Positive Energy Guide

The underworld parts of my journey began with the wound. In life as in mythology, a lot of journeys do. I hope you will find my deeper processes useful. Some parts are difficult to share.

At some point I asked myself: “Did I force the bike trip?” “Was I supposed to go?” “Did woman I called my ‘travel angel’ showing up to guide me mean that I was supposed to be at the monastery?” “If I hadn’t gone, would I have injured myself elsewhere?”

Frankly, I roll my eyes if I think like this. I find “supposed to” or “meant to be” talk annoying. Who is doing the supposing? Such conjecture is rarely useful. Real experiences of meaning arise from feeling, not conjecture. Then again, if we stay with feeling, sensing, and intuition, mining experience for gems will surpass such theories.

I felt clear that what I was going through was related to my energy experience in the castle garden. (Part 4)

As I lived with my injury, memories and insights surfaced from my personal archeology:

About fifteen years ago I had what seemed to be a trivial wound in almost the same spot on my opposite shin. I slipped on a jungle-gym and found myself hanging upside-down by a rope. (Shades of The Hanged Man in Tarot.) That rope wound did not appear serious but the tissues resisted normal healing.

About ten years ago I accompanied other healers on a Shamanistic trip to ancient power spots and barrows in England and Ireland. As our bus passed through Wales a succession of different past life images surfaced, along with related emotions. This intense experience seemed to be a type of energy release. One salient visionary sequence clearly pertained to the shin wound:

I was a man, carrying a huge, rough wooden cross through the streets of a medieval town, having suffered this for some months. I felt ambivalent about this penance. It did not feel spiritually alive. After long deliberation I confronted the church leader, who had tasked me with this burden. We disagreed. I pushed the cross in his direction, rejecting it, but did not push hard enough. It fell back. I jumped back but the wall arrested my movement and a crossbar struck my right shin.

Subsequent images showed me limping winter streets with a wound that worsened over time. I died without coming to grips with related conflicts about my beliefs.

Whether or not we were raised with religion, many of us carry remnants of religious programing. This can show up in many different ways. For example, we may assign a sense that we can never be good enough to an abstract divine authority, feel we deserve to be punished for things we think, or feel shame about our basic humanity.

Following my past life reflections, the rope wound to my shin began to heal again after remaining stagnant for years.

My current mix of influences had pinged that past life memory:

–My injury occurred near a medieval town, just after exiting a monastery.
–I had been actively processing ambivalence related to power structures within my spiritual group. [I’m good with my Teacher.]
–I was struggling with a painful and awkward burden that did not seem mine to carry, yet it fell back on me when I refused to do so.

Current life tags to the past life wound that never healed fueled flashes of terror. Hospital staff had told me this area of the shin was subject to necrosis. I could not stay off my feet. I could not check the injury as I had been told to leave it undisturbed until the drain was taken out. I worried whenever it hurt.

The positive energy experience I evoked at the formal garden before the injury (Part 4), spoke to laying down burdens, allowing myself to be honored, living more lightly, and receiving support. My healer and I had long been working to correct a weak energy grid on my left lower body, related to the above. I had challenged my status quo.

Some energy-based issues can be corrected immediately. Effective energy work then influences our life experience and reduces related reactivity. Pulling out energies that do not belong with us usually falls into this category. Energy patterning formed over decades or lifetimes, however, are often riddled with deeply held beliefs or conflicts and require ongoing attention and significant change to resolve.

How does your past shape what things mean to you in the present?

How do you influence whether your past creates a meaningful continuity of experience, or prejudices your experience of the present?

Grasping below the knee to apply pressure, I stared at my shin in disbelief. A chunk of skin had been gouged out. And I think I was looking at the lining of my tibia before blood obscured my view. Stunned, I picked a bit of flesh from my sock, feeling weird about throwing a piece of myself onto the cobbles. (I’ll spare you the gory photo.)

Strangely detached, I observed my denial: “The bleeding will stop and I’ll be able to ride back,” and “It may hurt a bit, but I’ll need to get up the hill to the train.” Blood ran into my sock.

Still clutching the leg, I hobbled into the monastery office. The staff assumed and then dropped their “What-do-you-want—you-already-saw-the-place-and-we’re-about-to-close” faces as they got a look at my shocked face and bloody leg. I asked about bandages.

