Stop with the Complaining!!!

Complaining,

like all thought patterns, is not mere observation. Complaining is a creative act. The more you complain, the more you summon your creative energies to attract something to complain about. Your complaints may seem fully justified, but realize that whenever you complain, you are placing your order for more of the same. Complaining is not merely about the past. Whenever you make a complaint, realize you are setting an intention — a goal — for the future.

Note that complaining is not the same thing as having a negative emotional reaction. That first-response negative reaction is OK. Complaining is the act of reinforcing what you don’t want and intending even more of it. It’s the act of dwelling on the negative.

People who complain trap themselves in a reality that constantly gives them more to complain about. Life keeps harshing on them. Their luck is below average. They never get any real breaks. Unfortunate circumstances, seemingly beyond their control, keep manifesting. It seems totally unfair, but it isn’t. The complainers are merely witnessing the fulfillment of their own requests. Every thought is an intention, and complainers habitually intend what they don’t want. So it makes perfect sense they live in a reality congruent with those thoughts. The complainer may tell you their reality is causing their complaints, but it’s more accurate to say their reality is reflecting their complaints.

Complaining is also addictive. The more you do it, even within your own mind, the more it becomes an ingrained habit and the harder it is to stop.

Complaining and the Law of Attraction

I’ve seen many a person claim to be using the Law of Attraction properly, holding only positive intentions and thinking predominantly about what they want to attract. Then after a few weeks of little or no results, they fire off an explosion of complaints:

This LoA stuff is nonsense! I gave it a real shot, and it isn’t working for me. Why haven’t my intentions manifested yet? Why does this seem to work for other people but not me? I’ve wasted a lot of time on this and have nothing to show for it! Robble robble robble!

People who really grasp the LoA won’t do this sort of thing. It’s like planting a seed and then digging it up in a wild thrashing manner to see if it’s growing. You just killed the plant in the process. Now consider this: If someone finds it necessary to kill their plant to verify it’s growing, did they really expect/intend the plant to survive and thrive in the first place? Obviously not. If you know the plant will grow, you won’t dig it up. Similarly, if you intend with certainty that your intention is going to manifest, you won’t lash out with complaints about your failure. You’ll simply continue holding the intention until it does manifest, no matter how long it takes.

In practice you will see some intenders hold their intentions patiently for months and years, while complainers will usually give up within the first 30 days. Why? You might not like what I’m going to say, but the truth is that the complainers were predisposed to eventually give up. Failure was their true background intention.

You see… people who backlash at the LoA for not giving them what they want never fully embraced the LoA in the first place. They were always expecting to fail, simply paying lip service to the idea of positive intentions. But their background thinking remained negative.

You can’t fool the LoA. It knows your true expectations, and it isn’t going to release its treasures to those it knows will eventually give up.

Intentions and time

Recognize that the LoA is timeless, not time-bound. Here’s how I like to think of it: Any thought you hold at any time is a timeless intention, so all thoughts in all times influence your results in all times. Now that’s a gross overgeneralization, but if you accept it as true, it will help you understand why you must treat your intentions as timeless commitments.

Your lifetime of thoughts acts like a resonating band of intention. That band’s overall signature determines what kind of life you live. A chronic complainer will manifest a predominantly negative life. A positive thinker will manifest a predominantly positive life.

Your thoughts/intentions are not time-bound. If you’re going to complain at some point in the future, that complaint will subtly affect you today.

Let me give you a real-world example. Suppose your car broke down this morning, and it was totally unexpected.

What caused that breakdown? Some might say it’s the laws of physics. An LoA advocate might say that you were unconsciously putting out intentions before then to manifest the breakdown, perhaps for reasons that may not be clear to you. However, I’m suggesting something else may have caused the accident.

How did you react to the breakdown after it happened? Did you complain about it? Did you keep going over it in your mind, making your negative reaction stronger and stronger? Do you realize all those thoughts are intentions? I’m actually suggesting that your act of complaining about the accident after it happened is what manifested the accident in the first place. If you weren’t going to complain about it, the accident might never have happened.

I know this runs contrary to how most people think about cause and effect. However, if you play with this idea for a bit, you’ll come to a new understanding of the LoA, one which I believe is more consistent with its actual functioning. If you begin to see intentions as running backward and forward through time, you’ll recognize just how crucial it is to keep your thoughts positive at all times if you want to manifest a positive life. Even complaining about the past is a thought pattern you must eventually drop.

