You Can't Be Positive If You're Also Negative
By Dr. Gary Null
Global Research
July 18, 2026
Surrendering the Negative Influences in Your Life
Growth has to begin somewhere. Start by exploring both the constructive and the destructive aspects of your nature. First you must deal with the negative. By dealing with what doesn't work in your life, you're going to know what excuses not to fall back on. You will know why you are not doing the things you've dreamed of doing. You will know why you stay with people who don't support and love you. It's a simple matter of deciding which direction you want to put your energies into - positive or negative. Once you understand the consequences of your negative qualities, you could say: "Hold on - do I really want to feel this way or go down this path again ? I've been here so many times, and I know that what I'm about to say or do or feel is not going to change things. I'd rather choose a positive option when dealing with a negative situation, which hopefully would help me resolve this constant repetition of old patterns of behavior." Once I have decided that I can make a positive change, then it merely takes the courage to give it a try.
Breaking destructive patterns is the gateway to getting on with your life. Positive input only becomes significant after you deal with the limiting negative factors. Sure, confronting the negative will make you uncomfortable, but the discomfort is necessary. Change never occurs without it. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said it in two words 25 centuries ago: "Character is destiny." The patterns you refuse to confront become the life you are condemned to live.
Once you understand your negative characteristics, you can claim your real self by saying, "Hold on, I don't buy into this anymore." Once you resolve these issues you will be able to reclaim the dreams of your youth and enact them as an adult. For every problem, you will be able to find a positive solution.
But before we get to the practical work - the questions you must ask yourself about the people and patterns in your life - I want you to understand something deeper. I want you to understand why negative influences are so destructive, and why removing them is not merely a matter of psychology or self-esteem. It is a matter of energy. And that is not a metaphor. It is science - science I spent decades of my life helping to prove.
The Discovery That Changed Everything
We owe credit to Professor Bruce Lipton, working at Stanford University back in the mid-1980s, who discovered that after removing the DNA from a cell, the cell continued to exist. It continued to function for a period of time. This shocked him. Just imagine taking the brain out of a person's skull and finding that they continue to think. Take the engine out of a car and it continues to drive. It went against all the known laws of science.
It would take him years to figure out how that was possible. And yet he came up with a solution - one that was both accepted and rejected within the scientific community, because it was a combination of physics and of faith. In effect, it was the placebo effect.
Consider what the placebo effect really means. An inert substance - a sugar pill - is used routinely in scientific studies as the control against an active ingredient some company has patented. What happens when the placebo outperforms the active ingredient ? It happens more often than the pharmaceutical industry would like you to know. As one example among thousands: a drug was introduced to Italian physicians with the claim that it would produce remarkable improvement in patients' pain. The doctors told their patients it was an anti-pain drug - and indeed, it worked. Then the doctors were informed that it had been a placebo, a sugar pill, all along. So how is it that with all the best medicines available to suppress pain - drugs designed to block the COX-2 pathway in the body that governs pain - a sugar pill worked better?
There is where Lipton is actually correct. A person's belief in an outcome can impact the outcome. Now, what if that same drug had been given to patients without any statement at all - no promise, no expectation ? Would they have improved ? Probably not. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus understood this two thousand years before the double-blind trial: "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them." The belief is the active ingredient. The belief is the energy.
And this ties directly into my own original work - work that began long before Lipton published a word.
A Chimpanzee Named Kokomo
Let me go back to the beginning, because the road that led me to the laboratory started in an unlikely place.
A friend of mine kept a chimpanzee - Kokomo Jr. - in his apartment on West End Avenue. When he went on vacation, he asked me to look in on her each day and see that she was fed. I said fine. But I didn't like what I found. He kept her in a cage six feet by six feet by six feet, with a little strap holding a disc on her back. If she started to act out in any way, he'd press a button and it would give her a shock. I thought that was cruel, and I told him so.
So while he was gone, I opened the cage and I took the strap off. She looked at me, and then she came over and she grabbed me and started hugging me. From then on she had the run of that whole floor - I lived in the next block in a small one-room apartment, so I know the difference space makes. I would lay out all kinds of fresh food, point to each one and say, "Kokomo," and give her a little sample. She'd smell it, taste it, and either throw it down or eat it. Within a week I knew exactly what food to buy for her - fresh food, none of the overly processed food she'd been fed. Then came pictures, and what she liked on television - cartoons - and the music she responded to, all the things that showed there was an intellect there, not merely instinct. She came to understand about a hundred and seventy-nine words and could respond to them.
After two years I wrote a manuscript, From Instinct to Intellect: A Study of Higher Primates. Because here is what the laboratories - including today's - refuse to acknowledge: they use these wonderful sentient creatures for experiments, torturing them, confining them, keeping them prisoner in cages for decades. Not long ago a laboratory finally released chimpanzees that had been in captivity for twenty and thirty years. When they stepped outside, they looked at the sky, they saw the sun - and they were simply overwhelmed. I have seen pure, unconditional love emanating from these creatures. I have seen sadness. But the world doesn't want to see that.
You don't want to see the beauty and the love in a cow if you're going to eat a steak or a hamburger. You don't want to see the love in a chicken who will come up and sit on your lap to be hugged, or in a pig that is smarter than your dog. You see it in your dog; you see it in your cat; you would never eat your dog or cat. But if you're going to eat a cow or a fish, why not understand that it is all the same life energy - one energy, simply manifesting in different forms?
The Dinner That Opened a Door
One evening my friend Jerry, a well-known and highly respected New York photographer, arranged to have dinner with me at that apartment, and he brought along a friend of his I had never met: Dr. Lawrence LeShan.
LeShan was the first psychologist in America to propose that if a person is being deeply responsible to other people but is given no appreciation in return, they begin to feel badly about it - in effect, they feel disrespected. You give your time, you give your energy to your family or to whomever it may be, and no one acknowledges it; they take it for granted. I believe all of us, even without a study, understand what happens when people take us for granted. LeShan went further. He told me he had followed women who had none of the classic risk factors for cancer - no smoking, no excess sun, none of the causes - and yet when they did not feel appreciated for the work and devotion they had given, a statistically significant number went on to develop either arthritis or breast cancer. He followed some of these women for years, and the pattern held. Unappreciated giving is not a neutral condition. It is a slow leak in the human energy system.