The woman pushed me onto a bench out front while the man rushed off and returned with a first aid kit. They were scary sober. They wanted to take me to the hospital. Fighting shock, I was not ready or able to decide. Stitches didn’t make sense if there was nothing to pull together. I needed to get back to town and regain my balance.

My helpers managed to cram the clunky bike into the back of a small station wagon and drove me within 500 feet of my hotel. There were too many tourists to get closer. I used the bike as a crutch. I hurt.

Somehow I got a cab to a pharmacy. They had no butterfly bandages, large bandages, or anything antibacterial. I left with an iodine solution to clean the wound, gauze, tape, and an over-the-counter pain killer.

I was starved by the time I got back. Tour groups were overwhelming the restaurant about eight feet from the front door of my hotel. They were booked until after 9 and said they would run out of food. No to-go options and they wouldn’t loan me a plate.

Fortunately that night happened to be my hotel splurge night—my only night with a view and a bathtub. And plates! The waiter relented. He would give me food if I brought a plate. Using handrails heavily, I brought a plate twenty minutes later. He filled it with fire roasted chicken from a cavelike hearth, and salad. I took a nice photo of the lovely view and meal.

After relaxing in the tub with my leg hanging out I put on my glasses and pealed off the bandage to get my first good look at the wound. To my horror, a big V of skin was pulling up my leg. The wound had torn as the skin retracted. This had to be stitched! I diluted iodine solution in a cup and washed the wound, shaky hands dropping the cup on the tile floor, which was peppered with shards. Bleeding again, cleaning the floor was out of the question. And I needed a scissors to cut gauze.

I tried to call the front desk. My phone didn’t work. There was no room phone. Arm over arm on the hand rails, I hobbled downstairs. No one was around.

Finally I knocked on the door across from mine. Two women who didn’t speak English gaped at me. I pantomimed cutting the gauze with a scissors. They conferred and offered me a nail clipper, which I declined. After much gesturing and conjecturing, the women realized that I needed help picking up the cup shards. They gave me four normal band aids, which I criss-crossed, pressing together the edges of torn flesh so they would be close enough to stitch come morning.

I emailed my healer and my spiritual Teacher, called my best friend via internet, and went to bed.

Although I hate hospitals, I almost enjoyed my visit to the Czech hospital. I was out of there in about half an hour, having spent forty euros to have the wound stitched up by two nice women in a bright, teal tiled room with high ceilings. They put in a drain and said I would need to return in two days to have it removed. They warned me that the injured area of the leg was known for getting bone necrosis. I was supposed to rest it.

I was grateful that I could hobble some, although the stitches pulled uncomfortably if I walked on uneven surfaces—like cobbles.

Did you ever feel as if part of you had planned ahead for something you didn’t know would occur, or that a difficult experience was part of your learning curve?

How do you feel about receiving help from strangers?

My visit to Cesky Krumlov—the charming medieval storybook town I was the most drawn to visit—proved to be challenging and pivotal. Initial delight thinned and frayed as the cute, cobbled streets filled and practically cramped with multitudinous tour groups. Frustrated, by not being able to move freely or see through the heads, I felt a growing and airless sense of compression. I strategized, and planned a twenty kilometer bike trip, a big loop including a monastery, cable car, and long downhill return.

The early morning had been good. I had walked up beyond and above the town’s castles, museums, and viewpoints to a formal garden. Inventive fountains spouted water from numerous mouths and pitchers. A long hedge row converged in the distance, where I heard the strains of a classical concert.

I imagined what it must have been like to live in or visit at the castle, and the lavish parties that had been held here over the centuries. The land itself maintained the energy of celebration—an energy with which I have never been totally comfortable. I tend to work. Enjoying the energy in this lovely and refined venue, I asked my energy bodies to absorb it. I thought about the huge hoop skirts women wore, using their shape to bring energy up from the Earth. Masters of martial arts carry a skirt-like ring of powerful grounding. I asked to increase my grounding.

As I pulled together my intention to accept and ground the energy of celebration, I felt a surge upward. Energy shot up and blossomed about two hundred feet above my head. The sensation was surprising and blissful, yet left me with a feeling that something was incomplete, since I was aiming for additional grounding. My inner Guidance clearly said, “Now you will have to ground this.”

