Positive Energy Guide

What is Real Love?

Much media imagery–about vampires and in many other dramas throughout history–lends the impression that love is not real unless one is tortured by it. This message is toxic to teens and can carry on into adulthood. I can’t tell you how many people I have seen in my practice who, when wounded in love, think that the more they suffer the more loving they are. I felt that way myself as a young person. Myths and stories can foster a sense or heroism or virtue in suffering from love.

Love Doesn’t Drain You

For some, the wound we feel about separation has a deep root in our feeling of being separated from the whole of life. This is a spiritual issue, easily confused with personal issues. No relationship can fill that. We fill it by becoming able to love ourselves and able to love the world.

While it is true that to fully love, we hazard feeling the pain of loss, disillusionment, or betrayal, this does not bear out the in myths below:

Vampire Culture Myths About Love:

• Love hurts
• Being miserable about someone or their absence is a sign of love
• We can be bound to and love only one person–forever
• Killing yourself if you can’t be with someone is an act of love
• Being hurt because we love is noble and true

Guidelines About Real Love:

Love feels good. If it hurts, it is not love.

Yes pain may be present when you love, but the love itself is not what hurts. Learn to separate real love from the issues it brings up. They come up so we can heal them.

Consider the following:

• Your heart center becoming larger as your ability to love expands
• Old wounds surfacing so you can heal them intentionally
• Issues related to needs, attachment, fear, jealousy, abandonment, or self-esteem
• A combination of the above

We do not need to quit loving someone if we lose them.

Another guideline about real love is that when we really love we feel filled up by loving. Love fills us even as it goes out to others.

What do you feel in your body when you feel real love?

How can YOU tell the difference between issue-driven sentiment and actual love?

This post supplies context to put Parts 3 to 9 of this Vampire Series to the best use:

Vampire dramas are gripping for many of us. Vampire dramas touch upon many important and basic needs and feelings, as listed in Part 1.

If we are gripped by a drama, something inside us resonates with it: We see ourselves in the mirror of drama. If we do not reflect on what we see on screen the impressions we take in can become scripts we act out unconsciously in our daily lives.

Drama is based on conflict. The conflict is what makes drama gripping. Drama can foster the impression that conflict has value. Conflict does have value. It helps us to differentiate ourselves from others, to hone boundary and communication, and to develop a strong and clear sense of self. As such, conflict is a learning tool.

Conflict is a fact of life. We all have internal conflict. Internally conflict stimulates growth and awareness. Using our vampire topic, you may be in conflict about whether to allow a vampire to bite or to master your desires and take a stronger more self-preserving route. This type of conflict builds character, internally, and on the screen or stage.

Let’s make a distinction between necessary and unnecessary conflict. Necessary conflict is important to personal and social development and has value. It can be conducted with respect, intention, and follow-through, and need not surface in harsh words. Almost all conflict can be managed with good boundaries—once we have developed the skills to do so. Conscious conflict has great value.

Unnecessary conflict is conflict we are not putting to constructive use. To turn conflict to a definite positive we need to be aware of it–to use it. Suppressing conflict causes problems that surface as relationship drama or physical symptoms. Staying aware of internal conflict allows for constructive expression and good boundaries. Unnecessary conflict is distress and friction that exist because we are not attending to and taking responsibility for our feelings and needs. Instead, we act them out in dramas with others.

Drama shows the results of different choices. It can model for us the end results of indulging or acting out, and show us various ways to manage challenging situations. Watching drama on a screen or stage can mirror to us our desires, tendencies, needs, and inclinations, assisting us to see ourselves.

The value of drama lies not in becoming what we see but in seeing what we can become. We can chose to act out some of the things we feel through destructive drama, or to model after characters who model the kind of behavior we want to practice. Considering potential results of different kinds of behavior can help us avoid unnecessary suffering.

What do you do inside yourself to keep conflict from becoming destructive and turn it into a positive?

Why Vampires are Popular and What they have to do with Healing

The Vampire Mystique has become increasingly popular because it resonates with real life experiences that impact vast numbers of people. In this post series I present important insights and tools that apply to relationships in general, and troubled relationships in particular.

Please read this entire post series and pass it on to those who need it.

Positive relationships become possible by learning to recognize and avoid the energy dynamics in unhealthy relationships. Valuing yourself enough to recognize and protect yourself from relationships that drain you is a huge key to positive energy.

In vampire dramas, the persons being courted by the vampires tend to be young people who are alienated from society, lacking deep, authentic contacts with others. So-called friends—with whom they rarely share their authentic selves, may surround these individuals, who feel alone deep inside. Of course there are heaps of victims who simply die as food. Their deaths feature very little into the drama.

