The Law of Positivism with Shereen Öberg

“The first healing I got was really apparent, that I was lacking self-love.” – Shereen Öberg

We consume media constantly, often only avoiding an influx of outside information when we make a conscious effort to separate ourselves from it. The negative messages that permeate that media can motivate us, but it can also tear us down and desensitize us. Shereen Öberg saw another way, and developed the Law of Positivism to help heal us with positive messages and energy.

We are taught limiting belief systems that make us feel like we’re not enough as we are. This feeling of a lack of ourselves is an illusion, and we can reclaim our idea of ourselves. Shereen Öberg shares the power she’s experienced of positive focus and affirmations, without falling into the trap of toxic positivity.

This week on Find Your Fierce & Loving, nurturing your awareness of yourself and your relationship with others. Break out of the suffering loops that trap you individually and seek to trap this species as a whole.

• (02:23) – Limiting belief systems
• (11:58) – Law of Positivism
• (17:47) – Suffering loops

Creator of the Law of Positivism Instagram and podcast, Shereen Öberg is a certified yoga and meditation teacher, Reiki III practitioner, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture practitioner and doula, and is currently studying health and wellness at university. She also holds a BA in Business and Economics. Shereen is of Kurdish descent, but was taken to Sweden when she was just a year old, and has made it her home ever since. She has also spent extended periods studying in the US, in Los Angeles, and working in Dublin, Ireland. Passionately and deeply dedicated to her spiritual path, Shereen enjoys learning and expanding her knowledge into new areas of health and wellbeing. The Law of Positivism podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, Anchor and Acast.

Do you want to unleash your inherent love and goodness, liberate yourself, and free humanity from the oppressive systems and structures we have created? We are here to support you in finding your fierce and loving life. Join us in Our Circle, a vibrant membership community rich in opportunities for engagement and transformation. Find out more at lolawright.com/our-circle.

You can follow Lola Wright, on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter and learn more about my work at lolawright.com.

Chicago born and built, Lola grew up in wealth and privilege, yet always sensed something was missing. She sought out aliveness and freedom in music, immersing herself in the hip hop and house music scenes of 90s Chicago. After finding herself on her own at 23, as the mother of two young children, she became determined to create a new experience.

Lola is an ordained minister with a gift for weaving together the mystical and material, she served for many years as the CEO of Bodhi Center, an organization committed to personal transformation, collective awakening, conscious activism, and community-building. 

This podcast is produced by Quinn Rose with theme music by independent producer Trey Royal.

If you’d like to receive new episodes as they’re published, please subscribe to Find Your Fierce & Loving in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help others find the show.

Lola Wright (00:01): Something is stirring. Maybe you’ve felt it. We are reckoning with the reality of injustice and binary thinking that feeds the political machine. Humanity is in the midst of a heartbreaking and painful paradigm shift. That is a good thing. My name is Lola Wright, and this is Find Your Fierce & Loving. This podcast is intended to help you disrupt, untangle and free your mind of personal and collective agreements, patterns and beliefs that are holding you back and weighing you down. We desperately need your fierce and loving purpose now more than ever. I am so excited to have this brilliant human being on today’s episode of the podcast. Shereen and I met when I was a recent guest on her podcast. She is the creator of The Law of Positivism. It is an Instagram platform and podcast. Shereen is a certified yoga and meditation teacher. She is a Reiki III practitioner. She is a traditional Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture Practitioner and a doula. She is currently studying health and wellness at university. She also holds a BA in Business and Economics. Shereen is of Kurdish descent, but was taken to Sweden when she was just a year old and has made it her home ever since. Shereen has spent extended periods studying in the US, specifically in Los Angeles and has worked in Dublin, Ireland. She is passionate and deeply dedicated to her spiritual path. Shereen enjoys learning and expanding her knowledge into new areas of health and wellbeing. Definitely check out the Law of Positivism podcast. It’s available on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, Anchor, and Acast. Shereen, I am so happy to have you on the podcast today. Welcome.

Shereen Öberg (02:12): Thank you. What a beautiful introduction, and your voice is so powerful so I was like, wow. Thank you so much for having me here. It’s lovely to talk to you again.

Lola Wright (02:23): I was thinking about our conversation and wondering if you could give a little perspective on how you found yourself on this spiritual path. You have an undergraduate degree in Business and Economics and seemingly have made a departure into the world of Reiki, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Acupuncture, being a doula, a yoga teacher, a meditation instructor. How did that pivot occur?

