The news last week about a Jordanian pilot being burned alive by extremists hit me hard. Driving with the BBC World Service on, I burst into tears behind the wheel.

The German word “weltschmerz”, which translates to “world pain”, labels the sadness that can arise contemplating the ills of the world.

Back in my college days I ended up in a bout of depression after realising I couldn’t stop the destruction of the rainforest or solve world hunger — not single-handedly, anyway.

The world was full of pain and suffering and I felt powerless to stop this.

This was how last Wednesday began. I was paralysed by the horror of it, incredulous that as far as we’ve come as a species we can still resort to such barbarism and brutality. I felt despondent and hopeless.

Fortunately, my yoga teacher — and spiritual mentor — offered some great wisdom as I arrived at her class, puffy-faced and listless.

“Despair will get us nowhere,” she said. “All we can do in the face of such suffering is to raise our own vibrational energy to encourage positivity, peace and love towards healing.”

It sounds a bit woo-woo perhaps, but what she referred to was the scientifically recorded spectrum of vibrational frequencies that people emit while experiencing different emotional states.

Feelings such as love, joy and peace vibrate high on the scale while emotions such as fear, hate, apathy and grief have very low vibrational frequencies.

The science goes further to show that someone vibrating at a certain level can influence the vibrational frequency of others around them, bringing them either up or down.

The Maharishi Effect says that individual consciousness affects collective consciousness. For example, many studies have shown links between the numbers of people participating in intentional group meditation and corresponding significant drops in crime, violence and accidents in the surrounding city.

In short, amping up our own levels of mindfulness and vibrational energy will have a positive effect on society and potentially the world around us.

And couldn’t the world use it? Couldn’t Bermuda use it?

The local news can hurt my heart in equal measures to the atrocities abroad, particularly our crime and accident statistics.

Lately, I have felt like a cloud of negativity has settled over our Island. With every bit of good news, too often we seem to jump to the downside, focus on what could go wrong, assume the worst.

In conversation, I find the tendency is always to slip toward the gloom.

Positioning ourselves in such low vibrational frequencies, are we perpetuating our own unhappiness?

We might feel powerless, but clearly we all have influence.

Rather than add to the draining hum of despair and disgruntlement, can we avoid the negative banter and pessimism?

Engage instead in ways to raise our own emotional levels and shift the collective towards love and peace?

Meditating, positive visualisation, listening to uplifting music, practising gratitude, being inspired, self-care and acts of kindness can all raise our vibrations.

“Welt heilung” translates to “world healing” — we each can contribute to the cure.

• Julia Pitt is a trained success coach and certified NLP practitioner on the team at Benedict Associates. For further information contact Julia on 705-7488, www.juliapittcoaching.com