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Our Energetic Selves

Posted on January 30, 2011

Greetings!

Some of us are canaries in the mine shaft.  You know who you are.  You get sick at the first sign of emotional distress or stress of any kind.  You can’t stand some kinds of music, or people, or places.  You can’t trust yourself to keep appointments or plans because you never know what the day will bring until it’s here.  You listen to others & wonder what they’re talking about because you can’t seem to pay attention to the verbal input along with all the other input happening.  You feel overwhelmed by crowds & large public places.  The energy of everything & everyone around you is impacting you & making it nearly impossible to function.  This is the life of someone who is sensitive to energy.  You may not recognize energy consciously but at other levels, you are very aware of it.  Sometimes it can be so overwhelming that it submerges physical senses.  Sometimes it feels so physical that you can’t be sure whether it’s physical & real or not.  You may question your sanity.  Others may question your sanity.  This would be your energetic self.  For some of us, the energetic self is awakened & aware & this is the cause of the canary experience.  Believe it or not, it’s a gift.  The curse would be not knowing what it is, what to do with it or how to handle it.  Once you get a handle on it, the gift begins. 

Gifts can start out seeming to be a curse.  This one is no exception.  It calls you to pay attention to your surroundings.  It necessitates making adjustments in how you live your life compared to how others are living their lives.  It requires that you listen.  It requires that you heed, especially if you want to be able to function.  The gift begins, once you begin to appreciate, value & utilize the information that it makes available to you.  Many gifts are obvious both in presentation & in utilization but this one takes some getting used to.  To begin with, our culture doesn’t recognize energy per se so you’re pretty much left to your own devices to figure out what’s going on.  Then to top it off, much of this gifts’ manifestations look like illness or some medical problem which can send you running from doctor to doctor trying to pin down & fix “what’s wrong.”  Even if you manage to identify something & apply “fixes” to it, you never seem to realize the degree of relief that others with the same diagnosis seem to enjoy.  Finally, if you do manage to manage the manifestations (!), you are left with what to do with it.  After all, gifts are given & realized for a reason.

The gift of being aware of energy, enables you to consciously work with energy.  Energy is all around & within everything & everyone.  It can be moved, cleared & manipulated in many ways, allowing balance to be restored in bodies, homes, land, buildings, businesses & the list could go on.  The more obvious ways of working with energy are in the healing modalities such as laying-on-of-hands, Reiki, Magnified Healing, Therapeutic Touch, Acupuncture & also Feng Shui, which is concerned with healing the energy in homes & buildings.  Designers, decorators, architects, builders & landscapers all work with energy whether they are aware of it or not.  Most people work with energy unknowingly.  Any time you clean your house, organize a closet, plant flowers you are affecting energy in a positive way.  The following are ways to positively affect your energy:

  • Yoga is particularly excellent for your energy & energetic self.  As with all exercise, yoga helps you process your energy so that your energy flows evenly but additionally, it also helps release blocks which reduces stress & supports your health & the healing process.
  • Accupuncture & Accupressure both work directly on your energy pathways (called meridians) & balance the flow & release blocks in that flow.
  • Energywork:  Try a Reiki or Magnified Healing session with a reputable practitioner or take a class & learn how to work with energy yourself!
  • Clean, Declutter & Organize:  This is one of the simplest ways to positively affect your energy as well as that of  your family & others entering your home, your office, your car & any other space.  A story will illustrate.  I was raised by my grandparents & when I was younger, my grandmother managed to control the house & the chaos she created by being a hoarder.  But as I got older, she began running out of space & as the possessions took over the house, it became more & more difficult to clean the house or keep it organized.  When I was around 12 years old, I began waking up in the middle of the night with what would now be called panic attacks.  At first, I thought I was waking up to get sick but as it began to happen several nights a week, I soon realized that I wasn’t getting sick.  I would lay in bed breathing deeply until the panic attack would pass & I could go back to sleep.  This continued weekly for 7 more years until I moved out.  The panic attacks stopped the day I moved out & never returned.  This is an example of how the energy of your home can affect you, if you’re sensitive to energy.  Even if you think that your clutter & dirt are not causing you problems, I guarantee you that they are.
  • Decorate:  Decorating your home is a fun way to create good energy in your home.
  • Prayer:  I’ve already devoted a post to prayer but I want to add here that prayer affects your energetic self & your energy because “energy follows thought.”  As an example, most of my clients come to me with what feels like static in the field around their bodies, especially from the hips down. This static is less-than-best-energy that they have picked up from other people, places & things. In the past, I would sweep their field from the top of their heads to below their feet many, many times before the static would be cleared.  Now, I have them say one statement to clear their field: “Everything I have, everything I’m holding, everything I’m feeling that’s not my own stuff, I bundle it up, surround it with love & give it to God to heal.” Then breathe in & out, letting it go & it’s gone.  In a similar way, you can clear places & spaces by asking for it.  I have for many years now, prayed places clear that I visit.  By doing so, I bless my self  & others with clearer energy in our environment.  So the next time you are out & about, say:  “I ask for the complete cleaning, clearing, healing, restoration, protection & forgiveness of this (name of the space/place) & all persons, places & things in, on, near, around & connected to it according to God’s highest divine will & timing for each individual & for the whole” & end it however you prefer to end prayers & breathe.
  • For a better understanding of yourself if this post describes you, read the book by Elaine N Aron, Ph.D. “The Highly Sensitive Person”

There is so much more I could say about energy but it will have to wait for another post.  In the meantime, exercise, clean, organize & pray yourself & your environment clear for a Happy New Year!

