paint over other authentic emotional experiences.
In a world where we beat the drum of focusing on the positive for a good life we often unconsciously relegate slowly oscillating emotional experiences into the realm of “bad.”
Once we label something as negative, we assume what’s good for us is to avoid it. However, part of getting out of this hologram we’re in is to look at the flip side of our actions. Sometimes a hyper focus on gratitude hurts us.
Don’t get me wrong. If you’re sitting outside on a quiet afternoon and find yourself feeling grateful- absolutely embrace it. If you’re making dinner and want to think of what you’re grateful for while you cook- I’m all for it. If you want to manifest experiences by feeling gratitude for them ahead of time- hit it.
The issue comes when gratitude is less of a lifestyle practice, and instead triggered as a practice when we’d rather avoid difficult emotional events.
Instead of feeling what’s actually coming up for us, we decide to find something to be grateful about. Essentially avoiding the real experience under the guise of “raising our vibration.” This is gratitude getting twisted up.
Our conscious mind is telling us gratitude is the higher and “better” emotion. Subconsciously it’s also the easier emotion. It takes far more courage to sit in genuine anger, grief, or disappointment and find a healthy way to discharge it, than it is to ignore it (and store it) to feel gratitude instead.
The irony is this “gratitude practice” often cultivates a lower vibration through avoidance, and missed opportunities to develop emotional fortitude.
Black and white thinking, and the desire to simply our existence by labeling certain emotional states as good or bad, is part of what we want to cultivate a higher vibration to heal. As Dr. Zach Bush said in a recent podcast,
“To feel better I think all of us are going to have to be willing to feel more. Right now we are suppressing our intrinsic capacity to feel, and it’s obvious why we are suppressing it because most of what we are feeling is uncomfortable.
So feeling more is going to be that trust fall in to yourself. Everything you’re feeling right now is the only real thing happening to you. Everything else is a game show.” ~Dr. Zach Bush
Spiritual Bypassing is Not How to Level Up
Years ago, I was walking down the street in a wonderful mood when I passed some musicians collecting money to release their music. A man at the front said he was collecting money for the group. In my great mood I pulled out $20 for him.
All of a sudden, everyone in the group was around me, in my space, yelling at me that surely I had a $20 bill to give them too. I should give everyone $20s. I was so startled my amazing mood fell through the floor.
Afterward I told my therapist I felt bad that I was just angry, and couldn’t switch over to finding something to be grateful about. She said, “Jennifer, it’s ok to just be mad. Trying to find gratitude before you process the shock and anger sounds more like spiritual bypassing than allowing your genuine emotional experience.”
Transmuting our emotional experiences leads to wisdom. When we process the emotional experiences of our lives we elevate our perspective. We can look down on a previous situation; from this position gratitude for what happened naturally arises.
The processing of our greatest wounds is often what creates our deepest wisdom.
We leave wisdom on the table when we avoid processing, and skip to forcing gratitude. Gratitude, wisdom, and expanding our consciousness are natural side effects of deftly navigating the whole emotional journey.
As for my experience, I learned there are times to find gratitude… and there are times to find your voice and use it to tell people to back the f*** off. The latter holds just as much value as the former.
Thanks for hanging out today! If you want to keep exploring you may enjoy these related posts on using anxiety or anger to supercharge your vibe, or bookmark the idea of checking out my consulting website.