That night, while LeShan and Jerry talked, I started getting dinner ready and asked if he'd like to join us - I'd made extra. I told him I was a vegan and had no animal food to offer, and he said that was fine. Then I called Kokomo over. "Kokomo," I said, "let's set the table." And there she was in her little apron - she loved that apron - putting down the plates and forks, getting things out of the refrigerator. I said, "Kokomo, go wash your hands," and she did. Then we all sat down together, Kokomo included, and I talked with her as she ate, and she understood and responded. LeShan watched all of this, and it frankly astonished him.
We talked for hours that night, and in the discussions that followed I told him what I believed. I said: these creatures we dismiss as dumb animals - the dismissal we use to justify experimenting on them by the hundreds of millions - are sentient. They think. They feel. And then he asked me: what would you like to prove ? I told him about the praying doctors of the South - physicians who give you every orthodox medical treatment they know, and then sit at your bedside and pray with you. There was no study showing whether it actually worked, because science had already decided it couldn't work: there is no God, no afterlife, no before-life; the body is a machine, and when a part breaks, the doctor is the mechanic who fixes it. And I said: I believe science is missing something - something that could improve healing. When you believe in something, that faith can make a difference. It is an energy.
He said, "You know science won't accept any of that." And then he said something else. He said, "I also believe in this - and I know a place where you can test it."
Proving the Energy Exchange
That is how, in 1971 - as a very young, naive, trusting, and not terribly bright new scientist - I became the youngest researcher in the history of the Institute of Biology, working alongside very experienced, very intelligent scientists in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. I appreciated those great scientists upstairs. They were nearly all Jewish, and they had come out of the Institut Pasteur and other great European institutions during World War II, when the Nazis put the word out to seize them. They fled, they got out, and they formed this institute back in the 1940s. I was young and simply in awe of their knowledge. LeShan, who was a friend of Dr. Stanley Krippner - probably the most famous scientist then studying what was called paranormal research ("para" simply means other than) - introduced me to the director, and after a long conversation the director and the head of science both said: you can do this. Mind you, they were all atheists. They thought the whole thing was stupid. But the institute was funded by Big Pharma, and my study threatened nobody's patent, because what I was testing could never be patented. They told me right up front: you have to show you deserve to be here. All the other scientists were wondering, who is this kid ? What has he done?
So that kid tried an experiment. They put me up on the third floor, alone, and there I did the first study. Over the years that followed I would successfully complete more than 174 experiments in health, and double or triple that number in psi research - energy research - across nearly four decades of association with that work. But it began with mice.
Fifty people came into the study. The goal was simple: here is a mouse - heal it. They could not touch it. Two assistants had to be present at every session to make certain no one exchanged mice or handled them. What I did not tell the participants was that the mice had ascites tumors - a cancer that kills a mouse in about twenty-two days, without exception.
In that first experiment, five of the fifty succeeded. Five people cured mice of a lethal cancer without ever touching them, and those mice went on to live normal, healthy, full lives. And these were not carnival mystics. One was Dr. Dolores Krieger, head of nursing at the New York University School of Nursing. There was Dr. Thomas Kruth of the Order of St. Luke, and Rabbi Abraham Wiseman from Brooklyn, and Dr. Morton Jacobs, and Dr. Audrey Kargere.
But healing a mouse with an ascites tumor one time doesn't really prove anything. You've demonstrated a phenomenon - an anomaly - but you haven't proven cause and effect. So you do it again. And again. I ran the experiment six times. Six out of six times, they healed the mice.
Then came the deeper question. I had never told these people the mice had ascites tumors. So how did whatever they were doing know what to heal ? And suddenly I understood - years before Bruce Lipton reached the same conclusion from his cell biology in the mid-1980s - that my hypothesis was correct: everything we truly need at the body level to survive is already encoded into our genes at birth. The healing intelligence is in there. I would imagine that many people thought about - is there something beyond the physical that allows 37 trillion cells to work in perfect harmony ? - but now for the first time we have the proof of it. And the question would become, would the atheists permit themselves to even consider it, because it pointed to something operating beyond the body-as-machine with its replaceable parts.
And what did all of the successful healers have in common ? Every one of them was engaged in prayer. They were using themselves as a channel. They were connecting, according to them, to their higher self - and that higher self allows the healing of others. We proved it, for the first time in scientific history: human beings exchange energy, and that energy can heal.
I remember Dr. Krieger saying to me, "All right, Gary - I've worked with you for two years. If we have an energy that can cure a mouse of cancer, what else can we do?"
When Good Intentions Carry Bad Energy
In that same study I found something else out - something just as important, and far more sobering.
I walked into the lab one night and neither of my assistants was there. Both were sick. In the middle of the summer - and nobody knew with what. Since the protocol required a witness, I asked one of the other scientists, Dr. Berman, whether he could sit in for half an hour. He said fine. Afterward he came upstairs and said, "Man, oh man, I have a splitting headache." I asked whether he normally got headaches. He said, "No. I never get a headache. Never."
Hmm. So I asked him: what was the only thing different tonight ? He said, nothing - this woman came in, one of the people in the study, and she closed her eyes and was doing some kind of meditation or prayer. And that's when it started.
I looked at the lab notes, she had been there four consecutive weeks and the mice she worked on had all died. I called her back a week later and asked her to work on a different mouse, and this time I sat in the room myself. Suddenly I felt something, and it was really bad - like someone putting my head in a vise and slowly turning it. This went on for two minutes. Understand: outside of chickenpox and measles and mumps as a kid, I cannot remember being sick. I said, "What are you thinking ? What are you thinking - specifically?" And she said, "I'm thinking about helping these poor mice. They're suffering. I don't want them suffering." She didn't say cancer - I had never mentioned to her that it was cancer. I said, "Stop for a moment. Look at the mouse."
The mouse was lying on its side, gasping for breath. It had not been doing that when she came in.
