Positive Energy Guide

Mechanical, habitual, or automatic behaviors are the opposite of Presence, of being in touch and aware. Mechanical behaviors usually originate as defense against emotional pain. When we shut down awareness, fear and anger, and self-observation to avoid pain we can become like an automaton in situations that have been painful in the past.

When we intentionally open our self awareness, this Inner Work* puts us in contact with parts of ourselves we can now reclaim in order to be whole and to Wake Up. Waking Up means being fully alive and aware. If we shut down to pain we develop blind spots, resistance to experience, and rigidity that block awareness and keep us asleep whenever pain is present–whether we notice it or not.

I have seen plenty of people who do not know or notice when they are in pain, and appear joyful. In a sense, those who feel their own pain are in a better position for personal or spiritual development because they know they have an issue and can address it. Well-hidden pain can create blind spots that are extremely resistant to discovery.

Embracing and discovering new ways to manage or release hidden or exiled pain is crucial to being self-aware. Our pain can fuel highly effective Inner Work. Releasing fear of pain makes us much more able to muster the courage to love deeply.

Pain is one essential ingredient for Waking Up. Not by courting pain as an automatic habit, but because by confronting pain that has been buried or exiled we free ourselves to become aware and Present in this moment.

Yes we can learn through joy too! Learning through joy is excellent. Most of us first learn through suffering, and then learn to learn through joy. Being able to accept pain is a gateway for authentic joy. Joy involves acceptance. Resisting pain and hardening ourselves to experience can close down joy at the same time. Accepting pain opens the door to joy.

“To know others is wisdom. To know yourself is enlightenment.” Lao Tsu

* I will write more about Inner Work in my next post. Also see “Inner Work as Universal Service.”

Have you ever felt Awakened, received great insight or benefited by passing through pain?

Please share your story in a comment.

Few things are as painful as nerve pain from irritated spinal disks. It shoots, burns, and temporarily cripples. I was physically unable to sit, stand, or lie down for about 36 hours. Being on knees and elbows in total darkness left me unable even to read, totally awake hour after hour with no distractions. Each day bled into the next.

I practiced:

• Finding one spot that didn’t hurt and building sensation out from there, relaxing every place I could.
• Getting my breath down into areas of my body where I did not used to feel fully, activating body parts and organs and increasing my ability to Sense.
• Viewing this difficult time as having value.

Being able to do nothing freed up my sense of time. My habits and patterns were all out of commission. Un-creating our lives and getting off the treadmill of have-tos and all the things we think we need to do and to be creates perspective and opportunities for spiritual growth. I could not use my time as I might wish, but was temporarily released from the necessity and addiction of managing it.

Intentionally making the Observer function far larger than the parts of us that are in pain–by becoming open and curious and releasing resistance to pain–the pain often shrinks down. It may even go away. Mine remained, but my exercises in awareness made it manageable.

I used the pain and period of incapacity to:

• Focus on my Inner Work*
• Develop compassion–for myself and for the suffering of others
• Release pride–I was literally on my knees
• Explore deeper issues about receiving support
• Clear energy blocks related to self-love and support
• Learn how to ask for and receive assistance more gracefully
• Develop gratitude for things I was taking for granted
• Do profound energy work including clearing out energy from clients
• Find the inner strength to remain authentic in a painful passage in relationship
• Find and learn from new healers
• Learn more how to manage pain and help others with pain
• Practice positive spiritual surrender (not giving over—acceptance)

In addition to icing fifteen minutes out of every hour, I maintained a cleansing diet high in fish oil and antioxidants to reduce inflammation, built up levels of vitamin D and minerals, and used enzyme supplements that eat up pathogens as well as inflammation.
These approaches will be a net gain for my whole body.

A friend who had grown distant stepped in to help me. She practiced new found and profound healing skills that she would otherwise have been shy about sharing. Her loving service reestablished and deepened our friendship.

