Positive Energy Guide

Balanced development has requirements of which we may be unaware. When we have difficulty growing in a desired direction, there may be a natural prerequisite. Profound states of awareness can lead to issues and distortion, for example, without the anchor and safety of grounded body awareness.

The story below explores the relationship between expansion of consciousness and body awareness:

After a number of hard knocks over a short period, it took me several days doing intensive practices while walking in the woods to access expanded awareness and open my heart. Expansion felt great after being so contracted for so long! By “expansion” I mean feeling LARGE, diffuse, blissful, extended into the space around me, and connected with all life.

I worked with my breath, energy, and divine names. With my energy fields expanded I noticed that my awareness seemed to extend for half a mile or so around me. When other hikers passed me I felt contracted. Some wanted to say “hi,” or had various issues active and running in their energy systems. Interfacing was uncomfortable.

I began to alternate between breathing into my hara/belly center and bones, and relaxing into expansion. I practiced pulling all the way into my body, resisting the almost inevitable pull to “leak” energy as soon as people showed up. I practiced keeping my energy contained. When I did this I picked up signals to the effect that people experienced me I as cold. Containment felt counter to my natural affability.

I now had to work through my feelings and judgments about allowing myself to separate from others when I need to. At first I felt that I must choose between being friendly and being intact. As I gained skill in alternating between my expanded state and anchoring in my belly, I became able to give people a moment of friendly contact and then pull my energy back in after they passed, noticing any leaking that may have begun to occur. (I’ve learned to relate openly without leaking when I’m working. Apparently doing it in passing is a different skill. I think that’s about wanting to connect quickly and going too deep too fast.)

As people passed, I returned to my expanded, fully-open state, letting myself spread out and feel connected with nature and life. If I stay that open at close range with people I still tend to pick Stuff up. This is getting less and less as I am able to maintain a strong anchor and quickly sort my energy out from theirs.

I look forward to being able to maintain expanded states and solid body awareness at the same time, experiencing unity without feeling entangled. Practicing states alternately is a good start.

When we habitually “read” the energy around us it can keep us in contracted states. We look out AT people and may feel invaded by them instead of feeling at One.  SENSING the energy is different than “reading” it. We just know, just feel, just sense. Sensing is less characterized by a sense of being the Doer. It is body centered, not mind centered.

It is easier to feel the heart from sensing than from thinking.

By Sensing we can feel connected without leaking or taking unwanted energy in. Simply sensing–without an overlay of thought– does not involve considerations about what might be. It stays with what IS. Sensing relies on body awareness AND energy awareness. The body becomes the anchor–but the whole boat is part of us too.

Which of the themes in this post do YOU connect with the most?

How aware are you of your energy responses to other people?

Why Feel Your Pain Body? This poem speaks to the spiritual benefits of facing our pain:

The Truth stands before me,
On my left is a blazing fire, and
On my right, a cool flowing stream.
One group of people walks toward the fire, into the fire,
And the other towards the cool flowing waters.
No one knows which is blessed and which is not.
But just as someone enters the fire,
That head bobs up from the water,
And just as a head sinks into the water,
That face appears in the fire.
Those who love the sweet water of pleasure
And make it their devotion are cheated by this reversal.
The deception goes further-
The voice of the fire says:
“I am not fire, I am fountainhead,
Come into me and don’t mind the sparks.”
~ Rumi

Going into rather than pulling away from our pain creates a portal-like place of leverage through which we can access authenticity and positive vulnerability. These states are essential to experiencing true healing and deep intimacy.

To anchor the process, I asked a client exactly what she had done to move herself from self-condemnation into insight and relief. I was extraordinarily moved listening to her breakthrough in confronting her pain with self-compassion. Her heartfelt awe and amazement at the way her experience changed is inspiring. Here are some excerpts(with permission):
“I just go in and be with the sadness, and stop trying to move against it or defend it in any way.”

“When I move through the behaviors I do not go into shame. What drives everything [unpleasant behaviors] is NOT going into the pain. When I go right to what the feeling really IS and express it, I can address what is really bothering me and I can receive support.”

“I was willing to look at it without judging, putting aside my inner critic and seeing where am I TODAY: How do I feel and what do I need?”