Her intention was compassionate. Her energy was destructive. She was projecting her anguish at their suffering - and her energy was actually speeding the animal toward death. My goodness, was that important for me to see: a person can use their energy, sincerely and with the best of intentions, in a way that accelerates another being's decline.
Now imagine what that means for you. Imagine how you feel when you're around negative energy - a negative person, a toxic environment. The energy is real. It transfers. And it does not need malice to do its damage.
Sprouts, a Ficus Tree, and the Memory of Living Things
So I kept going, at night, downstairs, so the regular scientists didn't know what I was doing.
I took sunflower sprouts and placed them in two different rooms — identical sprouts, identical water, identical soil, identical light. In one room, the healers did their meditation, one at a time. In time-lapse photography you could watch those sprouts absolutely boom — they grew dramatically faster than the untouched controls.
Then I did something better. I took a small ficus tree and put it in one of the lead-lined rooms the institute used downstairs for its radiation research. This was a double-blind design. I wrote six instructions on slips of paper: go in and spray the ficus tree; go in and sing to the ficus tree; go in and play meditation music to the ficus tree; go in and shake the ficus tree and yell at it — and so on. I put the slips in a box and shook it up, so even I didn't know who drew what. Each person went in alone, identified only by number. Nobody knew what anyone else had done.
Six months went by. Then the participants returned, and we placed electrodes into the soil and monitored the tree as, one by one, each person simply stepped into the room. Everything stayed normal — until one person walked in, and the readings went clear off the charts. That was the person who had been assigned to shake the tree and scream at it. Mind you, this time they just stepped into the room. They said nothing. They did nothing. And the plant recognized them. Six months later, the plant remembered.
That opened an entirely new door. Years afterward, scientists in environmental and behavioral science would confirm what that ficus tree told us — including the work of the great Canadian PhD who showed that trees communicate with one another, that when a tree is sick, the root systems of the surrounding trees send electrical impulses and chemical support through the soil to help it. A consciousness in the forest. And ask yourself: how can there be consciousness in one living entity and not in another ? The happy thought, the positive thought, the positive energy works universally — not selectively.
I said to Dr. Krieger, "Why don't you create a course and call it Therapeutic Touch?" And she did. Nurses have been trained in therapeutic touch ever since — it's a common refrain in nursing today, and it is energy, and it traces back to that original work. I published the findings, and doctors, scientists, and researchers from societies around the world invited me to lecture — before five thousand scientists and physicians in Milan, in Tokyo, all over the globe. The whole idea of energy healing, of energy medicine, began to have legitimacy. It was no longer a theory or a hypothesis. We had proven it. (Go to garynull.com, look under scientific discoveries, and you can see it for yourself.) So what does this mean today ? Think of how many people are angry, negative, sarcastic, toxic, mean spirited, thinking or talking trash and especially as using words as emotional lessons towards you - you become that energy. And that's why I advocate staying clear of negative people or environments, because it can and does impact you.
Hold that thought now — energy is real, it is exchanged between living things, it can heal, and it can harm— because everything that follows in this chapter rests on it.
What Fame Taught Me About Illusion
I've had the opportunity to be around some remarkable, successful people in my life, including some of the world's most famous. You see them when you go into a museum and look at their work, or you look at their fashions, or a movie they've made, a Broadway play, a ballet. I meet them from the other side — when something is wrong, when a legend is quietly dying and the public is not allowed into that world. When you spend your entire career trying to help people as best you can within your own skills, you see the person for who they are. And it is not difficult to understand how people who stay long enough around remarkable people begin to lose the concept of their remarkability — because underneath, they are living otherwise normal lives.
One of the most famous married men in Hollywood history came to me, and I was helping detox him from alcoholism at my farm upstate — Fertile Earth Farm, where people came who needed extended periods of time to rebalance their biochemistry and get their minds straight. It was a beautiful spring day; there had just been a light, warm rain. I found him sitting on a bale of hay in the barn, surrounded by goats and sheep and a little pony, with a smile on his face. I asked him what he was happy about. He said, "In this moment I went clear back to when I was a child, in the country, around animals. It just brought it all back." I said, "You could have this back home. Buy yourself a ranch further up in California. Create your own oasis."
He said, "No, I can't."
I said, "Why not?" And what he told me was one of the most revealing conversations of my life.
"You have to understand two phenomena that are supposed to harmonize and don't," he said. "Every day I go through a normal day like everyone else. You get up, you do your morning constitutional, you have your breakfast, you read the paper, you watch the news. And then you hope, at some point in that day, that when the phone rings it's your agent telling you you've got a new movie. And when we go out to a store — just a regular drugstore, a food store — we know people are going to recognize us. So my wife takes at least an hour to get ready, because people expect it. We've been branded — the most beautiful woman, the best actor. They expect us to look a certain way.
"Now imagine what that does when you look in the mirror one morning and you're no longer twenty-two but forty-two, and you're seeing the gray hairs and the wrinkles, the loss of skin texture and tone — all the things that happen in normal living. When you're not famous, so what ? Everyone else is aging along with you, and you've accepted it. But we're afraid of getting old, because it means you won't perform as you once did, or you won't be as acceptable — you've grown out of the sex-symbol stage and you haven't quite made it into the mature roles. So what happens when the phone doesn't ring ? You've got the same twenty-four hours to fill.
"Did anyone ever ask why all these people live on the same hills called Beverly Hills ? It's just a hill. It's not attractive. The homes can be — but you don't always meet your neighbors. You know who they are, but that doesn't mean you're friends; it doesn't mean you socialize. Most of the older people hardly socialize at all. You've got these beautiful mansions where you almost never see the people, because they've gotten too old. The phone never rings for them unless it's someone wanting money for a charity. So they show up at the charity event and everybody says, 'Oh, I remember you in that movie twenty years ago — forty years ago.' And then they go home and turn on Turner Television to catch one of their own old films. They live in the past, because there is no present except the past, and there's no future. And that's what I have to look forward to.
"They don't want to see me out there working on a farm, digging things up, planting food. You have to understand — our whole life is a storybook made up by writers, directors, lighting directors. You think people want to hear me talk the way I'm talking with you right now ? No. They want every time I open my mouth for something elegant to come out. That's a screenwriter who put those words in my mouth. Some of those moments will be immortal on film — but they were never mine. We exist through other people's expectations of how we should exist, how we should look, how we should sound. None of it is real. Everything in Hollywood is fake — as it is in almost all the other professions.