Always remember:

• Resistance is the only pain we can spare ourselves.
• Letting go of intense desires for life, people, or situations to be different than they actually are can alleviate suffering.
• Don’t waste your pain.

*I will post on Inner Work after the Pain series. Also see Inner Work as Universal Service

What benefit have you been able to create in painful circumstances?

Social trends that involve acting ultra-positive cast grim shadows. I said “acting,” not “Being.” Many of us work very hard to “be positive”–by busily judging others and ourselves when one of us expresses distress.

Distress generally indicates unmet needs, including the need for expression. Disregarding distress is the opposite of being in touch; Being Present. Distress, when we carefully heed it and make an intelligent response, can keep us from developing illness, allowing problems to build up, overlooking life purpose, or becoming emotionally isolated.

I am not suggesting that we indulge a habit of constant complaint instead of taking action. I am suggesting compassionate presence, authenticity, and constructive action.

When pain comes knocking and we ignore it, it tends to knock more loudly. Don’t make pain break down your door.

Do not waste pain. What does this mean?

Pain is an awakener. Pain can bear gifts. We can discover or create advantages through pain when it is present. I am not talking about trying to convince yourself with your mind, but actually using unavoidable pain for positive processes.

Here are some examples of how to use pain:

• Notice what is going on so we can intervene while issues are still small
• To awaken compassion and open your heart
• To discover who we are deep inside and more about life
• To learn what we resist and what we want
• To inspire new responses to situations
• To create opportunities for positive change
• To direct our attention to issues we have been ignoring

These examples are abstract. I will address possibilities concretely in “Part Two, Using Pain to Improve Your Life”

If you bring forth what is within you,
What you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
What you do not bring forth will destroy you.
—Jesus, from The Gospel According to Thomas

How do YOU use pain to your advantage, without courting more?

Question: “Is there a particular place/article on your site that I could go to get insight/strategies/direction on how to really get rid of the anger that keeps coming up.  I try to do the work, monitor thoughts etc. but I do not feel like I have had any breakthrough.”

My Response: Getting rid of an emotion is like shooting the messenger. When we seek to get rid of an emotion we lose the opportunity to learn about who we are and what we need.

As with all powerful emotions, anger provides information about yourself and your needs. As you learn to handle anger according to its origin in yourself, you can use your anger in your personal work to increase self-awareness, direct your activities, and support optimum health.

The difference between suppression–including suppressive therapies or belief systems—and real self-integration hinges on our ability to observe ourselves with neutrality. Self-observation without condemnation allows us to eventually embrace ourselves in our entirety.

Let’s talk about some of the possible origins of anger and how to address them. Here are a few examples:

Physical causes: Excess energy in your liver can make you angry. Excess liver energy can be balanced several different ways, bringing more ease and peace. If it comes from a toxic load, reduce toxins and use supplements that support liver clearance.

Constitutional causes: If your liver gets over-stimulated owing to the way your system customarily manages survival, related to a lot of strong energy around trying to get things done, this energy can be balanced by strengthening lung functions. Breathing practices and creating clear structure and order in your life can calm this down.

Emotional causes: Anger is a most often a reaction to persons or situations. Explore exactly and specifically what it is that sets you off. What is it about yourself that comes up when you get set off? How can you support the needs, boundaries, fears, or communication that will bring you relief when you first begin to feel the distress that later flares up and becomes anger?

Energy-based techniques like EFT and others tap on acupuncture points related to the liver and gall bladder to reduce and eliminate anger. ThoughtField Therapy and EMDR address the energy and origins of trauma, which can underlie anger. Resolving your “triggers” can reduce anger by allowing you to remain more balanced. I would call this “addressing” anger, not “getting rid of it.” This focus is positive and integrative, not suppressive.

Mental element: The parts of you that speak through your anger may become more aggravated if you shut them out. “Monitoring thoughts” is a sticky wicket. Maintaining a constructive outlook is helpful. Trying to prevent yourself from thinking and feeling what you think and feel interferes with self-observation and leads to suppression and dissociation. Try gently steering the parts of yourself that produce thoughts you do not like into avenues of exploration that will support what they actually need.