Shereen Öberg (02:55): It’s hard to say when everything started, but I would say that it’s always been like a parallel part of my life. It’s not been anything separate. Even when I’ve been working in a corporate world, I’ve always implemented my spirituality in the places and with the people I’ve been working with. It’s all like connected. We don’t have to be in either or like having a separation, but I think the spirituality was something that has always been a part of my life from when I grew up. I was always fascinated by mystical and spiritual things. I always wanted to explore these things. I was, in my teenage years, very interested in reading these types of books. It wasn’t an outer influence. I think I was mostly odd when I was doing that. It’s become more popularized and more integrated now, I think, but I also had a lot of experiences that led me there, like my own spiritual experiences. It just felt natural that throughout the years that I was studying, even though I didn’t start with yoga and mindfulness until my mid 20’s that I started also studying things like astrology and quantum physics and philosophy. All of these things. That just built up. The more I explored, the more I wanted to learn, and I found new things and places and people, and that naturally grew into the Law of Positivism, which was me having really, in the start of my career in Business and the digital world that I realized that I had just been going and going without also stopping and thinking of this inner and spiritual growth that was so important. When I was working at my very first full-time job in Ireland, I started to disconnect a lot from myself and things changed in a very short time period. I also got very stressed and overwhelmed, and I started feeling disconnected from everything. That was also when the deep transformational process started for me. That’s when the changes, big changes, started to happen. That was around 2012. A lot of things shifted. What I learned in that process I wanted to share, so that’s how I created the Law of Positivism because I also found that we can raise our frequency with releasing negative thought patterns that’s not serving us to have these old beliefs and thought structures that we’ve grown up with from society. That’s how it all started. Then that’s grown into what I’m doing today. I just started to get more and more interested in the healing sciences. And, that’s Western, Eastern, energetic, yogic, all of these healings because I was working on myself. I had someone ask me, “Well, what do you call yourself?” I’ve never thought about calling myself anything. I can say that I’m a yoga teacher, but if it’s something, I would say like someone that is really passionate about healing and wellbeing, and we can do that in so many ways, but it’s not one thing. We can do it from different aspects and then integrate that into what we do. We can still do a different career than that and integrate it into that.

Lola Wright (07:47): What were some of the, say, the top three limiting belief systems that were holding you back or weighing you down that you think transforming have made the biggest difference? What were some of the recurring thought patterns that were really intoxicating and oppressive for you?

Shereen Öberg (08:12): That’s a really good question. They can also be categorized, but there was so much, but one thing that I think is so important and what I learned when I started the process is that thoughts that made me feel that I’m not enough as I am, that I have to be and become and change. The first healing I got was really apparent that I was lacking of self-love. In yoga, we talk about ahimsa as non-violence, like not acting in violence in thought or in physical shape and form towards others, but it’s also towards ourselves. It’s really important. That was one. I think a lot of things came from that. Then also, when you reach some place where you’ve always thought that you want to be, and you struggled to get there, you study and then you get there and you, but you don’t feel happy. That’s again, the thoughts of desire of wanting something more or being something else. Again, like life is not enough. That’s very limiting, actually. That creates so much lack in ourselves because it’s not true. It’s just an illusion.

Lola Wright (09:41): Yes. I oftentimes talk about the successfully discontent. It’s like those among us who have done all the things, checked all the boxes, have all the accolades, and still there’s a deep sense of discontentment because as we know, happiness, joy, peace, fulfillment does not occur in accomplishment.

Shereen Öberg (10:10): Yeah. Everything that we are desiring that is outside of our highest consciousness, it’s ever changing. However, it turns out tomorrow will not be how it turns out in a few years. It’s always going to change, so it’s not constant. If we create attachment to that, that’s what makes you feel like you are always in a state of being happy and unhappy and going up and down. It’s about reaching. That’s also one of the pillars in yogic philosophy… That to have contentment, to be what is right now, and it also goes back to the root that we are in this veil of illusion that what we can experience with our senses is real. It’s real to us right now. It feels real, but we go in and out of that state just by sleeping and waking up. When we see it like that, it can become lighter, but we all go through different things that make it hard. We forget that. I think one important thing that I think was giving the fuel for these thoughts, just as a third thing, I think is really the things that we’ve experienced in the past that are also coming up in our thoughts and that we haven’t cleared that we are still also attached to have that story. I think all these three points are really important on the path of healing to have worked with.

Lola Wright (11:58): When you use the language Law of Positivism, I’d love to hear what that means for you because I think that more and more people are understanding that positivity bias can also be limiting. I know that your work is robust enough to span beyond like just think positive. What does Law of Positivism mean for you?

Shereen Öberg (12:24): Yeah, that’s a really good question. It took time for me to come up with a name, but everything was divinely guided. When I got the thought, and back then I don’t think that Instagram wasn’t that big as it is now, but for me it was just that I wanted to create something or remind someone that they’re loved or that I’m giving something positive to the world. That was my intention… To send out the positive thought or affirmation because that’s what it was in the beginning. It was a lot of affirmations. That worked for me on my path. For me, having positive affirmations… It really pushed out the recurring negative thought patterns that I had evolved during that time.