This unexpected comment arrested my attention. I sensed an undertone that made me question: ’Is that going to be okay?’ I felt a shade of consternation sense I realized I must agree to some kind of a process if I wanted to move forward. After a brief hesitation I assented. This seemed like something that would have a positive outcome.

I had a heck of a time finding the bike shop. This frustrating delay was nothing compared to trying to find the bike path, which was supposedly marked. The map was not useful. Looking for someone to point me in the right direction, I showed seven people, including two policemen, where the path started on the map. Three or four shut me out in an exaggerated manner that was actively hostile.

Europeans in general are not anxious for approval like so many Americans are. They have fewer compunctions about being brusk or expressing impatience with strangers. This behavior was of a different order. I got the distinct impression that the locals were reacting against a behavior I kept seeing in Japanese tour groups, who routinely and mechanically ignored others. Groups stood shoulder to shoulder, in no way acknowledging others. The only places I was hostilely ignored by Czechs were areas saturated by these tour groups. Locals whose living did not depend on the tourist industry had apparently hit load limit and begun to hurl it at tourists in general.

Almost in tears at this point, I was practically yelling “I hate this!” It was nearly two hours since I rented the bike to get away for space and peace, and I had yet to ride it out of the tiny town! I considered returning it, since there was no time left to ride the loop. I decided to go just to the monastery.

Having tried all the other nearby routes, I headed up the only road in the correct direction that I had yet to try. It was a steep hill with a lot of traffic. I had to push the bike.

Across the street a pretty businesswoman called out, suggesting that I’d be safer on her side of the street. As I joined her, she said that the route to the monastery was indeed poorly marked. She loved to ride bikes. If we stopped by her nearby home so she could change clothes she’d be happy to ride over with me, before returning to make dinner for her family. She seemed like an angel sent to help.

Soon we were riding along a shortcut through poplar woods and down a long hill to the monastery, where my travel angel said goodbye. The grounds seemed vaguely familiar. I walked though the orchard to relax and then took a tour inside. As I left, I stood on the bike pedal to get started up the hill. The front wheel of the bike turned and an uncovered fender screw bit into my shin.

How important is it to you to assign meaning or purpose to strange or difficult experiences?

Do you assign meaning quickly, using pre-defined structures of belief?

Are you comfortable remaining open to see whether or not vagaries of experience resolve into an organic sense of meaning?

On a day trip to Sedlec Ossuary in Kutna Hora, I met a wonderful couple on the train platform. We shared a compartment—and most of the day. My new friends were expats, living in Thailand. They work with a Christian Mission, organizing medical care for Thai locals.

We teamed up on navigation. The three of us managed to figure out how to get to the Ossuary and several other attractions, despite unexpected details. We arrived at Kutna Hora via a back route, crossing a lovely park below a castle.

Sedlec Ossuary is a World Heritage Site. Here are a few quotes from Wikipedia: “The ossuary is estimated to contain the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, whose bones have, in many cases, been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel.”

“In 1278, Henry, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery in Sedlec, was sent to the Holy Land by King Otakar II of Bohemia. He returned with him a small amount of earth he had removed from Golgotha and sprinkled it over the abbey cemetery. The word of this pious act soon spread and the cemetery in Sedlec became a desirable burial site throughout Central Europe.

“In the mid 14th century, during the Black Death, and after the Hussite Wars in the early 15th century, many thousands were buried in the abbey cemetery, so it had to be greatly enlarged.

“Around 1400, a Gothic church was built in the center of the cemetery with a vaulted upper level and a lower chapel to be used as an ossuary for the mass graves unearthed during construction, or simply slated for demolition to make room for new burials.

“After 1511, the task of exhuming skeletons and stacking their bones in the chapel was given to a half-blind monk of the order.”

Neither I nor my companions found the site macabre or dark. The bones were handled with an intention of honoring the dead, and, we agreed, the atmosphere was almost joyful.

The weather suddenly changed from hot to wet on our way back. We were on a train platform, making a transfer that hadn’t been necessary on our way there. An enormous gust of wind blew in a fierce rain squall. I was instinctively heading for the stairs when everyone on the platform began to scream and shot for stairs, instantly soaked. Heavy squalls continued as we parted in Prague. People were bunched up just inside the exits from tram stations, waiting it out or working themselves up to making a break for it.