Beware of perfectionism. It is generally driven by childhood issues and antagonistic to compassion.

Life situation: The liver can become irritated when we need to set better boundaries. When anger begins to surface, ask yourself how you might structure your life and your time to change circumstances that stimulate anger. Rather than getting rid of your anger, alter your circumstances, or the way you respond within them.

Watch yourself in your daily life and see if you can catch the exact moment when your anger shows up. See if you can discover what your anger is asking you to do for yourself; what you need for balance or relief. Now you can address your need with compassion.

Regardless of its origins, the energy of anger can be channelled into constructive expression that leads to improvements in your life. Find a positive motivation or a change to make that will uproot your anger at its cause. This might involve changing your circumstances, setting a boundary, or learning to speak your needs in a timely manner.

If you cannot find the sources of your anger, call for an appointment and I will help you to discover them.

Got Questions? Enter them at AskTeresa.com

One adjustment to your approach can bring your health, your Inner Work and your life expression into full blossom. This adjustment is what I call “Working the Up Side.” This principle applies across the board, from physical, structural, and nutritional health through life direction and business success.

Many of us tend to cancel appointments for care or support then we begin to feel better. Working the Up Side means taking on our challenging issues when we are feeling good. When we first begin to feel better the iceberg of distress has retreated just beneath the water line. This does not mean it has been resolved. It may surface again with a bit of stress. When we stop doing what is working too soon we not only invite a relapse but miss the opportunity to:

• Resolve underlying issues, not just surface expressions
• Use our previous distress to full, positive advantage
• Address difficulties from a position of strength, resource, and creativity
• Eliminate the need to get symptoms or distress again
• Optimize and improve instead of simply maintaining
• Move into new and exciting territory by building on gains and successes

When it comes to developing positive energy, consistent practice over time actually transforms us. Paying attention to our needs and processes only when we feel drained or distressed keeps us stuck at the level where we require problems to motivate us. Working the Up Side means making a study of what works. We become motivated more by pleasure and less by pain.

When you begin to feel better, pay special attention to what you did that worked. Exactly how did you feel before? What helped? Be specific.

How did support or an intervention change the way you relate with others? How did your sensations and emotions shift? Does your breath sit differently in your body? How have your energy levels and flows changed?

Super-aware presence during times of improvement help to stabilize your changes.

At what point do YOU set aside the support that makes you feel better? What do you tell yourself about it?

Sensation is arguably the most important element in the alchemy of personal and spiritual development.

Feeling is indispensable to the experience of meaning. If we shut down our feeling function we cut off our avenue to experience meaning. This can lead to depression as we become unable to connect inner value with outer experience.

Let me explain: Meaning is an internal experience, based on feeling. We see something on the outside—behavior, art, beauty, synchronicity—and it means something BECAUSE OF what WE FEEL in response. Making up a mental interpretation or assumption does not move us. That yields mere platitudes. Feeling moves us.

Body information (sensation) is intimately related to emotion. Through sensation we learn what we feel, and how to move through those feelings.

We are touched by events only to the extent that we are able to open to feeling.

Whether we shut down feeling to protect ourselves from pain or to give ourselves or others a false sense of simplicity, the result is the same: We are less available to life and love.

Let me take this a little farther: Sensation in the body provides us with the clues necessary to explore our responses to people and events.

Fears, issues, assumptions, and lack of appropriate internal attention can make it next to impossible to experience our own subtle emotions–especially if we are conflicted about something and wish we were not. Lack of subtle attention makes it necessary to get all the way out of balance in order to notice what we feel and need.

Careful attention to sensation such as tension and breathing patterns, flow or blockage, facial expression, hand position, etc. provide us with subtle and useful information about ourselves. This body-accessed information informs and influences our feelings. For example, a hunched posture shuts down the lungs and diaphragm and can make us feel low energy and unhappy.