“My opportunity for change and shift expands. When I’m in my positive vulnerability, there is a larger space; I do not operate in this tiny vacuum. And I LIKE that space a lot! I don’t feel small or pitiable. I feel like I have more space to move emotionally. I feel like I have real freedom when I am positively vulnerable. I have positive choice. This feeling is incredibly beautiful.”

“I look at myself differently, and at my life differently, and I do things differently in my life. It’s not always something huge. The things can be small things like the way I bring myself to work or the way I eat dinner, but they make a big difference. Life is made out of these moments.”

We so often long for or seek purpose in life. We tend to look for something grandiose. Moments of sincere Presence with ourselves has inherent meaning. Real intimacy with ourselves invites real intimacy with others. We learn to relax the mechanistic resistance, blocking, avoidance, distraction, and shutting down that keep us from feeling fully live, engaged, and accessible to joy. Pain, accepted, can be a gateway to meaningful engagement.

Our energy does something amazing when we fully enter into intense feeling, with compassion. The frequencies that pour through us connect universally with others. They flow through us into the world in a way that supports love, compassion, connection, and healing. Our energy impacts all the souls we touch from inside, and spreads to everyone with whom they are linked. This experience is profoundly meaningful.

Can YOU recall an experience in which you fully allowed and accepted pain without judging yourself or pulling away from feeling?

Were you surprised by what happened?

I initially learned about my pain body from my main healer. She only told me it is an energy body that contains and ‘runs’ (automates) our accumulation of old pain, influencing our behavior.

The last time I went to her in heaps of pain, she told me I was “doing pretty well with my pain body”. That surprised me since I was feeling a lot of pain. Inquiring, I found out that “doing well” meant I was more at one with my pain, instead of pushing it away from myself.

For more than a month I had been accumulating pain. One painful event rolled over into another without enough down time to fully feel and adequately recover from each hit and before the next arrived. The mostly-unexpected death of an extended family member disoriented me and cut off a vital source of support.

My habit of taking things in stride, staying constructive, and performing my duties as impeccably as possible usually strengthens me. Work can order, regulate, and balance me. Suddenly the activities that usually help became an additional strain.

Our strengths sometimes become our undoing. We may power through or stay positive on the surface while our innards are screaming out. Meanwhile our bodies layer on stress and tension. It can be better to break a bit than to stay too strong, to let down enough to get back to a flexible flow.

I woke up one morning realizing that I was ‘coping’ way too well–and burying agony. My healer had said, “Don’t let your pain body win!” when I left her house. But how?

Contemplating this, I realized I must start a campaign to release my backed up pain. I began with the current score:
Pain body: 12
Teresa: 1

Not good for the first round.

A full-effort campaign to make myself a priority looked like this:

• Alter chemistry: Dump grains and sugars, add vegetable juice, bone broth, and consistent protein. Walk daily, early to bed, more water.
• Observe self
• Update nutritional supplement program
• Observe self
• Change my game by taking on things I usually leave be and leaving be things I usually take on. State my needs. If necessary, take unilateral action to meet them. Say “no” when I need to.
• Observe self
• Let housework, non-personal email, to-do lists etc. pile up.
• Schedule appointments to receive services.
• Observe self
• Seek healing kinds of pleasure–
• Spend time outside, watch nature
• Get massage
• Sunlight
• Observe beauty
• Cook lovingly
• Watch a show with a friend
• Observe self
• Make spiritual practice a priority.
• Observe self
• Take some time off and just BE without pressure to DO anything.
• Observe self

. . . and quit complaining about not getting anything done!

New Score:
Pain Body: 3
Teresa: 18

Letting the pain body win means allowing old habits surrounding pain to run on automatic, keeping us from being self-aware enough to make fresh choices. It means letting the pain run us. When we push it away we become less aware of it, so unconscious patterns prevail.

Taking on the pain body is more than taking on our needs. It consists of noticing the ways we give over to pain or submerge it, and allowing current and authentic feeling to emerge. Only when we feel what is going on do we know how to care for ourselves in ways that dissolve and release our pain.

I did not include in my list my processes of attending to feeling and self-inquiry because I was already doing them. I will describe them in detail and discuss the pain body more in following posts.

What do YOU do when intense inner pain comes up?