"When we went to the opera last time we were in New York, you see the faces afterward, you go backstage to say hello to the ballerina or the conductor. You don't see the pain that ballerina is in — her feet, her legs, the injuries. You don't see the struggles, the twelve-hour days they put in when they're young to become that person, to have that one moment in the spotlight. We live a completely illusionary existence. And we're all living through someone else — like the salesperson demanding your attention to sell you something you don't need and possibly can't afford, while you never see what the rest of that person's day is like or what they believe. Like the Wall Street broker selling a client a stock he wouldn't buy himself.
"No — I've studied my condition for a long time. The reason I drink is because I'm detached from life. I don't do what I want to do, because I'm always in the public eye — until I'm not. And then it's as if you never existed. Everything was just a story told, a performance played out. Do you know how lonely it is inside that existence ? And what would happen if I said something on a political level, a social level ? I'd be attacked instantly for alienating someone. It's a tightrope we walk. Unless you're young and crazy — as a lot of them are — in which case you'll burn out, and then no one looks at the best you've done or could do. They'll say: you had your opportunity and you blew it. No discipline. No morals. A decadent life. And plenty of the famous do live decadent lives — but it's hidden. So much is behind the curtain. It's like a movie set: a palace on the front side and an empty lot on the back. People want to believe it's a real palace and that we live there. We don't. It doesn't exist."
Marcus Aurelius — an emperor, the most famous man in his world — wrote to himself: "All is ephemeral: fame and the famous as well." This broken, brilliant actor on a bale of hay had arrived at the same truth, the hard way.
The Most Beautiful Woman in Hollywood
That conversation was doubly revealing to me, because at the same time, one of the most famous actresses in Hollywood history — considered the most beautiful woman of her era, and she was — was a guest of mine. She was unemployed. She had no money. She spent two years living at my farm because she loved nature, and she would sit and watch Turner Television throughout the day, the way the actor had described. She was an authentic, brilliant person — later in her life she would finally be known for her brilliance rather than her beauty and her performances. She ended her days living alone down in Florida, a very common life, and an extremely lonely one. She told me: "Do you know what it's like when people love you for your beauty but not your brains — not who you are ? Then everything is a performance."
It reinforced everything I had already learned.
And then there was Gloria Swanson, who called me one day asking if I would help her. Here was one of the founders of Hollywood itself — alongside Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. — retired, and yet as active as a person could be, deeply socially conscious, and determined to improve the meals in the school system. We started in Harlem, because that's where we had the political connections to get a green light, and she asked me to create the menu, and I did. And it worked. Finally, kids were given a real choice: have the organic, healthy, vegan food here, or have the usual food — and the children liked the healthy food. Other schools contacted me because they wanted to improve their meals too.
So you see — some people don't just retire, fade away, and become invisible. Some become even more active. Their life still has meaning and purpose.
Now what is the difference between all of these people — the drinking actor, the lonely actress, and Gloria Swanson ? Energy. The exchange of energy. Because when you reach a place in life where you actually have a choice, and the freedom of thought to make the right choice, the question becomes: do you keep negative energy in your life, or positive ? It is rare that we ever think about this. Most people never do.
The Bar in Malibu
Let me show you what happens when the question never gets asked.
A man named Neil used to work for me in the 1960s. He asked me for some money to go to Hollywood because he wanted to work out there, and he did, and he became very successful. One day in the late seventies I was out there raising funds for KPFK radio — I did my program for thirty-four years — and I asked him: what happens to all the people in the entertainment business, in all its forms, when they can no longer compete ? When they're no longer bankable — when they can't open a movie anymore, when the rock star who filled giant stadiums can't even fill a local bar ? What happens to them?
He said, "I'll show you."
We drove about twenty-five minutes out to Malibu — and I don't know why Malibu is so famous; it's a plain stretch on the ocean — to a bar there, in the middle of the afternoon, around two o'clock. We walked in, and the place was packed. He said, "Take a look around the room, Gary. Look around without being obvious about it. What do you see?"
I said, "I see a packed room."
He said, "No. You see what happens when the phone doesn't ring — when your agent makes excuses about why he can't get you work. Everyone in here was somebody once. They were on television. They had soap operas, movies. Some were teen stars, and now they're no longer teens and no longer marketable — because there is always someone to take your place. People want to be excited. They want to be entertained, enthralled, moved. These were the people who did that for them. They had their moment. But they never planned on it ending. They overspent. They didn't save. And when the phone stopped ringing, they had nothing left to do but come here and share their stories of woe."
And then he said: "Now imagine this happening to hundreds of thousands of people, all the time. That's what nobody realizes."
These are people who are still alive, still capable, who could certainly still do something — but they've given up. And the energy in that room, in the middle of a sunny California afternoon, was completely toxic.
There is a real difference between the energy of being selected — the exuberance you feel when an audience appreciates your book and you sell a million copies and the agent calls asking when the next one will be ready — and the silence when that ends. Where do you transition ? That is why no one should ever take success seriously. I only look at success as something that gives me an opportunity to reach people who are open to being reached, who want to be informed, who want options to improve the outcomes of their choices. Never take it personally. Never separate yourself, and go live in exclusive areas, and show off your possessions because you're making more income than average people. We haven't learned that lesson yet. That's why the Kardashians can have over four hundred million followers while their businesses keep failing — and they keep succeeding anyway.
Epigenetics: Your Environment Is an Energy Field
Now, what did Bruce Lipton ultimately give us ? Epigenetics. Epi — meaning the larger environment we are in. And that environment includes the people in it: the people at work, the friends around your table, the family in your house. The environment is not just chemistry and weather. It is energy.
There are now thousands of studies in epigenetic science showing that negative energy — simply being around people who are depressed, hostile, chaotic — causes our own energy, and even our gene expression, to shift. Think of how many of us have maladapted to someone because they were always complaining, always whining, always blaming, always acting like a victim, always angry, always rageful — and we just accepted it, instead of realizing: I should not be letting this in.