I sprinted from doorway to doorway to awning, aiming to be on time for a dinner date with a semi-local spiritual dance leader. She happened to be in Prague for the afternoon. After removing and wringing out my socks in the WC, I was pleased to meet her, and another woman whom she had been mentoring for some years.

The weather changed again during dinner. The leader caught a train home. By sunset, the other woman and I had taken a wonderful walk along a viewpoint ridge, and were sharing medicinal tea at her apartment. She lives creatively, doing her own version of transformational healing. Very tired, viewing her across a small table, I had the interesting sensation that she was another myself.

How do you feel about places that challenge your cultural preconceptions?

Does understanding their history interest or comfort you, or are you more curious about your direct responses to the energy and environment?

Fairly extensive train travel during my trip gave me ample opportunity to hone my observations about who sits or does not sit in adjacent seats or train compartments with an intuitive.

Given that I was nicely dressed and consistently bathed, I had become curious about why people on a busy train will pass by an almost empty compartment and leave me to myself. As I travelled, I discussed with other intuitive people, who described similar experiences.

Most of the time I appreciate the peace of riding solo—unless the particular company suits me. By the end of my trip I realized that most of the people who chose to sit with me were intuitive or spiritually oriented. The percentage of personally developed people with whom I shared space on trains was definitely disproportionate to the averages. It amazed and delighted me how quickly and naturally spiritually alive topics arose between us. I spent a lot of travel time on my own between meeting some wonderful people and having great conversations.

Intuitive and spiritual people are likely to recognize and be drawn to one another. This seems simple and obvious. I began also to contemplate people who immediately walk by to sit elsewhere, especially when the train is starting to full up. The selection process goes well beyond appearance, gender, age and manner.

Everyone has some degree of intuition—even though it is a social convention and common personal habit to avoid being consciously in touch with it. Being aware means one consequently needs to think, feel, and live differently. Most people are so quickly able to sense anyone a little bit different, showing that they have the skill—instinctually. Selection often occurs without conscious intention, or even despite it.

Many fear being aware of their intuition. Sensing it sets too many balls rolling. In addition to fears, desires, and control issues, it brings up the degree to which we are responsible for our choices, and the necessity of sorting out intuition from the usual welter of conflicting feelings and thoughts. It’s too much work.

Those who can’t deal with intuition naturally use what intuition they do have in part to avoid interfacing too directly with those who they somehow sense can ‘see.’ A character in a fiction audiobook I recently listened to said: “Intuition is more threatening than nudity.” Several friends added that being around an intuitive “feels like being naked—but more so.”

If you are highly intuitive and still feel a little hurt when the seat beside you is the last to fill on a public bus, take heart. Once you know it’s not something wrong with you, you may even appreciate that people’s process of selection spares your energy and attention for those who can meet you more fully.

What have you experienced interfacing with people on public transport?

What type of people are most drawn to you?

Who stays away?

Sorry for dropping of the map for the last few weeks. I didn’t realize how much recovery time I would need upon my return.

The next few blogs take place in the context of recent travel.

Travel is considered expansive. Awareness stimulated by new experiences expands us as we open to embrace additional insight and inspiration. We have an opportunity to drop or relax habits and habitual viewpoints, duties, personality traits, and activities we normally identify with and carry along though daily life. Viewing our usual orientation as irrelevant creates room for expansion. At the same time, our focus of attention may simultaneously contract as visiting interesting locations for short periods of time rivets attention on the immediate environment.

When I travel I am keenly aware that I will probably never pass this way again, sharpening my focus within the moment and making simple things precious. This local focus enfolds everything around me. It sometimes includes where I initiated my day and where I am headed. During the most salient moments, whether or not they are pleasurable, my world consists of what I experience around me and my trajectory through it.

Ideally we would live in the moment most of time during daily life as well, bringing attention fully forward into the immediacy of life. Our capacity for attention tends to fall asleep among the people and things we see daily. We may substitute what we think we know about people and situations for actually interacting with who they truly are in the moment. We also tend to take for granted that we will be here tomorrow, but we may not.

Foreign travel vigorously challenges assumptions. Without language and prior experience as sources of understanding, we must open to What Is and take nothing for granted. We have to find out how to get places, what a bus stop looks like, what a coin or bill is worth, whether to tip, where to buy a ticket, how to find acceptable food, and so forth. This takes a lot of energy. It can be invigorating or harrowing, depending how we manage our self care, and what the universe throws our way.