Movies like New Moon are generally aimed at and appeal to teens and preteens. At this stage of development, when sexuality is first emerging, our needs and fears tend to be frightening and unclear to us.

Let’s look at those who are courted. Vampires protect the special ones they court. Watching someone learn, or trying to learn to become strong enough to maintain boundaries that prevent being damaged, even in the face of desire, is a positive lesson if we are not sure how to manage these boundaries ourselves.

Vampire dramas, depending on one’s personality, resonate with the following feelings and desires, most of which operate without conscious awareness:

• Fear of and desire to be open and vulnerable in a love relationship
• Intense need to be wanted
• Fear of or ambivalence about emerging sexuality
• Fear of losing your sense of self in pleasure or relationship
• Confusion about healthy boundaries
• Desire for a tight-knit family that resists intrusion from the outside world
• An unhealed need to feel protected by a powerful being who loves and wants us
• Identification with being different instead of giving in to society
• A need to feel special and different, powerful and invulnerable
• The need to be understood, recognized, and valued with all your weaknesses
• Belief that getting needs met diminishes the giver
• Fear of abandonment in love with craving for eternal connection
• Need to feel a sense of dignity about needs, of which one is ashamed
• Desire to submit without having to take responsibility for your desire

A number of these are common in young teens. Some of the above are basic human needs that someone who drains energy from others may exploit if we let them. Read the rest of the series to find out how and why this occurs and what to do about it.

Have you ever met anyone who drained your energy more than you thought possible? What part of you allowed it?

This post is about breakthroughs in perception in clinical practice.

A decade or more ago I was astonished watching a certain doctor give workshops on an energy-based method that corrected body alignment. He would glance among class attendants and pick someone on whom to perform the next technique he wanted to demonstrate. He could do the same thing with issues caused by toxicity or emotional imbalance, for which there were no obvious physical landmarks. Several of my teachers have had that skill.

I saw this same doctor last weekend. We were both attending a workshop on using body signs such as facial lines, tongue color, tender reflexes, and broken capillaries to determine clients’ exact nutritional requirements. We both knew several other methods of matching nutrition to body needs, yet learned a lot at the workshop.

In my practice today three fascinating things happened.

In the first, I checked the strength of the pulse in the throat on the left and right side of a client to see whether the blood flow into his brain was balanced. The right was beating harder—which can lead to stroke. I discovered that by using energy techniques I could quickly entrain or calibrate the left and right together. Within thirty seconds they were beating identically.

My client noticed that it felt “more open through the back of my head.” Sensing a change, I asked about his lower back, which had been in pain from an injury. He said his back felt more open in that area. Lying with his legs straight no longer hurt as it had several minutes before. Circulation is critical to healing. It was amazing how much difference this small intervention made for my client’s experience of wellbeing.

Here is the second thing: A client had a recent injury in one calf. I had treated it several days before, but she was still limping what I considered to be too much for her injury. I noticed that her injured left leg was larger than her right. Her right leg had been injured years ago in soccer, causing her to compensate by overusing the currently-injured left leg. On instinct, I shifted the soft tissue around a tiny bone (hyoid) in her throat, which can impact balance much as does the inner ear, and had her walk.

Now she was walking better on her injured leg but felt and looked very unstable. Next I did a technique that essentially told her brain to reevaluate its orientation with her eyes. He brain had become accustomed to compensated balance. I had no clues for this but just knew. I had to do two more techniques, one to clear old emotions from head and neck tissues, and one to integrate lobes of the brain with body movement patterns. Then she was—suddenly since this took about ten minutes total—able to walk normally, balanced for the first time in years. Her limp was gone. Her new injury had shown me the way to clear up her old one!

The third thing would sound too woo-woo if I tried to describe it briefly.

What I find fascinating is the way new methods, such as the artery balancing technique, simply show up, and the way a skilled practitioner can just “know” where to look or what to do next. I am still floored when I see others do this. For example, at the workshop, my former-teacher touched me for a less than thirty seconds, in a few spots and told me my left ovary was my key issue. I had determined this myself, in another way, the week before. How he came up with it on the spot without going through any protocol STILL astonishes me, even though things like this happen for me as well.

Skills that are developed over decades reach critical mass and seem like magic to those who have not put in the long hours of training and observation that underlie the skills.

Have you ever noticed skills or abilities that seem to show up out of nowhere after exposure to teachers, techniques, or certain kinds of energy?
Let us know!

(Part I is under the Healing tab in site navigation.) LINK

Being in the body is not always something one can just do. Being is different from doing. Being is an expression of all that we are. For example, if you have issues about safety, that make it hard to feel safe, this will show up in the energy in and around your body. You may also be prone to dissociating—losing awareness of your body. This does not mean passing out, but going through stretches of time when it is difficult to tell what you feel, need, and sense going on in your body.