Look at the country right now. Over the Fourth of July holiday, people went to the beach to have a good time — the majority of people always do — and instead there were brawls everywhere, mainly ne'er-do-well teenagers coming in to cause havoc and hurt people. That creates a negative energy. The environment itself becomes negative, and everyone in it absorbs the charge.
I have seen it most painfully in people caring for elderly parents suffering from dementia. They don't want to place them in a home, so they feel guilt and shame, and they stay — twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, immersed in that draining energy. I know a group of seven such caretakers. All of them were healthy, vegan, athletic people; two of them were champion athletes — a national champion and a world champion. All seven have lost their health. That is the energy of a toxic environment doing exactly what it does. If you think you can stay healthy in a toxic environment, the science shows you cannot.
And remember the lesson of the woman and the mouse: the energy doesn't need bad intentions to hurt you. Guilt is an energy. Shame is an energy. Worry, resentment, and obligation are energies. When you are around a negative person long enough, their energy can supersede your positive energy — and you become negative. You become part of their condition.
The Inflection Point
Most people never think about any of this. They think: here is the circumstance I'm in. I have to work, and it's becoming harder to find work I love. They think back — when I was twenty-four, I got out of college and got a job, and I kept that job, and I worked my way up to a senior position, and I had the family and the income, a quality of life and a standard of living. We had fun. It was joyful. And now I wake up every morning with existential dread, because I'm fifty-five and corporations are willing to hire people out of South Korea and Japan and India and China, people with PhDs I don't have, who will work for a third of what I make with no benefits, no bonuses, no four weeks of vacation. And then there's artificial intelligence on top of that. And corporations are downsizing like crazy, because the average person no longer has the money they had ten years ago to buy whatever they wanted and throw it on a credit card they can't pay back.
Look around at this year, 2026. We are seeing the highest number of home foreclosures since 2008, and yet almost no one is paying attention to the collapse in home values in state after state. There are now entire video reports on the ten cities in Florida not to live in, because they're losing twenty and thirty percent of their value right now, before the major course correction — the "haircut," as they call it — even arrives in those communities.
How did we get here ? We overspent. We spent foolishly. We spent on impulse instead of thinking things through — no plan B, no plan C, no reasoned approach at all. We reacted. And so people didn't save enough. The older generation did save — which is exactly why it is the richest generation, holding the most wealth, the most financially secure. People moved, or had already moved, to second homes and winter homes in Florida, or Arizona — which turned out to be a bad bet — or Texas: the states with no income tax and lower sales taxes, where you can actually afford to live on a limited income and still have quality of life. Those states were known for low crime rates because they held strict principles of respect for people's private property and respect for life. People left cities that were once wonderful and are now unsafe.
All of that sits within a person's power of choice — at one point. And then one day you realize: I can't write a check for five hundred dollars without it bouncing. A thousand dollars could get me in real trouble. And you think — how much money did I spend, just because I could ? And now I have nothing of value to show for it. Seneca saw this condition clearly in ancient Rome: "It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor."
So there is a place in our lives — an inflection point — where we can choose to move from the frantic life into a normal, quality, positively adapted environment with good people. It will be a simpler life. A quieter life. A less hectic life. One based on the energy that we share: positive energy, joyful energy, relationships built on a foundation of love. And people who make that choice are happy with it. They don't need to draw attention to themselves.
Compare that with the tens-of-millions-of-dollars celebrity wedding at Madison Square Garden. Why ? Where is the intimacy ? Do you really believe all those people are there to celebrate a marriage ? No one there truly cares about the marriage, and no one truly cares about the celebrities. People assume they must matter because they have followers — but how many of those followers follow because they have nothing in their own life to follow ? You follow when you can't lead. You follow when you've become passive — a spectator. And how long can you sit in the same seat, eating your popcorn, watching someone else perform your life for you?
Understand me: performative lives are phenomenal. We need them. The poet laureate sharing wisdom in language that lifts us; the opera singer. We appreciate the skill, the time, the patience it took, and the energy they are willing to share with us — they are sharing a part of themselves, and they are vulnerable in that moment, because we could boo. We could say: you're boring, you're not good at this, I'll pass. In which case their phone doesn't ring, and all that effort curdles into self-doubt — maybe I shouldn't be pursuing this. And thank goodness the real ones keep thinking: but what if I do? I'm going to keep at it until I decide for myself whether I'm the right person to be doing this.
But what happens when you get around people who support you, who believe in you ? That is an energy being exchanged — the very same energy Bruce Lipton found in the cell, the same energy that healed those mice — operating on the emotional and spiritual level. We all know how good we feel around people who feel good about life and about themselves. No whining, no complaining, no blaming, no playing the victim, no dividing the world into predator and prey. You are not a predator or prey. You are a human being.
So let's deal with this energy exchange in a practical way — a way that keeps the negative energy, the doubting energy, the shameful energy, the insecure energy, the uncertain energy, the guilt energy, out of our decisions. Because when those energies are foundational to a choice, we are never going to make the right choice. When we are in the right relationship at the right time with the right person, sharing the right energy, we get the right outcome. When we stay in the wrong energy — a wrong relationship we've maladapted to, a wrong job we've maladapted to, telling ourselves "there's probably no other job out there for me at my age, so I'd better stick with this one and make excuses for my bad choices" — that is maladaptation. That is bringing negative energy in, and refusing to let it be purged out, forgiven out, and released.
What follows are the questions that do the purging. Take them seriously. Take out a pen. This is where you become the architect.
Do You Get Unconditional Support From Your Friends and Family?
Think about the people in your life. How do you feel about them ? Do they care about you ? Are they supportive and giving, or are they takers ? What do they want from you?
Fold a piece of paper in half and record your feelings about each person in a double-entry journal. On one side record your positive responses, on the other side the negative ones. You'll probably have mixed feelings about many people; in these cases, write on both sides of the page.
This exercise will help you clarify some of your feelings. You may find that some people expect you to serve their hidden agendas.