Seeking new ways to meet our needs and negotiating unfamiliar terrain causes us to interface with life at a lot more seemingly-random points of contact, meeting more people. Many of these people are also in motion. Liberated from our usual contacts, we are more available for interaction. When we are in motion it’s as if the world is a huge pinball machine and we are one of the balls, bouncing around and available to intersect with others in seemingly-random yet cosmically-ordained timing.

Travel can make immediate and direct the reflections life throws back to us. Our points of contact can be invitations to experiment with what how we want to be as we explore new feedback from the people in our environment. To some extent we can re-create who we are in a new place. The reflections we receive are not predicated on past impressions from former interactions. The reflections we receive from others are thus more direct.

Intensive travel, where we throw ourselves into full engagement with a larger slice of the world, is not the same as a vacation. It is not always comfortable. Full immersion in a foreign environment is not about relaxing, escaping responsibility, or luxuriating, although these may occasionally occur. Intensive travel is active, vulnerable, and demanding. Recovery time can be required afterward.

To what style of travel are you primarily drawn?

What values do you or would you support through this selection?

Transparency, in the context of energy, means letting energy pass right through you without sticking. Transparency is essential because it provides a way to interface with someone’s energy without cutting yourself off from the other person or taking on their energy. This skill is especially valuable in work or play that involves touch, such as healing or dance. Without this skill you either take on energy from others or wall them out and block your own flows.

I once won the respect and gratefulness of a chiropractor who had been suffering for years from almost-debilitating hand and foot pain. I noticed energy blockage when I saw him work and asked him what was going on. He told me he had been using specific visualizations to block clients’ energy from coming into his hands or entering through his feet. He learned this technique from someone who was teaching it to practitioners. Somehow I managed to correct this condition about five minutes. His pain went away completely and did not come back. He called and emailed his gratitude several times over the next six months.

In order to pick up energy from someone you have to be in some sort of relationship with that specific energy, just as an argument takes two parties. Your role may be minimal, but must exist for energy to transfer.
I go into details about why this occurs in my book. [link]

Blocking yourself off doesn’t work well. If it does keep energy from coming in, it also blocks your most direct source of feedback about yourself. The way your energy interacts with external energy provides powerful and precious feedback—guidance. Personal cultivation is greatly aided by staying open to the mirroring that occurs between our personal experience and the rest of life. Awareness and intelligent response are the high road. Protection may be necessary under specific conditions, but personal cultivation and mastery are more much more meaningful in the long run.

Dealing with personal issues is the one most effective way to enhance energy safety. This is why I write about addressing inner wounds. Inner cultivation with respect to these wounds is critically important and frequently overlooked in self-development programs.

Profound self-knowledge is an essential precondition when it comes to accurately discerning energy influences. We cannot be clear about what is going on externally when we are adding our own issues into the mix. Lucid discernment of energy depends on having a clear baseline. Self-knowledge and personal clarity provide this baseline.

When we get confused about which energies and emotions belong inside versus which do not, we lose clarity. Energies that do not belong with us compromise our transparency like a log in a river gathers debris.

Learning to become transparent to influences that might undermine wellbeing keeps us safe from taking on energies that do not serve us. Transparency also enhances our ability to discern between different types of influences. The self-development work necessary to learn to do this improves every aspect of daily and work life.

We’ll go into more detail about clarity and discernment in the next post.

What have YOU noticed about blocking energy as a means of protection?
How do you feel in relation to other people when you wall them off?

Beginners in the art of managing subtle energy are often taught to protect and shield themselves from outside influences. One of my own mentors, an advanced healer with staggering talent, caught me before I learned this type of skill—and put the nix on it.

A Viet Nam veteran, my mentor could discourse for hours on everything from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to contributions to our understanding of consciousness from different Buddhist sects throughout history. He told me shielding is like a Band-Aid; not a real solution. He maintained that becoming transparent to energies and letting them pass through without sticking was a much higher art than attempting to keep influences out.

Before I we go on, I will admit that I felt extremely vulnerable and chagrinned at the time. I had no idea how to manage my sensitivity. We were in a whole house full of people at a healing workshop in which novices were messing with each other’s energy. My mentor had me sit still, carefully sensing my body and feeling my safety issues instead of running around or jabbering. Apparently I survived.