Sensation is key to self-knowledge. This speaks to the purpose of the body.

Almost all energy-changing tools support and develop sensing.

What have you noticed about the relationship between sensation and energy?

Tips to Renew Yourself

This post is about practical ways to create an experience of renewal.

Every day, every moment is here once. When it’s gone it’s gone. The opportunity—for love, for some small measure of awakening, for choice, for a full and complete breath—is gone with it. Our children are one more day past innocence and toward running the world. Yes, as we hurtle through space on this spinning globe, the next moment presents, seamlessly from the last. Yet something is gone forever. Use this.

Quit putting off anything that brings real meaning for you, the things you would regret from your deathbed. Make bold choices.

Release anything that no longer serves you:

• Forgive while simultaneously strengthening fluid boundaries
• Get rid of things you don’t use. Give them to charity
• Deep clean your home and your body
• Move beyond the familiar by inviting yourself to make one fresh choice

Renew your life by setting clear intention in every moment you can remember.

• Nurture the body with respectful eating
• Let the people you love know it
• Express appreciation that may have remained silent
• Buy yourself flowers and put them anywhere you work too much

Regenerate your inner life:
How does regeneration come about? Please let me use a few words and relax any old associations with them.
The word confession does not have to be about religion or guilt. It can be about empowering yourself to speak your truth. With this meaning, confession is about being able to say who you are.

The word redemption does not have to be about religion either, although it can be if you like.
What if every act we do to reclaim parts of ourselves we pushed away is an act of redemption? It can be.
Chose to be whole and authentic. Use every moment you can to wake up a tiny bit more to choice.

Spring is especially glorious this year in Seattle. Some years it slips by almost without my notice, lost in the clutter of my to-do list. This year the energies present offer major opportunity for transformation—if we respond.

Use the winds of change to scour your life down to the fresh, vital skin so you shinewith the sweet, tender shoots and buds bursting into world. You may think you’ve seen them, but these particular flowers have never been here before and will not last. Focus on being fully alive.

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as in being able to remake ourselves.
–Mahatma Gandhi

What are YOUR secrets to renewal?

What makes guidance effective?

Here are some considerations, followed by guidelines below:

The most useful guidance is rarely one-size-fits-all. Our bodies, personalities, beliefs, and aims differ.

Social consensus–agreement–is often considered truth within a society. This does not make it so. Prejudice, for instance, rests on social agreement.

Our perception of what is true changes as we develop emotionally and spiritually.

I have clients who hold public offices or handle large sums of other people’s money, and clients who would find such responsibilities a distraction and a waste of their lives. Teaching children has just as much influence and value. Social standing and money are not the standards for the value of your life. They matter to some and are insignificant to others. Effective guidance takes this into account.

The value of our lives rests on our inner experience of meaning, not on social approval.

Guidance or advice can be effective but not truly of service. Someone can guide you to conform to values that are not right for you. The best guidance assists you to discover and express what you want for yourself, not what others think you should want. Being effectively guided in a direction that is not a fit for you is not service.

Effective guidance in service:

• Begins with recognizing where we are actually at now.
• Respects our personal aims and values.
• Resonates with what we know inside.
• Impacts our lives.
• Feels meaningful to us personally.
• Is specific to our needs rather than asking us to conforming to an external standard.
• Provides a sense of direction.
• Provides a clear sense of how to apply it in our lives.
• Leads to increased clarity.
• Makes us feel “seen.”
• Makes us feel more like our authentic selves.

I would love to have your comments and questions about what makes guidance effective. Please share below.

Part 3 discuses dealing with destructive criticism. I know some of you may be in situations in which others criticize you ruthlessly and without constructive intent.

Even mean and vile criticism can be used for good if you are strong enough to do so. If you are not, do your best to develop skills to deflect it while working to take yourself out of the situation.