Once you define your feelings about these people, you will know which relationships need more nurturing and which ones require more honest communication. If you find there are some people you feel comfortable with part of the time, ask yourself whether the benefits of being with them outweigh the detriments. Are there certain activities you can enjoy together ? This will allow you to plan your time accordingly.
Be honest about who supports you and whether that support is conditional or unconditional. Then you will know who is healthy for you. Seneca gave his student exactly this instruction two thousand years ago: "Associate with those who will make a better man of you; welcome those whom you yourself can improve."That is not elitism. That is energy hygiene.
What Are You Willing to Accept From Others?
Be very clear about where you draw the line with others; otherwise, people will overstep your boundaries. Let people know when they are making you feel uncomfortable and that their behavior is unacceptable to you.
One evening last week, for example, someone came to my home unannounced. He said, "I just thought you'd be in," to which I responded, "I'm glad you did. It's good to see you. By the way, I'm so busy lately, you might want to call next time, so you don't waste a trip if I'm not here." It was a thoughtful and polite way to remind him to call first.
If you don't set boundaries, you're saying that any area of your life is free and open for people to explore. Then you have no sanctuary. Every human being needs a sanctuary — a place on earth that is exclusively and uniquely his or her own. Sure, it's good to be spontaneous at times — to call someone at an unexpected hour — and sometimes it's just plain necessary to do so. But you should always consider other people's boundaries, and their need for sanctuary as well.
One of the most important sanctuaries is the emotional and intellectual sanctity of yourself. When people say your ideas and feelings are all wrong and start to correct them, they're dishonoring you intellectually and emotionally. That's an emotional assault — a serious offense. And now you understand it is also, quite literally, an energy assault.
What Do You Expect From Others?
Do people in your life know what you expect from them ? Tell them right up front. Either they can meet your expectations or they can't. If they can't, then end the relationship. There's nothing worse than someone saying they can do something when they can't. It creates unrealistic expectations and results in anger and fear of failure.
I look for honesty in my friendships; it's a first priority. I won't allow anyone into my life who lies to me; in fact, I don't believe in second chances once a person has lost my trust. If you give someone a second chance, before long they'll be asking for a third chance, a fourth chance, and a hundredth chance. From what I've seen in my life, I'd say being dishonest is always a pattern of behavior, not just a onetime thing. It's a character flaw that keeps coming up, although sometimes people become clever enough not to get caught.
Unless you tell your friends what you need from them, you'll have ambiguities and contradictions in your relationships. Honest, open communication is essential. If you have trouble expressing your real needs, think about what's holding you back. Are you afraid to lay out your real needs because you worry that no one will honor them ? Well, in some cases you're right: they won't, or can't. But it's better to modify and explain your feelings than to engage in a superficial, meaningless relationship.
Remember, if you're not clear from day one about what you want from a relationship and what someone can give you, much of what you share in that relationship will be built upon false expectations. If it ends, there will be unnecessary blame and recrimination. Who needs that ? Just be honest right up front. And be patient. No one can be all things to you, or anyone, all the time.
And when two people's energies simply do not harmonize, honesty means admitting that, too. Get into a relationship where all you're doing is arguing, and that is a doomed relationship. You can go to all the couples therapy you want; it's not going to help, because it's not going to change who either of you is, or how you perceive each other. All you'll do is maladapt to each other's needs: I won't ask you to go to the opera, and I won't ask you to watch the movies I like, because you've said you don't want any of that — and you won't go to a vegan restaurant, because you like meat. So we'll engineer a life where you can eat your meat and I can eat my vegetables without us fighting. That isn't love; that's a serious amount of mutual maladaptation. Why not simply say: we both tried; neither one of us is wrong; we're honoring ourselves. Each of you should find someone else who harmonizes with you, so you can have a good experience instead of an arguing experience. Ask the honest question — is this relationship mainly good, or mainly challenging ? For most people the answer is challenging; hence the stereotype of the long-suffering spouse who can never get a word in and can never win an argument no matter its merits. Make it an energy exchange instead. You feel excited around someone with an exciting energy — and if you harmonize with it, you have a phenomenal relationship.
Do You Stop Yourself From Attaining Basic Assets?
Consider the following assets. Do you have negative habits that prevent you from attaining them ? You'll find that it helps to actually write these down.
Happiness
Write about the habits you have that keep you from being happy. Perhaps you tend to worry, or you have specific fears. You procrastinate, get angry, suppress your feelings, or compare yourself to others, assuming that other people have something you don't. If only I had their looks, wealth, mate, children, or house, you think — then I'd be happy.
I was running with a man who told me he didn't think we were going very fast. He was comparing our speed to that of some other runners who had just passed us by. I pointed out to him that those guys were bolting at a four-minute pace and must be world-class athletes. We were going at a five-minute pace and doing very well. We weren't as good — but then again, we weren't twenty-two. Don't compare yourself to someone or something you're not.
Health
Write about habits that undermine your health. These might include drinking, being lazy, not exercising enough, thinking negative thoughts, not getting enough sleep, overeating, and worrying. And add to that list the one the studies now confirm: remaining, day after day, inside a toxic emotional environment. That is a health habit too — the worst one.
Fulfillment
What do you do that prevents you from being fulfilled ? Look at these possibilities: needing to make a career change, but keeping yourself back; not working up to your potential; never having enough money; procrastinating; being dishonest with yourself; making excuses; having no confidence; lacking focus; not trying for fear of failure; denying yourself the things you want; and giving up.
Respect
What do you do that prevents you from being respected ? Perhaps you don't respect yourself because your self-esteem is low, you avoid necessary confrontations, you dishonor other people, or you gossip.
I never gossip. If I have something to say, I say it to a person's face. Anyone who talks to you about someone will talk about you. It's a destructive activity that many people engage in. They see someone looking happy, but instead of being happy for that person, they make some kind of snide remark. I won't do that; it dishonors not only the person I'm talking about, but myself as well.
Love
What do you do to prevent yourself from being loved ? Unless you love yourself, you'll be unable to project love to others and to receive love. You also need to be vulnerable and to be able to take risks. It's difficult to be lovable if you're not open, because no one knows what you're really feeling. When you hold your emotions inside, people can only guess your feelings toward them. Perhaps you're afraid to be honest for fear of rejection, or because you're out of touch with how you really feel.
