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Developing Our Energy Awareness: The Basics
Developing our energy awareness is an easy way to move through the world with more grace and less reactivity. It empowers us to develop our inner authority, and is a powerful way to shift out of old habits that no longer serve us.
Energy-shifting practices help us learn how to expand our sense of the living energy that surrounds us. Over time, such practices enable us to perceive from experience rather than from mental constructs. Grounded in sensation, energy-shifting practices take us into our somatic (body) experience, where we learn perceptually. Our bodies change our minds.
Vibration, sound, visualization, and movement, combined with intent, help us sidestep our ideas, stories, stored emotions, and the experiences they have emerged from. They offer direct perceptual experience to our physical body and to our energy field. In other words, they help us change our energy!
The simple patterns of energy awareness and practice I write about are based on what I have learned from indigenous wisdom keepers over a twenty-five year period. They are based on my own experience and the effects such practice has had on my life, my relationships, my view of the world, and my path. They are based, as well, on sharing these practices in many years of teaching and writing.
The basic principles of energy awareness include releasing, filling, connecting, expanding, and deepening. Let's explore these a bit more.
Releasing and Filling
Releasing energy that no longer serves us, and filling with lighter energy are essential principles of energy work.
When you view everything as just energy, there's no judgment. There's no positive or negative: it is just energy, transforming.
The principle of all energetic releasing and filling is that lower frequencies (heavy energy) attune to higher frequencies (lighter or more refined energy), not the other way around.
When the Dalai Lama or some other great spiritual teacher enters a room, we experience this attunement in our bodies. It's not just our excitement and thoughts about seeing someone famous, it is an energetic, embodied resonance we feel. Similarly, most of us feel much happier when we are in nature than when we are in the middle of a factory or office building: the density of energy in the office makes us feel heavy; the lightness of trees and wind and water lightens our mood.
The principle of all energetic releasing and filling is also based on the reality of our interconnections: we are affected by and pick up energy from the people around us and from events in the world. This is familiar to all of us: when there is a massacre, those directly involved have their personal and collective trauma; the rest of us experience and re-experience this trauma vicariously each time we see or hear news, and each time someone at works talks about it. If we have stored another similar trauma of our own, or our family's, in our bodies, the triggering is much worse.
In the world beyond our personal dramas, what is happening dribbles into our fields, muddies the view, or acts like blobs of debris making things harder and heavier. Even when our "personal" lives are going fine, we pick up "stuff." As changes in the world speed up, we find ourselves working harder to stay clear, clean, and open. Energetic releasing and filling can be applied to all energy, no matter where it comes from.
Connecting and Expanding
Learning to keep our energy bodies clear and light is key to being present, and being empowered. Whether we are facing a partner's rage, a disaster, a child's disappointment, or the state of the earth, these practices help us be as clear, open-hearted, and as filled with our natural radiance as is possible.
In this state, we can support others, send love and light, and affect energy fields beyond our own.
In other words, when we are connected with our essential selves, and clear of the debris that surrounds us, we can connect more strongly and surely with each other, and with trees, mountains, group energy fields, and the earth herself.
In feeling, experiencing, and perceiving our interconnections, we can expand and open our hearts to the world as it is. In compassion, we can let the rage and horror arise, and fall away. We can let the sadness arise, and fall away. We can let go of judgment (who is bad, who is good), and just be with what is.
These practices, of releasing, filling, connecting, and expanding, shift the energy in the world. And when you are passionate about an issue, they help you act from a place of power.
The Pain Body and The Joy Body
Almost everyone carries accumulations of old emotional pain, what Eckhart Tolle calls the "pain-body." This pain body feeds on negative thinking and drama in relationships. It is an energy field of its own, with
"...its own primitive intelligence, not unlike a cunning animal...the food it requires to replenish itself consists of energy that is compatible with its own, which is to say, energy that vibrates at a similar frequency. Any emotionally painful experience can be used as food by the pain-body."
Similarly, our "joy-body" (my term) contains all the love, wonderful experiences, and associated emotions that we collect over the years. Like the pain body, our joy-body stores family, ancestral, and collective joy. It feeds on positive, transporting experience. The importance of this to our living energy, our power to promote change in our emotional responses, and the creativity at the heart of our universe is profound. We have a choice about what we feed, what we eat, and how we digest what comes our way.
A Simple Practice
Instead of identifying and labeling our emotions, instead of telling our stories of hurt and betrayal over and over again, we can work with the energy itself.
We can learn to notice energy that no longer serves us, release it, and fill with something lighter. When we view everything as just energy, there's no judgment. Just as we blow out one breath to take in another, we can release the heavy to make space for the light.
Every meditation practice teaches that our feelings and reactions arise, then change, then change again; our pain and mental responses are not us.
This point of view offers us freedom to move in and out of feeling states with fluidity; to change our energy; and to avoid getting stuck in those "heavy" and redundant thoughts that occupy 75% of our thinking. Instead, fluid awareness, gratefulness, and joy can become our state of mind. Imagine the world when leaders begin talking about how brilliant and wonderful other leaders, religions, culture, and countries are...
We need not wait for the leaders; we are the ones we've been waiting for!
We can notice our own thought patterns, topics of conversation, and the energies behind our words, and learn to shift the heavy doses of negativity we are used to.
We can visualize a peaceful, harmonious world.
We can feed our pragmatic shifts with inspiring, mystical experience.
We can set our intent to explore cosmic sources of our inner wisdom.
Practice and repetition embeds transformation in our bodies, psyches, and habits. Noticing, releasing, and filling helps us move from pain body to joy body. The more clear we become internally, the stronger a conduit we can be for balance, cosmic healing energy, and bringing our light to the world.
Meg Beeler/Earth Caretakers
Copyright � 2013
If we do not believe we can change, be co-creators, be connected and joyful, and heal trauma, we are not likely to try. We will probably hold onto our stories of dis-ease, repeating them over and over. This in turn encourages our body/selves to hold onto the status quo.
 | | Gratitude Despacho, in process, summer solstice |
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