People commonly assume the LoA only travels forward in time. I don’t think so. In fact, I’m fairly certain that isn’t true at all.

The complainer seed

Here’s another way to think about this, one that might be a little easier to accept if you’re very attached to linear thinking. Consider that if something unfortunate happens to you, and you’re going to complain about it afterwards, then there must have been some kind of complainer seed within you in the first place… before that negative event took place. You must already have been the kind of person who’s predisposed to complain. And if that seed is there, you can bet the LoA is going to pick up on it.

Really positive people who are good at manifesting don’t complain. Even when things don’t go their way, they keep directing their thoughts towards the positive side. They expect that things will eventually go their way. They also take action to participate in the positive manifestation. Setbacks don’t make them throw in the towel and curse the LoA because they don’t harbor the complainer seed. They’re not going to be perfect about it, but this is their dominant pattern.

If you want to create the life you really want, instead of one you merely tolerate, you must eventually uproot the complainer seed. This seed is so destructive that it will keep killing the positive seeds you plant. It knows it can eventually destroy them. It knows you’re only fooling yourself. It will make you think the positive seeds you’re planting are really weeds, such as wishful thinking or gullibility.

When you finally recognize that the complainer seed will continue to sabotage your efforts as long as you harbor it, make the conscious decision to dump it. Only then can your positive intentions take root without being uprooted.

Whenever you catch yourself complaining, visualize that complainer seed, and imagine yourself uprooting it and throwing it away. Feed it to the birds. Give it back to Source. Or just toss it in the garbage. Then visualize a positive thinking seed, plant it, fertilize it, and water it. Say to yourself, “I hold the seed of happiness.”

Complaining may be a compelling addiction, but it needn’t be a life sentence.

Perhaps the most important step in quitting the habit of complaining is to disconnect the undesirable behavior from your identity. A common mistake chronic complainers make is to self-identify with the negative thoughts running through their minds. Such a person might admit, “I know I’m responsible for my thoughts, but I don’t know how to stop myself from thinking negatively so often.”

That seems like a step in the right direction, and to a certain degree it is, but it’s also a trap. It’s good to take responsibility for your thoughts, but you don’t want to identify with those thoughts to the point you end up blaming yourself and feeling even worse.

A better statement might be, “I recognize these negative thoughts going through my mind. But those thoughts are not me. As I raise my awareness, I can replace those thoughts with positive alternatives.” You have the power to recondition your thoughts, but the trick is to keep your consciousness out of the quagmire of blame. Realize that while these thoughts are flowing through your mind, they are not you. You are the conscious conduit through which they flow.

Mental conditioning

Although your thoughts are not you, if you repeat the same thoughts over and over again, they will condition your mind to a large extent. It’s almost accurate to say that we become our dominant thoughts, but I think that’s taking it a bit too far.

Consider how the foods you eat condition your body. You aren’t really going to become the next meal you eat, but that meal is going to influence your physiology, and if you keep eating the same meals over and over, they’ll have a major impact on your body over time. Your body will crave and expect those same foods. However, your body remains separate and distinct from the foods you eat, and you’re still free to change what you eat, which will gradually recondition your physiology in accordance with the new inputs.

This is why negative thinking is so addictive. If you keep holding negative thoughts, you condition your mind to expect and even crave those continued inputs. Your neurons will even learn to predict the reoccurrence of negative stimuli. You’ll practically become a negativity magnet.

The trap of negative thinking

This is a tough situation to escape because it’s self-perpetuating, as anyone stuck in negative thinking knows all too well. Your negative experiences feed your negative expectations, which then attract new negative experiences.

In truth most people who enter this pattern never escape it in their entire lives. It’s just that difficult to escape. Even as they rail against their own negativity, they unknowingly perpetuate it by continuing to identify with it. If you beat yourself up for being too negative, you’re simply reinforcing the pattern, not breaking out of it.

I think most people who are stuck in this trap will remain stuck until they experience an elevation in their consciousness. They have to recognize that they’re trapped and that continuing to fight their own negativity while still identifying with it is a battle that can never be won. Think about it. If beating yourself up for being too whiny was going to work, wouldn’t it have worked a long time ago? Are you any closer to a solution for all the effort you’ve invested in this plan of attack?