Financial Security
What do you do that prevents you from being financially secure ? Perhaps you're afraid to take risks because you're afraid of success.
People who are truly financially secure aren't motivated by money, nor are they afraid of losing what they have. People who are afraid of losing money never seem to have enough. No matter how much they have, they continue to work like crazy to acquire more. That shows insecurity. You see this in immigrants who work themselves to death even after they've acquired more than enough money. They never let their children forget how hard they work and how much they suffer. As a result, their children feel guilty about anything their parents give them.
You need to be happy with who you are and what you do. You find security when you adjust your lifestyle so that you're happy with what you're doing regardless of the amount of money attached to it. Of course, you need to accept that your lifestyle is going to be commensurate with what you're doing. For example, if you want to work for charity, your lifestyle will not incorporate fancy cars and lavish furnishings. If you realize that you're getting something else that's more important to you, accepting a simpler lifestyle won't make you unhappy.
When I wrote the first book in this Mastering Life series, Change Your Life Now, I didn't seek my regular publisher, Random House. Instead, I chose a publisher with a background in transformational books. My earnings for this book didn't compare to my usual earnings, but the circumstances were different. Random House publishes books on nutrition, but this book was about helping people change their lives. This was particularly important to me because I had just come to understand that people need to learn to change their beliefs before they can change their diets. I'd been doing it wrong for all these years. I'd been writing about nutrition, thinking that people were getting healthier, when they weren't. They needed to change their attitudes first. Then they could change their eating habits. Otherwise, they weren't going to stick to the right diet.
The point is that although I was paid less, I felt that this was the most important book I'd done. I gladly accepted the terms because it was what I needed to do. I'm not measuring my book, or my self-esteem, by my income. That would be dangerous. I'd start basing decisions on money and end up betraying myself in the process.
How Do You Control Others and How Do Others Control You?
Think of the chase, the capture, and the conquest. After you conquer something or someone, do you begin to lose interest ? Look at all the things you thought were important. You put a great deal of time and energy into those projects. Afterward, was what you did no longer important ? If so, then control was what you were after.
Or perhaps you've been in this situation. You were the object of someone's affection. As long as you were being pursued, the person had an interest in you. But the situation changed as soon as you said, "I'm yours." Suddenly the interest was gone. You were just another trophy. Again, control was the issue.
Do you try to control people ? Do you assume that you have the right to ? I see this in parents who try to dominate their children instead of respecting them as individuals. Children need to know that they count. Even when children say things that make no sense, a parent needs to respect their right to say them. Too often you hear comments such as, "That's stupid," "You're wrong," "Don't embarrass me." Such remarks teach children to stop being honest. They become afraid of expressing anything, because their parents might judge what they say as being unworthy. They would rather say nothing than risk feeling the pain and discomfort of their parents' rejection.
That starts a pattern of holding back that continues on into adulthood. People refrain from sharing positive, constructive insights. They relate to authority figures as if they were their parents. They follow their boss's dictates unquestioningly, as if their own opinion counted for nothing. They search out partners who control everything they do.
When someone controls you, your life is no longer your own. It belongs to someone else. Someone else is building his or her own ego by controlling you. The person never cares about your dreams or treats you as an equal. The person is never there to support you. Lao Tzu warned of this trap at the very dawn of philosophy: "Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner."
Think of how different it would be if you were with people who supported you unconditionally. You'd think: maybe I could really run that marathon, or change my career. Of course, sometimes the people in your life would really support you — if you were honest with them about what you really want to do and be. If you're not honest, you're never going to know.
The people who really care about you for who you are have got to give you the freedom to be who you are. If that means letting go of some control, then they've got to let go of that control. That's why you have to look at who controls you.
Where in Your Life Do You Feel Empty?
Look, for example, at the following areas of your life.
The Empty Friend
Are you an empty friend ? Here's how I define the empty friend. He (or she) is the person who always needs something from you. That's the only reason he calls. An empty friend calls and says, "How are you doing, Bob ? What's up ? It's been three years, but it feels like we were just talking yesterday. You're not using that house up on the lake, are you?"
True friends aren't users. They enjoy being with you and they honor who you are. They never criticize or betray you. They defend you when someone else attacks you and they never talk about you behind your back.
If you don't have integrity within a friendship, then what's the point ? It's better to let go of that relationship and find another friend. There is no shortage of good people out there. Look for people with good hearts — people who can laugh and who are fun to be with.
Think about the kind of friend you are. Are you able to accept people for who they are ? If you can't, you shouldn't be with them. Don't be with someone whom you constantly criticize.
The Empty Lover
The difference between an empty lover and a real lover is that the latter will always take part of the responsibility for the relationship. The empty lover never does; if something goes wrong, he or she blames you, perhaps calling you a user. When the relationship is working, they never complain about your using them.
An empty lover tries to make you feel worthless for wanting to end a relationship that is no longer working. The person doesn't accept that there's a time in a relationship when each person has a right to say good-bye. An empty lover sees the relationship as an investment, and tries to make you feel as if no one else will want you if you end it.
If someone tries to make you feel bad about yourself, just say, "Wrong. I'm not going to feel bad about me." The next time someone tries to put you down, simply refuse to allow that energy in. Then their reality doesn't become yours.
It takes two clashing egos to fight. They can't put you down by telling you how much they enjoyed the time spent together. They're not going to say, "I'm sorry we're not going to spend any more time together, but the time we did spend was good." You don't often hear anyone say that — but how much healthier that would be!
The Empty Patient
Are you an empty patient ? I know people who see holistic doctors and then get very angry or disappointed because the doctor is not meeting their needs. They say the doctor gives them too little time, or doesn't treat them because they don't have enough money to pay for the treatment they need. Or they say the doctor doesn't believe their symptoms are real. Yes, these may all be legitimate complaints, especially considering that some "holistic" doctors are holistic in name only.
However, I also see people ignore the insight and advice their doctor gives them. They never become holistic patients. No treatment ever works for them. They keep going from doctor to doctor.