How do reset yourself so pain discharges instead of accumulating?

The dream I had Christmas morning speaks to spiritual transformation through balancing inner masculine and feminine elements. Its message is useful to many of us:

I entered a large cathedral with a high, vaulted ceiling into an open chapel without pews. The congregation stood attentively toward the front. As I stepped forward to join, I almost passed a small, ancient woman, seated with her back to a pillar with her legs out in front of her. She was observing me gently. I recognized her as a revered holy woman I had met seven years earlier. I said, “Hello Mother,” bringing my hands together in reverent greeting.

“Hello Teresa,” she returned. She smiled at my astonishment that she remembered my name after so many years and thousands of pilgrims. In her East Indian tradition, I stooped to touch my head to her feet. She had none. Or rather, she had part of a left foot and no right foot at all. I touched my head where her feet would be, brushing the left with the crown of my head. She winced a bit.

I woke up without understanding this dream, yet knowing that it held a message for me. It felt like a gift. In the way of dreams, its imagery means something different in the world of symbols than what initially occurs to the conscious mind.

Shortly after the dream I found myself in a frustrating situation to which I felt unable to respond. As my frustration rose and crested, the meaning of my dream surfaced on its wave.

The pillar was comprised of two rectangular columns at right angles, so its footprint formed a cross. This shape made it strong and gave the pillar four inner angles where one could shelter. Among other things, the cross represents the point of intersection between the earth (horizontal) and ascending (vertical) planes of experience. The sometimes-painful point of contact between our current realities and our ideals is the “place” where our inner work occurs. It is the crucible that develops self-awareness. Columns also represent the wood element, which includes boundaries.

The Holy Mother–in this case a common person who had developed herself through devotion–represents the Positive Feminine. She is seated on stone (earth element/grounding), with her back to cement. The cement and vaulted ceiling represent the Positive Male, providing sacred structure and support.

The Positive Feminine is presented in surrender to the Divine. She JUST IS. She does not need to ACT to have VALUE. She is OF value and precious simply because she exists. She is not in self will. She is surrendered to reality. There is no where for her to fall. She is in her bliss– with or without feet is no matter. She receives support at her base from the earth and at her back from what has been build by man.

This image speaks to a real life situation in which I become stymied because it is not mine to fix. When I push too hard I go from Positive Male (structure, initiative, support, boundaries, direction) to Negative Male (over-DOing, frustration, aggression). Or I am drawn toward Negative Feminine (helplessness, passivity, indulgence, valuelessness, destruction through neglect).

Positive Feminine represents surrender into preciousness; non-doing with full spiritual value.

Why does she wince when I put down my head? Why has she no feet?

In my process of awakening so far I have brought the qualities I need in and down most of the way, but I cannot yet fully stand in them. I feel helpless when I cannot move forward, and can find contacting hard realities painful. My work point is to lean into my distress and grow stronger feet, not to force action, but to bring the Holy Feminine fully into life. Then I will have the patience to NOT act when BEing is a better choice.

Message from the Divine Feminine: “Observe yourself, through my eyes of love. I recognize and accept you. When you fully accept life exactly as it is you are not compelled to DO anything about it. Residing in inner preciousness is your place of refuge.”

How is YOUR balance between inner Male and Female energies?

Can you move freely from one to the other according to the situation, or do you get stuck in one polarity?

This post on using energy and sound to balance hyperactive children was written by my competent friend Barbara McKell, who practices energy medicine in Ontario:

This summer I had some long fruitful conversations during a visit with my friend Teresa Dietze. On one walk together the subject came up of children being drugged with Ritalin. I have always felt it was abhorrent to drug a child. Through greater patience, understanding and a holistic approach, this is completely unnecessary to solve issues with children’s behavior.

I told Teresa about a mother I met at a workshop I was conducting. I will call her Jenny to protect her privacy. After the workshop Jenny came up to me and asked me if I would work with her son. Jenny was very distressed because the school her 6-year-old son was attending asking her to put him on Ritalin because of attention and behavioral problems. They had begun to take extreme measures with him in the classroom. His educators had put a partition around his desk, so that he would not be stimulated by the activities in the class and could not disrupt the other children. This tactic wasn’t working and Jenny had asked them not to do it.  Then they told Jenny that if she were not willing to have Jonathan put on Ritalin, they would have to remove him from the classroom.

