No, I'm not talking about the negative side of some esoteric, mystical life-force or energy field here, although you can describe it that way without being too wrong (or very accurate either), but negative consequences, experiences, events, circumstances, people or incidents which could suddenly and unexpectedly assail you.

You see, we live in a universe of cause and effect. Yet don't let the simplicity of how that sounds fool you. The truth is, our universe, inasmuch as you want to define it through your observation of it via your consciousness, is both a Newtonian system of cause and effect relationships as well as a random, chaotic system of bubbling, toiling and troubling quantum soup.

Whatever you do has an effect not only on yourself but to everyone and everything else around you, and the repercussions, reverberations, effects and consequences of your actions can spread throughout the entire Universe, in sometimes very large and sometimes very small ways.

But your actions leave an impression on the universe nonetheless, and these impressions in turn may or may not come back to affect you, or they may affect other people close to you or even remotely related to you, "even unto the seventh generation".

The individual affects the collective and the collective affects the individual.

Call it Karma or causality or the butterfly effect or the quantum equilibrium process or Tikkun Olam, but this system is real and it works to provide some form of balance to the universe.

Suffice to say, what you do to yourself or to others have effects in relation to your actions. What goes around, comes around. What goes up, comes back down. What you plant inside, reveals itself outside. What you push, pushes you back.

Whether what you get back in return is good or bad (according to your perception), depends, of course, on what you decide, when you first made the choice to do what you intended to do.

Let's say one day you get angry. You get very, very angry. Angry about, against, with or for what? It could be anything. You could be angry with another person, or yourself, angry about the whole world in general, angry against God, against the system, basically, you're angry, and it doesn't matter who or what caused you to be angry in the first place (the truth is, all anger comes from yourself, as is all other emotions), but you are very, very angry.

Your first impulse would be to direct your anger against something or someone, regardless of whether or not he, she or it had been responsible for that initial 'transgression' against you.

You just want something or someone as a punching bag, for you to vent your frustration.

By all means, it is healthy to express your anger in a non-destructive or at least minimally-destructive manner, and I'm sure you know of some methods to do that, for example, yelling your lungs out in a place where no one can hear you, jump, run, swing, punch (not people I hope), etc.

But I propose one very, very powerful way, a way that is not only neutralising but constructive. Not only does it erase your anger, it would also set in motion a series of events that would affect you and everything else around you in a tremendously positive way, it's almost miraculous. It'd be like turning fire into ice or snakes into harmless, cute squirrels.

My method is this - if you should ever get very, very angry for any reason whatsoever and you feel like venting that anger against something or someone and you know that your venting of anger would harm that something or someone and set off a negative chain of events, then stop and do this instead :-

Do something very, very good, beneficial, charitable, kind and helpful to another person or thing, in such a selfless and altruistic manner, that it actually hurts you (initially) to do it.

For example, if you one day happen to feel angry because you think your employer had somehow forgotten to give you due credit (and compensation) for your hard work, and gave that credit to someone else instead who you feel was less deserving, I want you to find someone perhaps in your company, or perhaps anybody you know, or even any stranger on the street, whom you know needs even more help than you and is in a worse-off position than you, and help him or her to the point that it would hurt you if you would help him or her.

Yes, don't you remember what one great teacher once said about offering your other cheek if you were slapped on one and giving your cloak also if you were robbed of something? What he probably missed out was the part where you would be compensated for what you'd offered, perhaps seven, ten, infinite times more.

The principle is simple :- If you feel unjustly treated, reverse that injustice into an opportunity for abundance to increase its flow into your life by altruistically giving yourself to another, until it actually hurts you to help another. What you get back in return will be infinitely more satisfying, more rewarding, more fulfilling than what you would have gotten if you had chosen the more reactive, immature and vengeful action. In fact, if the person you choose to give-to-until-it-hurts is the very person who had done you wrong in the first place, that would be even better!