The empty patient never does anything for himself. When I ask these people why they don't use what they know, they give excuses: "I don't know what to do." "I'm not a doctor." "I don't know what my body needs." Yet they never seem to start educating themselves about what they need to know. Remember what those healing experiments proved: the intelligence to heal is already encoded within you. The empty patient is a person sitting on top of that inheritance, waiting for someone else to spend it for them.
The Empty Worker
Empty workers resent people who work harder, because it shows how little they do by comparison. These people work on automatic. They're at their job just to collect a paycheck. They don't care about what they're doing. They never take responsibility for anything they do, and they never give constructive suggestions about how to make the job better.
An awful lot of people in this country are empty workers. I watched people strike at a plant in my hometown. My uncle worked at the plant, and I talked to him about it. I said, "You're making a certain income. It's enough to cover your basic needs. I know you want more, but there is a price war on with a foreign importer. The importer is subsidized by his government, allowing him to cut prices by twenty-five percent. If your company cuts its price by twenty-five percent, it cuts itself out of the business and you're out of a job. Would you rather have a job where you can maintain your standard of living, or would you rather go on strike and cause your company to go bankrupt ? Then you'll have no job. You will lose your home and a lot more."
I was amazed that these people hadn't thought of that. They were only concerned with having more and milking their company for all they could get. They didn't care about making production more efficient. Six members of my uncle's family were working at a job that required only one person. They were causing their company unnecessary expense. They admitted they could have found other jobs.
Perhaps you've really got to be in business for yourself to appreciate what I'm saying. When you are responsible, you care about making your product or service better and more efficient. Then you're not an empty worker, but a caring one.
From Transition to Transformation
Now bring it all together — the science, the stories, and the questions — because they converge on one final distinction, and it is the most important one in this chapter: the difference between transition and transformation.
Most people, when they change at all, merely transition. They move from point A to point B and take their insecurity and their emotional traumas with them. New city, same fears. New job, same resentments. New partner, same wounds. That is not change; that is relocation.
Transformation is something else. One day, you sit quietly in a room with no distractions for two hours. You take a sheet of paper and you ask: What do I no longer want to have in my life ? And how can I release it — let it go — so that I am no longer one of those people who continue being responsible for other people's lives with no appreciation in return ? Remember LeShan's women. Remember the caretakers. The energies that worked for us at one time do not work now, and the hardest thing in life is to recognize when you are staying adapted to an environment that is no longer adaptable. You take the energy you no longer want in your life and you say: thank you — and goodbye.
Things have changed. Society is in crisis, and it is not going to get better. But it can get different — if you change. "I don't want to change," people say. And indeed, most people are not going to change, and unfortunately, they will suffer. Others change for the worse — they maladapt. That is where addictive behavior comes in, and by the way, it does not have to be drugs or alcohol. It can be chronic overworking. It can be being overly responsible. It can be pouring yourself into helping the ne'er-do-well finally do well — which never happens — until you are drained and have become part of their energy. Understand this about negative people: stay close enough, long enough, and their energy can supersede your positive energy, and you become negative yourself.
But here is the promise on the other side. This is what I learned from the great scientists upstairs at the institute, brilliant men who had fled the Nazis and knew everything in the textbooks — and from what they were missing. We think we have to learn everything in order to have learned anything: it's all in a textbook, all in a classroom, all in the wisdom of a wise man or woman, an uncle, a grandparent, the Stoics and philosophers of past times. No. We are bornwith it. Energy in life carries codes — messages. That is what the mice proved: healing occurred that no one had been instructed to perform, guided by an intelligence no one had been told was needed. Everything essential was already encoded. You had vitalism in you at the beginning — in the first stages of your life it flowed freely — and you have the truth in you all along. You simply have to liberate that truth from the clutter: from the superstitions, from the propaganda, from the over-conditioning, from your absorption into someone else's ideology and political dynamic. You have to become a human being, and respect the uniqueness of every other human being — because that uniqueness is precisely what we all have in common. That mutual respect is the exchange of energy that allows transformation. And healing occurs when you liberate the innate immune system — the innate self — and enhance it. That is the power of the energy. That is what I have spent my whole life doing.
This is not a new message. Norman Vincent Peale preached the power of positive thinking to millions. Napoleon Hill was writing it in the first decades of the twentieth century and died in 1970, an old man who had watched his principle proven over and over: take a positive energy into anything and it enhances it; take a negative energy into any environment, for whatever you're doing, and it limits or destroys it. Marcus Aurelius put the whole science in a single sentence eighteen centuries before the laboratory confirmed it: "The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts." What color have your companions, your habits, and your environments been dyeing yours?
So how much of your energy have you abrogated to other people to dictate ? How much of your life has been an existence through other people's expectations — the good son, the good daughter, the doctor or lawyer or nurse they wanted, instead of the person you were meant to be ? The retiree who wakes up and thinks, "My God, what am I supposed to do with my day now ? My routine, my schedule, my responsibilities — all gone." Good. Gone is the opportunity. Now you can do exactly what you want, and you can do good things — as Gloria Swanson did, more active and more purposeful in retirement than most people are at their peak. When the old identity ends, you are not obligated to sit in the Malibu bar telling stories of woe. You can have a whole new transformation of energy.
You become the architect of your own life, instead of leaving the blueprints to someone else. Now you have no restrictions. What do you want to be ? Where do you want to live ? What do you want to bring into your life each day ? Just remember the biggest single mistake we make: believing that bringing more into our lives will fix what's wrong. If only I had more of something, it would be better — more money, more possessions, more followers; the low dose didn't work, so raise the dose; more chemotherapy. No. Healing has never worked that way. You must first take out of a person what is causing the problem. You must first empty out the past. That is why getting rid of negative influences is not one self-help exercise among many. It is the gateway. It is where all growth begins.
Do the work. Sit in the quiet room. Write the honest lists. Draw the boundaries, speak the expectations, release the people and the patterns whose energy diminishes you — and thank them as they go. Then watch what happens when you become the positive energy that draws other positive energies into your life. Because life is a whole lot better when you're in the right relationship, at the right time, with the right person, sharing the right energy. That is when you stop performing a life — and start living one.
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Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation's longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.