Jenny was desperate. I told her I would be happy to work with her son. She brought Jonathan in the following week. The child I met in office was bright, alert and very curious, but he was not the type of child you could sit down with and have a quiet conversation. He was stimulated by all the energies in the new surroundings. In order to interact with him on a level that would be comfortable for him, I encouraged him to move around and touch some of the objects in the room. He was fascinated and his little mind had a hundred questions at once. In my healing room there are many crystals, sacred objects and sound healing instruments. After some exploration and many questions, Jonathan began to settle in a little. His curiosity and ability to operate on many levels at once was being honored and he was feeling safe and comfortable.

He then zeroed in on a musical instrument made by Woodstock Chimes. It is constructed in a xylophone format with the chimes tubes and creates amazing sound no matter how the instrument is played.

We sat on the floor together producing wonderful soothing rhythms to which he responded by becoming even more relaxed and comfortable. Jenny was witnessing the whole interaction and with tears in her eyes. She told me that Jonathan had told her on the way over, before he even met me, that he was going to see Barbara so he could play music with her. She told him she didn’t think so. Now she was witnessing the very thing he had said would happen in his session with me.

Discovering how sound affected him I decided to try out a set of tuning forks with him. I had him stand up and I used a D and an A fork. I use a method with the D&A tuning forks that I learned in a Jonathan Goldman workshop many years ago. It is highly effective for children who been labeled ADD and ADHD.

I simply hold a tuning fork in each hand and gently strike the forks to get them resonating. The two forks sounding together create a harmonic, which is referred to as a “Sacred Fifth”. I move the tuning forks around the auric field and weave them down and around body, usually three times, moving slowly past the ears so the recipient not only feels the vibration throughout their entire field, but can also hear as the forks move past their ears. There is also a cross over motion, which brings the brain into balance while the weaving motion balances the Chakras.

Jonathan loved this and asked me to do it again. After we had done it two more times there was a remarkable difference in him. An air of calm and confidence had settled in. Now he was ready to receive a little more energy work and the rest of the session went like a charm. Jenny was so impressed that she bought a set of the D&A tuning forks and I showed her how to use them.

A few months later I saw Jenny and asked how Jonathan was doing. She told me he was doing beautifully. The work he did with me had held. He had learned to discern for himself when he was out of balance. When this happened he simply ran and got the tuning forks, handed them to his mother and “Here mommy, tune me”. There was no need to drug him or segregate him all that was necessary was a little understanding and a non-invasive tune up.

Barbara McKell,
Visionary Artist and Energy Medicine Practitioner, Guelph Ontario
http://www.reikikids.ca

Self-possession is a particular quality of Presence. The state of self-possession naturally expresses boundaries, a sense of dignity, and the ability to feel emotionally safe around others. When we know who we are and where we are, we define ourselves rather than letting other people define us.

Here is a story I shared that was helpful to a client learning to stay present with her feelings in group situations:

Historically I felt unrecognized in groups and found myself being shut down by the leaders when I spoke out. During a ten-day partly-Zen retreat I practiced sitting in my body and sensing while my inner wounds were active, instead of pulling away through action or distraction. The next time I became triggered in a group setting I was able to stay present. This means that I maintained body-awareness and awareness of my surroundings instead of going off in my head or being lost in the emotions that came up.

I made what I thought was a useful comment in the group. The leader abruptly and intentionally cut me off. Since I was Present, I noticed that the first three words of my comment made it seem like I was speaking about a specific person.

In the past I might have found myself spacing out while helpless, frustrated thoughts arose, disconnecting me from the group. Confident that I could stay with and support myself inside if I were to feel hurt, I stuck around. I restated my comment, leaving the out three words that may have caused misinterpretation. Instead of seeing the group like blobs in chairs like we do when lost in thought, I looked around and noticed that eyes in the group were supporting me.

Turning to the leader I said, “I think this comment is appropriate for our context.” My body language made my statement a respectful question. I remained open to her input so she would still be in control of the group. This respect for the group and her leadership gave her room to agree, and she did.