Protection may provide a quick way to feel safe. I have endured situations that did require measures of protection, which I learned later from a powerful clairvoyant healer who had participated in military Remote Viewing programs. While perhaps essential over the short term in unusual circumstances, I agree that protection is not the best way to deal with sensitivity to external energies. This is why:

• Trying to protect from the outside does not address the energy issues on the inside that cause us to be unsafe.
• Most methods of protection do not lead to or enhance spiritual and emotional development.
• Fearful motivations cultivate defensiveness.
• Putting layers between yourself and the world may reduce contact with energies that benefit you.
• When you do pick up external energy this is a form of guidance. It shows you where you need to work on yourself to be clear.
• You may mask information that it is useful or important to be aware of.
• It’s easy to confuse your own mental, emotional or energetic material with something from the outside and try to remove or repel it.
• Working on the energies in yourself that allow influences to impact you makes excellent use of your experiences and will help you to develop depth, strength, discernment, and clarity.

Advanced healers and energy masters do strengthen their energy fields. They may even build in structures that are protective. But the intention is not defensive. They are working with positive intention, not from fear. There is a major difference between bringing in energies that unsavory energy will not stick to, and trying to wall it off.

Bringing in positive energies successfully relies on the personal clarity that comes from acknowledging and handling our own energies and issues. Protective actions, taken by someone who does not confront their issues, are like locking the front door when a punk in the basement is going in and out without shutting the door.

Defensive energy without looking inside yourself at your own issues works about the same as refusing to talk about things when we’re feeling uncomfortable in a relationship. The energy hangs around without being dealt with. And that beaver-dam of blocked energy causes disturbances.

Becoming aware of our own interior contents allows us to deal with the energy that belongs to us. Situations become less charged, simpler, and more manageable when we’re not aggravating them by reacting from a stockpile of unresolved issues.

We’ll go into more detail in the next post. My book discusses energy protection in even greater detail, including specifics about when and why we pick up energy from others, and what to do about it.

Please share these posts with those who may benefit.

What does your energy feel like when you are defensive compared to when you are using good sense to stay safe?
Have you noticed that the things you want to do when you are uncomfortable stop you from doing the things that can get you past it once and for all?

How do you sort your energy out from those around you and simultaneously develop more-universal awareness? This is the task before energy-sensitive people. As we become more aware, we must learn to integrate between personal and global.

We interpenetrate and are interpenetrated by the energy of other people. Whether or not we notice, everything that impacts our environment influences us to some extent. Everything that impacts the planet influences us. We influence the greater whole too. It’s a two-way street.

Our outer, most subtle energy fields not only overlap with those of others– they are blended as One. Visualize yourself as the smallest doll—the innermost, solid one–in a set of Russian nesting dolls. Let that doll represent your personal energies close to your body. The largest doll can represent the Collective Unconscious or group mind on planet Earth. I am not talking about abstractions. People who develop specific types of awareness experience these actualities directly.

Developing the ability to move your awareness intentionally into different states assists greatly with discomfort related to sensitivity to energy. Practices with energy and Presence can be used to exercise our capacity to sit with difficult states without being trapped in them. Sensitivity becomes a tremendous asset as one learns to manage it. Directed sensitivity forms the backbone of accurate spiritual and daily-life guidance.

In Sufism (a 2000+ year old mystical order) initiates use sound and intention to invoke and experience specific states of consciousness. Subtle, expanded states are often paired with embodied, contracted states. Alternating between attention Other to and attention to Self is one example. Spiritual practices that use this alternation help develop boundaries and Presence. Rapid alternation between states develops an ability to shift instantly between personal and Universal awareness.

ALL of the numerous advanced spiritual teachers I have encountered have been able to integrate expanded states of consciousness with body-awareness. They are extraordinarily Present and move with grace. Those who practiced types of meditation that moved awareness out beyond the body also used their clarity of focus to be fully Present IN their body and personal environment from moment-to-moment.

Powerful spiritual people require clear and lucid boundaries. The more developed our subtle awareness, the more essential are excellent boundaries. Without good boundaries, we may get tangled up in the issues and energies of others, and perhaps invade their privacy.