Lola Wright (13:19): Was there one affirmation that you really worked with that had a most potent impact on you?

Shereen Öberg (13:25): Yeah. Besides coming up with new ones every day, I had that I’m strong. I’m healthy. I’m loved. Very simple things. For me, on my path, they really worked. It wasn’t that I was trying to mask anything. It’s like you clean out your mind and your thoughts. Then from that, the Law of Positivism was mostly that I was… When I studied in L.A., I was studying humanistic philosophy, and I learned a lot that we are getting a lot of programming. I used to watch the news every day and these things and everything that comes from media. It does program us, so we have to somehow deprogram. Of course, with yoga and meditation, I learned it’s about coming to the silence, but if you’re already in that state of thinking and thinking, and you’re a thinking person, because we’re all different, then you really have to focus. That’s also a way in yoga that you shift your focus. It doesn’t mean that you’re disregarding this, but when you shift your focus, you also realize that some of these things are not valid anymore for you, but they’re just there, creating crap in your mind. It’s like a cleansing. It’s cleaning out and being very intentional. My intention was always to give something positive to the world because I saw that when I was watching TV or consuming any social media… It was a lot of negative stuff, and I had experienced a lot of negative talk and negative stimulus all the time. It comes into our mind. I thought, “Okay, I can at least create something positive.” I had learned about how one positive thought, like when you say positive things to yourself, it does create a vibration because in the end, we’re not our thoughts. We can use our mind as a tool, the thoughts, but we are beyond that. We’re observing our thoughts. We’re not the voice. We are observing that. As we’ve started to open up to spirituality, there has been certain things that for certain people, something like thinking positive can sound negative, but actually in the yoga lineage that I am, which is based on old Vedic tradition, the fifth pillar is meditation and positive thinking. It just means that you can use your mind. You create your reality with your thoughts. You create the world. Even your emotions. These are just layers and layers that with the consciousness that is one with the highest consciousness that is not attached even to the emotions or experiences or your thoughts. It’s just creating this reality that you think that is the only reality. So, yeah. We have to move beyond that.

Lola Wright (17:02): You want to be more alive. You want to unleash your inherent love and goodness, liberate yourself, and free humanity from the oppressive systems and structures we have created. We are here to support you in finding your fierce and loving life. Join us in Our Circle. This is an affirming and radical space that will gather weekly, on-demand or live, whatever works best for your life. For more information on how you can engage in Our Circle, visit lolawright.com/our-circle. I’d love to have you with us. I, like you…  I don’t watch TV. There’s nothing wrong with TV. First of all, my life is very full, so I don’t have dead time to sit around and watch things that don’t feel supportive of me, but I do stay attuned to what is occurring on the planet through other mediums because I think it’s actually important to be related to where human consciousness is moving, vibrating, shifting, changing, and I agree we have to be really mindful about what media we’re ingesting because it always has an agenda. That being said, there are some collective issues that we are experiencing. Whether it is Israel and Palestine, whether it is racial injustice, whether it is climate change, there’s economic disparity. There are some suffering loops that we are experiencing as a species. How do you be with that? How do you make sense of that for yourself?