Consequently, the solution I like best is to stop fighting and surrender. Instead of resisting the negativity head-on, acknowledge and accept its presence. This will actually have the effect of raising your consciousness.

Overcoming negativity

You can actually learn to embrace the negative thoughts running through your head and thereby transcend them. Allow them to be, but don’t identify with them because those thoughts are not you. Begin to interact with them like an observer.

It’s been said that the mind is like a hyperactive monkey. The more you fight with the monkey, the more hyper it becomes. So instead just relax and observe the monkey until it wears itself out.

Recognize also that this is the very reason you’re here, living out your current life as a human being. Your reason for being here is to develop your consciousness. If you’re mired in negativity, your job is to develop your consciousness to the point where you can learn to stay focused on what you want, to create positively instead of destructively. It may take you more than a lifetime to accomplish that, and that’s OK. Your life is always reflecting back to you the contents of your consciousness. If you don’t like what you’re experiencing, that’s because your skill at conscious creation remains underdeveloped. That’s not a problem though because you’re here to develop it. You’re experiencing exactly what you’re supposed to be experiencing so you can learn.

Conscious creation

If you need a few more lifetimes to work through your negativity, you’re free to take your time. Conscious creation is a big responsibility, and maybe you don’t feel ready for it yet. So until then you’re going to perpetuate the pattern of negative thinking to keep yourself away from that realization. You must admit that the idea of being the primary creator of everything in your current reality is a bit daunting. What are you going to make of your life? What if you screw up? What if you make a big mess of everything? What if you try your best and fail? Those self-doubts will keep you in a pattern of negativity as a way of avoiding that responsibility.

Unfortunately, this escapism has consequences. The only way true creators can deny responsibility for their creations is to buy into the illusion that they aren’t really creating any of it. This means you have to turn your own creative energy against yourself. You’re like a god using his powers to become powerless. You use your strength to make yourself weak.
The reason you may be stuck in a negative thought pattern right now is that at some point, you chose it. You figured the alternative of accepting full responsibility for everything in your reality would be worse. It’s too much to handle. So you turned your own thoughts against yourself to avoid that awesome responsibility. And you’ll continue to remain in a negative manifestation pattern until you’re ready to start accepting some of that responsibility back onto your plate.

Negativity needn’t be a permanent condition. You still have the freedom to choose otherwise. In practice this realization normally happens in layers of unfolding awareness. You begin to accept and embrace more and more responsibility for your life.

Assuming total responsibility

You see… the real solution to complaining is responsibility. You must say to the universe (and mean it), “I want to accept more responsibility for everything in my experience.”

Here are some examples of what I mean by accepting responsibility:

*If I’m unhappy, it’s because I’m creating it.

*If there’s a problem in the world that bothers me, I’m responsible for fixing it.

*If someone is in need, I’m responsible for helping them.

*If I want something, it’s up to me to achieve it.

*If I want certain people in my life, I must attract and invite them to be with me.

*If I don’t like my present circumstances, I must end them.

On the flip side, it may also help to take responsibility for all the good in your life. The good stuff didn’t just happen to you. You created it. Well done.

Pat yourself on the back for what you like, but don’t feel you must pretend to enjoy what you clearly don’t like. But do accept responsibility for all of it… to the extent you’re ready to do so.

Complaining is the denial of responsibility. And blame is just another way of excusing yourself from being responsible. But this denial still wields its own creative power.
Conscious creation is indeed an awesome responsibility. But in my opinion it’s the best part of being human. There’s just no substitute for creating a life of joy, even if it requires taking responsibility for all the unwanted junk you’ve manifested up to this point.

When you catch yourself complaining, stop and ask yourself if you want to continue to deny responsibility for your reality or to allow a bit more responsibility back onto your plate. Maybe you’re ready to assume more responsibility, and maybe you aren’t, but do your best to make that decision consciously. Do you want sympathy for creating what you don’t want, or do you want congratulations for creating what you do want?

If you find this site helpful, please enjoy the spirit of giving and being nice too.

Caterina writes on how to deal with negative thoughts that are holding you back. One of the ways she suggests is to stop complaining and observe your negative thoughts. Then, start accepting more responsibility for what you experience (ie, if I’m unhappy, it’s because I’m creating it) because “Complaining is the denial of responsibility. And blame is just another way of excusing yourself from being responsible.”