As with nutritional supplements, practices that benefit most people may be inappropriate for a specific individual. Also, substances or practices that benefit initially may be detrimental if used longer than necessary to correct an imbalance. What makes you feel good initially can gradually make you feel bad down the line. Then it’s hard to tell because you associate that product or practice with feeling better. Misapplication of energy practices ranges from having little effect to being unsettling and causing imbalances that are difficult to correct.

All practices that advance health, personal, and spiritual development are enhanced through very specific and personalized application. Ironically: One-size-fits-all programs are not for everyone.

When it comes to powerful energy-changing practices, we have specific and individual needs. Energy work is most effective and safe when tailored to each individual. This being said, some exercises do serve almost everyone. If you are sensitive to energy, pay close attention to how any type of practice impacts you and be certain to speak up or stop if an energy exercise throws you out of balance.

Here is an example: Sometimes profound spiritual retreats include exercises designed to assist in shattering self-identification (ego-based awareness and personality habits). When the personality or ego stands in the way of connection with Other, these practices open up your sense of self and break down our habitual sense of separation.

At a five-day silent retreat a competent and alert Guide altered my practices from those of the group during shattering/opening phase of the retreat. Just thinking about the practices he was recommending to the group made me feel shaky and agitated. He noticed and stepped in, directed me to practice in a way that builds up a body-centered and personal experience of the Divine instead of breaking down walls. I was already too open.

Note that the way to balance being open was not closing or obliterating sensitivity, but finding a way to balance openness with a sense of solidity. Closing down does not ultimately serve us when seeking functional energy boundaries. Finding ways to be balanced and Present is the highest option.

Presence and boundaries are foundational skills. These skills naturally help to develop the ability to become transparent to energy that does not belong with you, allowing it to pass through without sticking. We will pursue this topic more in the next few posts.

Have you ever done energy exercises that made you feel out of balance? What did you do to get back in balance?

How do you tell the difference between energy that originates with you and energy from other sources?

A housecleaner was leaving my home after his second visit. At the door, we were conversing about whether or not to reschedule. I said, “To be perfectly frank, I like your work and feel you are reliable, but I need to adjust to you being in the house. You have really big energy, and I find myself having trouble concentrating. Perhaps I can do errands when you’re here. Of course I couldn’t do that the first time, but now that you know the house, something like that could work.” 

“Can you tell what I am thinking?” he asked, suddenly and baldly. I smiled and he went on: “I mean, I suppose I do notice energy to some extent—but I’m used to being around people who don’t notice that type of thing.”

“I get the impression,” I said gently, “that you have had some experience of being invaded by other people.”

“Oh yes! When haven’t I been invaded?!”

“Lots of us have that experience. It’s more normal than you would think. Take, for example, being a teenager and coming home two hours after curfew. You put your hand on the door and most people know at that point who is awake and whether or not they are in trouble. That’s feeling energy.”

“Sure. I did that.”

“It sounds like you are fairly sensitive to energy.”

“I think I may be, but I haven’t really thought about it that much, and I’m not sure I always know what I’m noticing.”

“My friend who was visiting today scanned you when you came in. I think that may have made you uncomfortable.” He shifted around on his feet. “She’s young yet, and doesn’t realize that it’s invasive to scan someone. Here’s how it works: Some things are in the public space and some are in private space. It’s okay to ‘read’ anything someone puts into the public mind-space. It’s not okay to go into their private mind-space without permission.”

He was looking at me, engaged, taking it in.

“Say you are sitting at a table reading a newspaper. If I walk by and I see the major headlines on the outside, that’s normal and acceptable. I may notice but not really try to read the fairly large headings. I do not sit down or bend over and read the articles. It is a violation for me to come around to the side of the paper you are on and read things without your permission. That is how it works. So: I don’t really pay any attention to what you are thinking. It’s not my business—and it takes work to read it.”

The housecleaner looked relieved and we went on to handle scheduling.

I found the encounter interesting because he was forthright about what he needed to know, and asked directly. For every one like him there are likely to be thirty who will not know how to ask, and a few hundred to whom the concept doesn’t even occur, or who shut down their thoughts and feelings about it before they become aware of them.

How do YOU feel when someone scans you?

If you scan other people, do you use any ethical or practical guidelines?

Do you believe that there is or should be an ethic about scanning other people?

If so, what feels right to you and why?

Here’s an old joke: Two psychics were walking down the street. They stopped, smiled, looked one another up and down, and one said, “You’re fine! How am I?”