When we cannot stay Present with our experience and we check out, other people sense the energy of our distress. If they are sensitive to energy they may feel this distress as their own, and think it is theirs. The distress in the room can become magnified like a hall of mirrors. In discomfort, they may shut down to us–as we have already shut down to them by checking out.

Trying to compensate for the discomfort of feeling too open to energy creates a paradoxical state in which one is too open in some ways and too closed in others at the same time. Going head-on into the distress, grounding and balancing, and making a statement that addresses your interests or needs brings clarity back into the room.

Uncomfortable situations can transform us once if we can define, communicate, and address our needs. This starts by staying with discomfort and feeling where it goes in your body. By surrendering resistance to the discomfort, we become able to drawn on resources that allow us to break new ground.

What type of situation challenges your boundaries?
What do you need to embrace in yourself to face that situation fully, without pulling away or shutting down?

Being comfortable and clear relies on knowing where we start and stop, what is part of us and what is not, which feelings and sensations originate with us and which come from other people or events. The more intuitive we are the harder it is to make this call.

Mystics experience all life as one. The psychologist Jung coined the term “collective unconscious,” where personal experience merges into what is essentially the group mind of all of us together

The more expanded your awareness the harder it can be to tell your own cup of water from the ocean. In actuality, water that runs through us has been in many different people, places, plants, periods of time, and life forms. We now call the water and minerals of our bodies “I.” Atoms jump in and out and energy interpenetrates us in the sea of greater-than-self awareness.

The task of knowing who we are involves being able to sort out different levels of awareness. Telling our bodies apart is easy. Sorting my feelings out from your feelings can be easy or hard, depending on early experiences, how similar we are, and other factors. The mind world is a stickier wicket. If you’ve ever had the same dream a friend had on the same night you have an idea how hard it can be to sort out mind from mind.

The most distinctly personal levels of our minds have a distinct and separate energy frequency or signature that identifies us to ourselves and to those who can identify persons through the energy of their thoughts. Advanced Intuitives and those who are trained in Remote Viewing, for example, have this skill.

Transpersonal levels of mind are more diffuse. The thoughts of everyone are out there in the mind-cloud of general human awareness and can jump from mind to mind. In Family Constellation/ Reconstruction sessions, where group members agree to represent one person’s relatives, it is not unusual for participants to temporarily express very specific emotions and physical symptoms of persons they know next to nothing about. This is exemplifies transpersonal experience. The group mind allows for transfer of information without words.

Boundary confusion STARTS WITH energy. Energy is not a woo-woo abstraction. Energy is a real part of the non-verbal communication that actually occurs during events when boundary issues begin. When a parent or family member invades a child through inappropriate acts, for example, the energy part of the communication actually enters the fields or body of that child. This type of energy is stick and hard to throw back out because the child cannot tell who it belongs to, owning it. This is one major cause of issues with boundaries.

Boundaries are primarily about sensing/knowing what is yours and what is not. This especially includes knowing what you are and are not responsible for causing or creating. Taking inappropriate responsibility for the feelings of someone who is attempting to manipulate you emotionally is an example of boundary confusion. You do not cause their emotions and you are not responsible for stopping them. They are. You ARE responsible for finding an effective and preferably respectful way to get away, and for taking care of your own emotional needs. Your need to be liked, for example, must not overpower your need for safety.

Making sure to be consistently authentic is an act of healing if you have any issues with boundaries. This minimizes giving yourself away to try and please others, second-guessing them, or otherwise getting them in your space and you in theirs. State straight out what you feel comfortable or uncomfortable with, respectfully, and work out positive solutions that work for everyone whenever you can. Challenges can often be used to hone new skills.

“Boundaries” is another word for self-possession. Self-possession is a fascinating term if you think about like this: If you are in possession of yourself, nothing else can possess you. When you are fully in your body and in touch with your feelings, energy that does not belong to you passes through but does not take up residence.

Do you ever get confused about what is YOU and what is someone else?
What types of energy do you get confused with?
What kinds of actions help you sort yourself out?

This post series speaks to learning to manage sensitivity to energy. Presence and Boundaries are cornerstones of this skill. You have to BE HERE to make a boundary.

The more able we are to be Present and the better we know ourselves, the easier it is to deal with energy we find uncomfortable to experience. If we are honest with ourselves and pay attention we will find that when we absent ourselves in some way through distraction, dissociation, or diversion, we do so because we feel uncomfortable. Often some feeling we don’t like is trying to surface into awareness. We stop it by checking out.