I was once in a situation during which someone with a personality disorder yelled criticism and blame at me continuously for several hours. Escape would have been quite difficult. This situation was unusual in that I was fairly certain it would occur before I put myself into it, and prepared myself in advance, with help from my primary healer.

I took the situation on as a spiritual practice. My job was to keep the energy centers in my body flowing correctly, without letting them flip or twist from their balanced positions. Keeping the energy centers or chakras balanced can keep you feeling safe and able to function with clarity. The ability to do this obviously has prerequisites, such as being able to sense your energy centers well enough to feel their positions, and staying in your body during discomfort. If you do not know how to do this, the tips in Part Two help with the psycho-emotional aspects of managing criticism.

Here is what I did inside during the two-hour flood of criticism:

• I relaxed my body as completely as possible.
• I watched to make sure I was breathing evenly and began breathing in and out of my heart.
• I reached out inside for the people who loved me, imagining them with me and feeling connected.
• I took care to stay focused in my body.
• I reminded myself that the person hurling criticism was in pain.
• I kept compassion present for both of us.
• I let the criticism flow around me, breathing in love and safety.
• I made note of several grains of truth to contemplate gently under better circumstances.
• I stayed with my own experience and withdrew my impulses to assist, judge, or manage the other person.
• I reminded myself of my better qualities to counterbalance the input.
• I nurtured my inner child.
• I reminded myself that I am loveable whether or not I have flaws, and that no one can hurt my self esteem as an adult unless I participate.

Learning to remain in the situation without allowing myself to be damaged was similar to an initiation. It solidified something inside me that could only be worked against intensity in order to become established. After going through this I remained much more able to stay WITH myself and in my body during uncomfortable situations, and to keep my energy intact instead of being frayed by other people’s issues.

Understand that the ability to keep one’s self safe, at an energy level as well as emotionally, is complex. I had been working on and off for years to develop in my energy systems the frequencies and patterns that allow one to experience safety. So please don’t throw yourself into situations that you are not prepared to manage.

Removing yourself from destructive circumstances is your responsibility unless you are able to use them to your spiritual or personal growth advantage.

Have you had an experience where you used your own or someone else’s criticism of you to improve your life? If so, feel free to share how you worked with yourself to make this possible.

Criticism Can Be Used For:

• Learning where our hot buttons are
• Fuel for inner work
• Learning to strengthen our boundaries
• Practicing social skills
• Determining what is important to us
• Spiritual practice overcoming ego or learning to love

Tips for dealing with criticism:

–Stay WITH yourself so you can nurture yourself

–Bring the neutral OBSERVER part of you to the foreground of your awareness to reduce any tendency to react

–Ask yourself whether or not you agree with the criticism. If you do, aim to make a pact with yourself to change your behavior, and thank the person for telling you. Telling you may have taken courage or been an expression of authenticity.

–If you are not sure whether you agree with a critical comment, ask yourself: “Is this a person whose opinion I especially respect?” If the answer is yes, give yourself time to consider whether you might like to incorporate his or her opinion into your actions. See what it feels like to embrace it instead of pushing it away.

–If your answer is no, consider the critical comment an opinion. You are not compelled to agree, but do not resist. If you cannot allow the person to hold an opinion you don’t like, work with a trusted advisor to discover exactly why this topic sticky for you. What does this situation or your feelings about it  remind you of or bring up for you?

Remorse can be a tremendous stimulus to change behaviors that do not work–as long as you don’t let it turn into further criticism and snowball. The results of our acts are ‘punishment’ enough. Adding to them by being unkind is like playing God. Our job is to use the feedback we get to adjust behavior that doesn’t make us happy, not to make ourselves unhappy rolling in it.

Using your response to criticism to motivate your inner work keeps you growing and getting stronger.

Destructive criticism is more challenging, but can still be used for positive inner purposes. Doing so takes some self and/or social mastery. I will say more about withstanding destructive criticism in Part Three.

What constructive uses have you made or seen others make of criticism?