Love, Dawn

Blog

Our Emotional Selves

Posted on January 19, 2011

Greetings!

We don’t usually think about our emotions, until they are in our faces but they are a part of us all the time.  We also don’t think of our selves as having an emotional self but it’s helpful to think of our selves in this way rather than diminishing our selves by saying that we just have emotions or feel emotions or are over taken by our emotions.  To view emotions as being outside of us or separate from us, diminishes our wholeness & gives us permission to ignore them, overlook them, minimize them or even hide them from our selves & others.  To heal, we need to honor every part of our selves, even those parts that we are not used to thinking about or recognizing as valid & as real as our bodies.  Our physical selves get the lion’s share of our attention, much to our detriment, because we are infinitely more than just a physical body.

Our emotions & emotional selves can be thought of as an early warning device that warns us of things that we normally wouldn’t perceive until it’s too late, much like smoke & carbon monoxide detectors.  Another way to think of them, is as a barometer that monitors our environment, only in this case it’s usually our inner environment.  Our emotional selves can almost be likened to instincts, arising many times without our thinking about anything or being aware of anything.  A story that illustrates might be helpful.

When I was about 21, I had just moved into a place of my own.  I was driving down the road towards my dad’s & grandfather’s office.  I don’t now remember if I was going there or if I just happened to be heading in that direction.  Anyway, I felt fine driving along listening to the radio.  Quite suddenly & without any thought or forewarning, I burst into tears.  I was crying so hard I could hardly breathe or see the road.  I realized right away what I was crying about.  I pulled the car over & ran sobbing into my dad’s office, probably scaring him half to death wondering who had died!  What had triggered this?  It was a verse, “don’t leave me again” from the song playing on the radio.  A few days before, my step mom had broken the news to me that she & my dad were separating but I hadn’t had a chance to talk to my dad about it, yet.  My dad & my own mom had divorced when I was a 5 year old.   My dad moved out & my mom remarried & took me out of state to live.  Unknown to me until that moment, I was terrified I was going to lose him again when he divorced my step-mom.  What is interesting is that up until hearing this verse, I had no awareness of my fear.  I remember feeling sad for them & for my siblings when my step-mom told me but that was all.  I have heard others relate similar stories of emotions coming seemingly out of nowhere, many times with comments about how silly they were to feel that way or how embarrassed they felt.

We tend to assume that what happens in the past, stays in the past & should have no effect on us later but our emotional selves would beg to differ!  As long as a trauma remains unhealed, it remains in us, forever affecting how we feel about our selves, others, life whether we are aware of them or not.  Fortunately for me, I could remember the trauma & could cry about it & talk about it with my dad & process it in a way that was healing for us both.  For many traumas & for many of us, this isn’t available.  Maybe we don’t even remember the trauma or the others involved are no longer in our lives or are not open to helping us resolve our traumas.  This is what drives many of us to the psychiatrist’s couch!  Counseling is definitely helpful in many cases but sometimes, something more is required.  That something more is what I call emotional work or forgiveness work.  It exists in many different formulas & forms:  Neuro Emotional Technique (NET), Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), Emotional Polarity Therapy (EPT), Emotional Attunement & many others.  For the past 12 years, I have used Emotional Attunement which is a local, home-grown-in-Indiana technique although I have experienced NET, EPT & two other un-named techniques used by a Chiropractor in Maryland & a therapist in Hawaii.  Forgiveness work is excellent at relieving emotional distress from any cause, past or present as well as resolving traumas, phobias, fears, blocks & about anything else I have thrown at it.

Another healing modality for the emotional self is exercise, believe it or not.  Exercise helps us process our energy & our emotions relieving depression, anxiety, hyperactivity, poor self-image & sluggishness just to name a few benefits.  It also helps bring us more fully present in our bodies & into the present moment which can help us better handle what comes our way.

Music can have a profound impact on your mood & could be considered a form of vibrational therapy.  In 2005, I got seriously ill.  For the next several years, as I recovered, I listened to Frank Sinatra CD’s every day, all day.  I have acquired quite a collection.  After I’d gotten sick, I found one given to my daughter that she’d thrown into the donate box.  I’d never listened to him before, so I was curious.  I popped it into the CD player & I was hooked.  Why Frank Sinatra?  Well, for one thing, I have no emotional associations with his music since I’d not listened to him growing up & for another, his singing feels happy to me.  If you’ve ever been sick for a long time, you know how depressing that can be.  Frank’s singing got me through it, day by day.  For you, it might be polka, jazz, classical or classic rock but whatever you choose, make sure it makes you feel good, happy, joyful, light-hearted.

Dancing is great for the emotional self also, as it combines two of these therapies-music & exercise.  As with the music, choose a dance form that you enjoy or would like to learn & have fun!

There’s my recommendations for healing your emotional self.  What are your ideas?  What has worked for you?

Love, Dawn