Being comfortable feeling our discomfort is a big key to being able to stick around in the here-now moment no matter what we feel. Although counterintuitive, this skill forms a foundation for learning to manage our own energy. Once we can stay present with our own, we begin to be able to sort it out from external influences.

Bell Rock Vortex

Allowing and observing discomfort instead of trying to escape from it is a very Zen kind of practice. It is the foundation of quite a few types of foundational spiritual work. Basic self-observation—sticking around and noticing what is going on—is also key to numerous therapeutic and healing techniques.

Let’s discuss what it takes to become more comfortable with discomfort.

In response to my Post Series about feeling the energy of the world, one brave man wrote: “I do feel the energy of the world, and it bothers me sometimes. All the unrest in the Middle East caused all sorts of funny energies, restless energies to hit me. I can also feel the energy of some people around me. I just don’t quite know what to do with it, how to process these energies. It is things like that which makes me need to numb myself unfortunately.” (Quoted and responded to with permission.)

I would like especially to address those of you seek ways to “numb out” when energy gets intense and those of you who get confused about what is and is not your responsibility. The common link here is that you need to be more Present in your body. This previous 3-post blog defines and also discusses “being in your body.” (Scroll part way down that page.)

Being in your body is fundamental to being Present, and to having effective boundaries. In order to keep from getting confused about what energy, emotions and thoughts are yours and which ones come from other people or events, you need to learn to clearly and distinctly feel and identify your own sensations and emotions.

Body sensations are the easiest place to start. These sensations change with each emotion, and when we get connected with different types of energy. It’s important to have a solid baseline of sensory experience so you can begin to tell what is yours. Again, this begins by sticking around.

Dissociation or disconnection from parts of ourselves—physical, emotional, thought, or energy—is a defense against pain. But when we abandon or fragment ourselves we cannot effectively nurture ourselves and minister effectively to this pain. The survival tool of pulling away is not so useful for sticking around and doing repair. Being Present helps us to learn when to physically withdraw, and to make new, more-effective responses to our needs.

Setting boundaries means recognizing your discomfort and being able to make decisions that are healthy for you; staying whole when things happen.

Post #2 will begin to explore constructive responses to emotions, sensations, and energies.

What do YOU notice about how you respond to discomfort?
Can you stay Present and feel it, or do you find a way to avoid your feelings and sensations?

This post suggests compassionate responses and actions we can take to stay balanced during times of major change:

Don’t take the ambient energy personally. Ambient energy comes from the physics that CAUSE earth changes AND from the collective response. By ambient energy I mean the energy currently circulating around in the collective. You know—the energy-aftermath from the feelings the news stirs up.

Less obvious and even more important is the energy OF the ACTUAL events the news is ABOUT. Energy generated by people in distress ricochets around the earth like a rock in a pond or an earthquake causing a tsunami and moving continents.

Do explore what is going on with you personally and the issues that arise inside, and address them. Take care not to add anything to them. The intensity that fuels your reactions may have little to do with you. (See Post #3 in series.)

Learn to take internal trauma with a grain of salt—even while you validate and honor its origins. Neutral observation brings balance. (See Inner Work series.)

Seek to participate in fully in transformation during times of trauma. Whether or not the PURPOSE of trauma is transformation, positive participation alleviates stress by conferring a measure of, if not actual control, constructive direction.

Take a longer-range view. Look beyond the last few days and weeks to note with compassion that we’re in the middle of a very long grind. We habituate to this stress mentally, and take it for granted. Our emotional and physical energies adjust more slowly, while fast-moving effects build over time.

Accept your discomfort. Grasping for joy and trying to push away discomfort digs us in deeper. It sets up a series of reactions that make authentic joy harder to access. Be with What IS as you take actions that nurture greater comfort.

Extend compassion to the parts of yourself that feel traumatized by the level of change occurring.

Surrender to the fact that change is inevitable, and seek to surf with it. Resistance drains you and keeps you stuck. Find ways to create benefit, even through loss.

Ask for divine assistance–not to GET something but to BECOME all you can be.

Do your Inner Work (Link).

