By the time this episode is posted, the Whole Body Upgrade course will have started! I’m excited for the people who have signed up. It really is a magical group and I’m just so lucky to get to offer this medicine to the world and to have the opportunity to speak to you all each week. I’m very grateful!The last 4 episodes I’ve been talking about sustainable change. It’s big: if you haven’t listened to it, I want to encourage you to go back to the beginning of January to episodes 28-31. It’s really the foundation of what happens when you want to get healthy. One of the pieces that I talk about is energy and a friend gave me a little nudge this week and asked me to talk even more about energy management, because it really is the missing piece that most people either don’t know about or don’t fully understand.
If you haven’t listened to episode 8, that’s another place to listen to why energy and energy maintenance is important. It will provide you with the framework and the grounding that will help you have some clarity about energy.
Previously, I’ve discussed how energy is something that we all have. We are made of energy and the energy that we have can be added to other people’s energy. The deal is that most of us don’t know how to maintain or manage our own energy. Because as I’ve discussed, this isn’t the normal conversation around the dinner table.
So I wanted to talk about some energy management tools that might be helpful for you. We are going to talk about energy clearing and then your own energy management.
Aspects of energy management that can be helpful in your everyday life.
This is important work because it can influence how your mental, emotional, and physical body feel. Alternatively, these different wellness bodies can also influence the energy body, so it’s a two way street.
There are some traditional energy practices that can be helpful for maintaining your energy body and are more traditionally associated with shamanism.
Grounding
Grounding is a connection with the earth’s energy. Grounding can be done by placing your feet on the ground, or imaging roots or cords that go down in to the earth and connecting with that nurturing energy of mama earth. For me, there is a real visceral sensation in grounding into the earth and it shifts my energetic body which shifts my physical, mental, and emotional body.
Clearing/extraction
This is basically removing energy that does not belong to you. It’s neither good nor bad – it just doesn’t belong to you. You can ask the Earth to do this, or any of the elements (air, water, fire/sun, earth) or you can ask something like the trees to clear the energy. Salt is also very helpful in clearing energy that doesn’t belong to you. So, for instance, a nice salt bath or a salt scrub in the shower can be very powerful.
Cord cutting
I’ve found this to be very useful for myself and my clients if there are energetic attachments from family, past lives, or even people that I’m working with. Because people in our society don’t understand energy, they will accidentally attach with energetic cords, and it can then suck our own signature energy away from us.
Transfiguration
Transfiguration works from a very different principle of managing your energy from the inside out. It’s a practice of connecting to the internal divine light that we are all sourced from, and using that to balance our own energy. It’s a wonderful practice that can be very stabilizing and helpful.
Management of thoughts/beliefs
So those are the types of shamanic energetic maintenance techniques that are typically used. There is also another way to manage energy that not all shamanic teachers recognize. Some teachers in shamanism will also talk about the energy behind thoughts and beliefs as well. In my system it would fall more under the Mental wellness body AND it influences our energetic wellness body.
The thoughts that we have hold a particular energy to them. You might notice the heavy feeling in the body if you think “this is going to be so hard” or “I’ll never get all of this done.” That is energy. We can also hand our beliefs to others when we say things like “you are doing it wrong” and that is sending our energy instead of managing our energy. It has a BIG influence on how we feel and how we influence the world.
One of my teachers gave the example of driving down the road in a rush to to run errands before a trip and someone pulled out in front of her. She sent this thought to them that was less than kind, and she immediately released she was sending that psychic energy out to that person and asked her guides to reel it back for her! Our thoughts are powerful sources of energy! So we can maintain our energy by watching the thoughts and the beliefs we are having each day. This takes a good healthy portion of mindfulness to watch the thoughts and see what is there, so that we can learn what to do with those thoughts.
Nutrition
Another way we can maintain energy is by the food that we eat. Yes the food that we eat can influence our energy. If you are drinking caffeine and you find that you have this restless movement in the body: yes it’s the result of the physiological effect of caffeine, but it is also energy that wants to and needs to move. What I always found funny was the people who drink a bunch of caffeine and then sit on a plane for hours. The body has all that energy and it wants to move. We interpret it as anxiety, but it’s really just energy in the body. The opposite can also be true: certain foods are heavier in energy can create a heavy or stagnant energy in the body. So, one way we can maintain our energy is to eat foods that are high in vitamins and nutrients. Plant-based foods and especially unprocessed veggies are a great way to maintain our energy. Limiting inflammatory foods is also important.
Emotions
The emotions that we feel or don’t process hang out in the body. If emotions aren’t processed, they can leave behind an energy residue that hangs out in the tissues. The best way to manage our energy with this aspect is through allowing ourselves to actually have the emotions we are feeling. It’s important to pause when we see that they are arising, and allow space and time to feel them, especially the physical sensations that go along with those emotions. You can imagine that if you have a bunch of unresolved anger bouncing around in your body, that is energy the body has to figure out something to do with it! By managing our emotions, the benefit is that we are also managing our energy (not to mention we are just happier beings).
So together, these different ways to manage the energy body are all hugely beneficial in your health and your wellness. By managing your energy, you’ll find that you get stuck less often and that you have more energy. You you won’t be as exhausted all the time! It’s an amazing skill set to learn and I highly recommend taking the time to go deeper into energy management.
