Positive Energy Guide

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?

I was doing Inner Work walking in nature, and noticed that I had a few Inner Child inclusions. I made this term up, and find it apt. I am referring to a phenomena that shows up in some types of energy clearing—although most of the fine healers I have seen are unaware of or do not scan for them.

Fragments of another person’s Inner Child become drawn to us when the person has unresolved issues at a particular age and views us as a source for those needs. If they disown that need, and are unaware of the need at the moment, and if one is sympathetic or identifies with their need, the related energy can enter our body or energy fields. We include it as if it is part of us, hence, an inclusion.

Conversely, we can call it an Inner Child exclusion if we have given over a chunk of our energy to someone else. Giving to someone else the energy of a part of self that we are not owning excludes it from our awareness, hence an exclusion. One healer I know refers to disowned or disparaged parts as “exiles.” He is talking about the psychological aspect. I am talking about the energy.

When energy that belongs within becomes attached to or projected onto someone who is seen as a source of need gratification, these chunks become exclusions for the person who disowns them, and inclusions to the person who carries them.

The problem with pushing these chunks away is that doing so maintains an arrested state of development. It is difficult to work effectively on issues when the related energy is not present in the body—along with the sensations and emotions that are connected with it. The problem with taking them on from someone else is that when we think they are part of us we can work and work on related issues and sensations without making much progress. We cannot change something that does not belong to us, so we can find the issues highly resistant to change.

Energy and issues show up in layers. We can clear everything we can find at a given point in time, then after significant growth, discover energy that was not previously accessible. It becomes possible to clear this energy when we get down to the strata of experience wherein that energy has been lodged.

Energy anomalies are always related to our issues. As with psychological issues, they do not show up until we are ready to grow through and beyond the related issues or control previously obscure elements of our personalties.

When I first learned about Inner Child inclusions, I removed all the inclusions I could find. Following periods of intensive Inner Work I occasionally find chunks that were buried and simply could not show up before.

Noticing energy related to complex issues requires dedicated focus. I do my best extended Inner Work walking in nature, when very few people are around. Then I can till the soil of a particular issue by turning it over and over, looking at all the ways that an issue appears in my inner and outer worlds, sensing into and working with the related energies. Movement helps air things out and keeps me grounded and in rhythm. Natural beauty keeps me from getting restless or uncomfortable, like I might be sitting for an extended period. New places and beautiful views give me perspective, elevate my mood, soften my heart, and remind me of that the world contains pleasant options.

As I walked I through out some chunks that had been drawn to me. This should be done lovingly, returning them kindly since the person who disowned them needs to accept them back and process something difficult.

A beginner’s error is to dis-identify with parts that belong inside, imagining that they originate from someone else. Throwing out parts that belong inside creates other problems. Be circumspect and willing to own your “stuff” if you try clearing yourself.

Do you ever feel unreasonable and awkwardly responsible for someone’s needs, in an odd, preverbal and stuck way? You may have inclusions.

Do you find that yourself unable to penetrate with your awareness into an aspect of your Inner Child, even through you can usually access those parts? You may have exclusions.

Discerning inclusions and exclusions  is subtle and complex work, not easy unless you regularly practice energy clearing and Inner Work.