Use the energy of change to transform yourself and your life by considering positive outcomes. Use any disruption you feel and your concerns about the future to motivate constructive action, personally and in service. Make a concerted effort to recreate your life while things are in a state of flux anyway.

• How would you like to emerge?
• What do you need to release or tear down to make way for a better situation?
• What can you free yourself from or give away?
• What do you need to be independent of to be happy?

Contemplate the freedoms that come with loss. Also contemplate the types of freedom inherent within commitment, the things you can express and accomplish.

Deal with any lingering dissatisfaction and your fears of going away from familiar structures and situations.

Make moment-to-moment choices that are consistent with you where you want to go.

Take responsibility–by staying as present as possible to your authentic experience.

Find practical ways to reduce overwhelm:

• put self-care at the top of your list
• set clear priorities
• revamp boundaries to fit current circumstances
• take time to relax
• spend time in nature
• exercise
• notice if listening to the news becomes too much
• take care of your spirit

Avoid random action rooted in restlessness.

Make changes based on true preference. Changes made to avoid discomfort can land you in another form of discomfort somewhere else. Impatience without a solid direction is just undirected energy.

Give energy a positive direction. If you do not have a clear sense of direction, focus on building clarity and developing lucid intention.

How do YOU manage the energy of change?
Which aspects of you adjust quickly and which ones get stuck?
What do you do when external energies become intense?

Intense world energies have been bringing up buried personal issues, but there is another phenomena going on too. What is it, and how can we use it for positive growth?

I got a call from an intuitive woman does her Inner Work and keeps her energy clear. She had been feeling disturbed by a vague sense of guilt, shame, or culpability and wondered why. She had effectively scanned inside, finding no source.

Responsibility is in the air. It accompanies all our new opportunities for choice. Choice and responsibility go hand and glove. The world has entered a phase in which we must each and all assume greater responsibility for our actions and impact upon one another.

Example: Persons whose choices courted or passively led to disaster for their families feel bad about it, adding concern about responsibility to collective energy pool. One may feel he “should have” sold the house sooner, or she “should have” selected a different retirement plan, etc.

Even waging peace demands responsibility from participants and those they petition.

We each take up what responsibility we can, hoping to see ourselves through the world changes. This new flood of responsibility—the energy of it—begins to work its way down into the things we feel bad about, into our old wounds and shame.

Assuming greater responsibility requires becoming aware of what we need to be responsible for. Not knowing what we are responsible for can cause stress and confusion. So does loading our plates with way too much responsibility without clarity about exactly what is ours, and what to do differently. This boundary-confusion can reactivate old wounds.

Many blame ourselves when we experience trauma. Children who are mistreated or have a parent die attempt to make sense of their world by taking inappropriate responsibility for things that were done to them. This stance confers a sense of having a measure of control. It’s easier to manage than feeling totally powerless in a senseless world. But it also keeps one stuck with feeling blameworthy. World changes can undermine this sense of control, making the wounds accessible.

Turn this to your advantage by doing deep emotional ‘housecleaning’ while the energy supports this transformational practice.

The sense that at some level we choose and set up our destinies can add fuel to confusion about responsibility. In general, giving our experience meaning and seeing ourselves as participants reduces trauma, whether or not our assessment is correct.

One reason those who have been victimized feel blameworthy is that we take on, absorb, and come to identify with the energy that abusers refuse to carry. Guilt and shame an abuser pushes away from his or her body congest in their energy field, like disowned emotion tends to do. This energy easily enters us those who are shocked and stunned into absolute openness by trauma.

Energy an abuser rejects can get stuck in your fields or body and echo as if it is your own. If you confuse this with a psychological pattern you will find that pattern highly resistant to change—and perhaps simple once that energy is removed.

Remember that blame is different than responsibility. Blame keeps one stuck in the past. Learning to assume appropriate responsibility in the present can free us from blame. (Also see Forgiveness Series.)

During times of upheaval we have a wonderful opportunity to do deeper healing and make major changes. Bring love and light to all realms of distress. We are helping everyone when we do.

Do you find yourself feeling responsible for things over which you have or had no control?
Do you blame yourself for it or go into shame?
How do you soothe yourself when this comes up?
How can you move into positive action instead of recycling your discomfort?