Shereen Öberg (18:55): What you’re saying is something that I’ve grown up my whole life with because my parents were political refugees from Kurdistan and what my ancestor and close family members have gone through is not only discrimination, but prosecution and execution as well. It’s really deep in me. It’s very close. I’ve heard all the stories, so I have deep, deep… That’s one of the things that as an empath has been very tough, especially in the beginning of my spiritual journey too. There’s a beautiful story about this, about Swami Sivananda, when a man came into his ashram and said, “I’m devastated. My son just died.” He started crying as well and cried and cried, and he said, “Why are you crying so much?” He said, “I’m crying for all of humanity, all the sons we’ve lost.” I’ve felt the pain of the earth. I’ve felt the pain of all beings. It’s been internalized, and that has also affected my physical body, so I am taking in everything on the energetic level. I’m staying up to date in a way now because I’ve also worked on my own path on how I can heal myself and thereby the collective. It’s easier to observe and then take physical actions. I’m referring a lot to yoga because I try to live according to these old philosophies and a lot of other philosophies as well, Chinese Medicine, everything, but in the end, everything is one. What’s occurring on the other side of the world is directly impacting me because I am not separate. I never felt separate. I also grew up in a different country than where my origins are. So, I know how it feels to be among minority. Also, living, in my early childhood, also in segregated communities and the beauty of that, but also what I see now as adult that there’s disadvantage. According to Kama Yoga, it means that you renounce the fruit of your actions. It means that you are not longer doing things that only serve yourself. Maybe indirectly it serves yourself, but everything that I’ve been dedicating myself to is the healing of the whole collective. We can’t feel like we’re so small that we can’t create change. Every action, just you educating yourself and going into a field where you can create change of thought, you’re making an impact or you’re having this type of conversation is making an impact. We know that what’s going on right now is we are in the Kali Yuga so we are in a dark age because it’s been so… We’ve been in an age where these behaviors have been somehow grown and also rewarded. It’s also rooted in the disconnect from the divine feminine. What I mean about that is that we haven’t been in a state of nourishing each other and taking care of each other, which we should because all life is sacred. Again, we have been tested to see if we can go beyond the illusion, which is the illusion that we’re separate and that we’re different in any way. In everything that I do, I only want to do it which benefits the whole. From that perspective, whatever is going on, I am always intentionally working to somehow create something better from the means that I have and also in communion with the divine because it’s also us. It’s not something other than us and all life is sacred and divine, but I remembered many years ago before I started to understand these things, I was feeling and the suffering. I felt like a million women’s pain in my body at once. I’ve had these experiences. That’s also a release for me. We can all be that channel to start. It’s so dense in the world. The energy is dense. Some people easily absorb that. Some people can watch the news and not feel affected by it and just watch it. That can be a positive trait because you’re not internalizing it, but if you’re not really attuned with yourself, you’re not tuning into that, it can be a state also of ignorance or a state where you’re not fully empathic with what’s going on. A really important thing is, and for people that have also this lineage of discrimination and of not being able to fully be in their ethnicity and fully feel safe in that, which also there’s a lot of groups in the world that have that. We carry a lot of actually grief. It’s a grief that is beyond what you think with your mind. I’ve had to work with that grief. It’s not only mine. It’s the whole lineage, and then I believe in reincarnation, so I think we’re carrying also many different experiences from different parts of the world in our astral body. It’s so many layers.

Lola Wright (26:03): What’s a practice that we could invite listeners into perhaps right now, Shereen, that could help with the density that you speak of? If each listener were to contribute to their own state of peace and have that be in service of the collective, do you have something that we could do together right now that people could do simply in their lives on a daily basis?

Shereen Öberg (26:34): Yeah. I think the first thing is really, really being aware and on the path of creating love from within yourself. In that way, we’re not creating more separation, or we can empathize with everything and everyone. We can feel that we understand everything and everyone because they are us as well. It sounds abstract, but it’s really about starting to dedicate your path if you feel called to it, to yourself, to your own healing, and see also what else you can do, which is not… What I talked about, the path of Kama Yoga, it’s like you no longer put your energy into things that are only benefiting yourself. In psychology, they’ve seen when you do something like volunteering, like selfless acts, and again, renouncing what the fruits will be, and you’re completely present in that. There’s so much we can do just where we live. There’s so much we can contribute with. So, we’re not small. I think that, but it all starts from within and becoming aware because if we’re walking around and feeling sad or angry, frustrated, that will ripple out, and we see that it’s happening, and it’s been going on for so long. It’s not helped anyone. If we all had that space to realize ourselves, then we can also help in a different way just by changing ourselves because this life will come and go. If we think about it, how fast time goes. It’s just like it comes and goes. That’s what I mean. Even life is not constant. It’s a short period, but I think a lot of frustration is this feeling of not being able to be in your fullest and highest potential of yourself, and then everything that we feel inside is also manifesting out in the world. I really believe in the power of prayer and intentionally putting love into situations, places. I consciously do that, or I can chant mantras and think about people that are suffering and put that in. I really believe in that. I wouldn’t practice it otherwise.

Lola Wright (29:33): One of my favorite inquiries with guests on the podcast, and we can close with this, is what is the prayer that you invite humanity into right now? If there were 8 billion people available to resonate on one prayer, what would you invite us into?

Shereen Öberg (29:55): That’s a big question. It would be that I create the love and peace within me so that I can create love and peace within the whole world and that we go beyond the illusion of our senses to see that we’re all one. Being in that and feeling that I am here and now and understanding that you’re really eternal and not limited. Then you can start expanding, but truly, a Sanskrit mantra that I love is Om, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti. It’s peace, peace, peace because from peace, everything can come and grow.

Lola Wright (30:45): I’m so grateful our paths have crossed, Shereen. I love listening to you. I love being with you. Thank you for sharing your truth and your grace, your love and your wisdom. Check out the Law of Positivism. Shereen has a beautiful and inspiring platform both on Instagram and in her podcast. I think you’ll really, really love it.

Shereen Öberg (31:10): Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

Lola Wright (31:15): If you enjoyed this show and would like to receive new episodes as they’re published, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. Your review helps others find this show. You can follow me at Lola P. Wright on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and learn more about my work at lolawright.com. This episode was produced by Quinn Rose with theme music from independent music producer, Trey Royal. 

Shereen Öberg (32:01): Everything is one, so what’s occurring on the other side of the world is directly impacting me because I am not separate.