Practically everyone, no matter how emotionally healthy, has periods of distraction when sensing and feeling fade into the background and thoughts or spaciness take over. This is normal but not desirable. Being in your body is an advantage.

Being in your body is also called “being present.”

Several advantages of being present in real time (not future or past) include:

• Being in touch with feelings
• Being able to feel safe and to tell actual threats from imagination
• Experiencing joy more readily
• Better rapport in social and intimate situations
• Being in touch with your body is sexy
• Staying healthier and healing more quickly
• Greater personal experience of meaning in life events
• Less prone to accident and injury

Life is precious and goes by fast. The more we show up for it the better it gets!

It is easy to understand why being present a primary aim on many spiritual paths. With or without any kind of belief, showing up fully for life is a spiritual act. When we are connected with ourselves we can connect with life. Being in your body dramatically improves your quality of life.

I will talk more about why we don’t show up in Part III, in the Energy Experiences category of site navigation. LINK

How can you tell when you are really present and what does that feel like for you?

Being in your body can make a huge difference in the way you experience life. This three part article tells you what this means, why is matters, and what it has to do with energy healing.

I recently treated a client who seized up her back. Her muscles were locked up on only one side. Through a series of questions I traced her issue back to the weight room. I balanced her back muscles, which had been activated unevenly by compensating for her weaker arm, working the strong side harder and twisting a bit as she used an upper body machine.

What does this have to do with being in your body? Keep reading!

Balancing the client’s muscles did not relieve her. I discovered that her issue had more to do with energy. She had dissociated when she lifted the weights, going on automatic. Two things happened with energy:

She absorbed energy that did not belong with her.

Her muscles were still reacting as if she were lifting weights.

When I cleared out the energy she had taken on she felt part way better immediately. As soon as I ‘told’ her muscles she was no longer in the weight room her discomfort went away.

This incident interests me because it speaks to the extent that energy impacts the body. Energy work is not just about messing with someone’s aura. Real physical results occur! Energy impacts our bodies in countless ways.

It also interests me because the problem occurred after dissociating or spacing out. Even while doing something as totally physical as lifting weights it is possible to be less than present in our bodies. Present means sensing and attentive; showing up.

I’ll say more about being in the body in Part II, under the Values category of site navigation. LINK

What do you notice about whether or not you are present in your body?

Cultivating authentic expression and self-respect enhances all physical healing. The path to healing and self-respect begins with knowing ourselves.

Authentic expression is a means to become whole. Being real is not just for the therapy room, but a way of bringing meaning and value to daily life. Our sense of meaning and joy is not enhanced by pretense or denying feeling but by seeking to live with authenticity.

Genuine self-knowledge opens the door to spirituality. Please bear with me and let me say why! Real love is required to see and accept ourselves. Deep self-knowledge involves healing the parts of ourselves that cannot accept love.  As we go deeper into healing we discover that spirituality is not so much about believing some creed or doing something with a group. Our true, core spirituality is about two things: Wholeness, and Unconditional Love. This is the link between spirituality and healing.

You do not need to think of yourself as a spiritual person or do so-called spiritual things to heal. You just need to be open to knowing yourself as you really are, and be willing to extend kindness to yourself when you find the parts that call for compassion. Healing is a return to wholeness. It is enhanced by kindness and compassion.

Judith Orloff, a competent psychiatrist and highly talented intuitive, uses the terms “energy vampires” and “emotional vampires” to describe people who drain or draw energy from others. The term “psychic vampires” is also in use.

I have experienced people who drain energy. As those of you who are highly sensitive know, the feeling of having your energy drained by someone is exhausting, invasive, and unpleasant. Being drained can be metaphorical, as in having an emotional reaction that leaves you drained after dealing with someone. Loss of energy can also be literal. Literal means that energy is actually leaving your body and the drainer is becoming stronger.

Personally I do not believe those of us who get drained are mere victims. We have emotional or boundary challenges to master in order to overcome being susceptible. Interaction goes two ways.

Likewise, those who drain—with a few seriously disturbed exceptions—do not do it intentionally. They are likely to be doing their best to cope with their issues. They may need feedback and professional support to learn how to fill themselves up.

Personally I have mixed feelings about using terms that categorize people as monsters. Doing so is fun, spunky, highly descriptive. It gives us distance from people and their issues. It makes it easier to realize how critical it is to set boundaries. At the same time these terms focus us on the problem as if the entire person was his or her problem. Most people who drain energy do so only under some circumstances or types of relationships.

What do you think? Are the advantages of calling people “psychic vampires,” “energy vampires,” or “emotional vampires” worth it? Are the terms too harsh, or simply well deserved? Why?