Every day, you pick up energy from the people around you and events in the world. Have you noticed?

Whether it is road rage or fear, a rude shopper or an anxious coworker, other people’s emotions can knock you sideways.

Social media posts can depress or elate you. Ditto the news. But if you are not managing your own energy—if you are being randomly buffeted and distracted by others—you may feel like you’re riding a roller coaster. You may feel out of control.

In the world beyond your personal dramas, what is happening dribbles into your field, muddies the view, or acts like blobs of debris making things harder and heavier.

Even when your personal life is going fine, you pick up “stuff.” And you probably find yourself working harder to stay clear, clean, and open as changes in the world speed up.

Instead: Peaceful Joy?

When I first visited the Peruvian Andes, I noticed that my Q’ero and Quechua-speaking hosts lived in a kind of peaceful joy I had never experienced. Despite living at 15,000 feet in stone huts, despite a lack of resources, they maintained their presence and joy. I wanted to know how they did that!

Américo Yábar, my first teacher—known as a “master of moving energy”—taught us wonderful practices that were based on the Andean cosmovision.

At first, playing with energy was a game. It was fun to see what emerged from my hands, to connect with the cosmos, to learn to “see.” But then I’d come home from my travels, go back to my ordinary life with its piles of laundry, and forget. Until…

Saved My Life

When my life was overwhelming me, it was energy practices that helped me survive.

When I lived in grief because my daughter was struggling so, I learned to release the heaviness from my heart and fill with fresh air and starlight.  This helped me be present for her—rather than reacting with fear—and do what I could to support her.

When my parents’ anger and despair threatened to drown me, I shifted my attention to the beauty of nature. This helped me keep my equanimity—rather than losing it and reacting with my old patterning—so I could be a respectful daughter for one more hour.

Slowly, I learned tolet go of old patterns and stories that weighed me down.

Gradually, I developed greater skill and fluidity in managing my energy.

I was able to step aside from my personal concerns and my ego, and fill instead with cosmic energy. I learned to embody the boundless energy that surrounds us.

I help folks worldwide learn these tools online, and use them during our 1:1 personal healing sessions.

How Energy Awareness Helps You Transform

Developing your energy awareness is a potent way to move through the world with more grace and less reactivity.

Energy-shifting practices help you expand your sense of interconnection. In turn, this enables you to perceive from your experience rather than from your old mental constructs and thought patterns (“I’m not good enough,” “no one loves me,” “I’ll get in trouble if I say what I think” and so on.)

Grounded in sensation, energy-shifting practices take you into your somatic (embodied) experience, where you learn perceptually. Your body changes your mind!

Explore this transformation for yourself inWeave the Heart of the Universe into Your Life: Aligning with Cosmic Energy

Releasing and Filling

Releasing energy that no longer serves you and filling up with lighter energy are essential principles of energy awareness.

When you view everything as just energy, there’s no judgment. There’s no positive or negative: it is just energy, transforming.

The ancient principle of all energetic releasing and filling is that lower frequencies—heavy, dense energy like depression and loneliness—attune to higher frequencies—lighter or more refined energy like love and joy—not the other way around.

When the Dalai Lama or some other great spiritual teacher enters a room, you experience this attunement in your body. It’s not just your excitement and thoughts about seeing someone famous: it is an energetic, embodied resonance you feel.

Similarly, you probably feel much happier when you are in nature than when you are in the middle of an office building or mall. The density of energy—rushing people, no fresh air, distraction, and desire makes you feel heavy; the contrasting lightness of trees and wind and water can lift your mood.

Connecting and Expanding

Learning to keep your energy body clear and light is key to being present and empowered.

Whether you are facing a disaster, a child’s disappointment, a partner’s rage, or the state of the earth, these practices help you be as clear, openhearted, and as filled with your natural radiance as is possible.

In this state, you can support others, be love and light, and affect energy fields beyond your own.

In other words, when you are connected with your essential self, and clear of the debris that surrounds you, you can connect more strongly and surely with trees, mountains, group energy fields, or the earth herself.

In feeling, experiencing, and perceiving your interconnections, you can expand and open your heart to the world as it is. In compassion, you can let the rage and horror arise, and fall away. You can let the sadness arise, and fall away. You can let go of judgment (who is bad, who is good), and just be with what is.

Release. Connect. Fill. Open. Practice. These practices shift the energy in the world. And when you are passionate about an issue, they help you act from your sacred power.

Daily Tragedies: An Example

Daily shootings, incarcerations, verbal brutality, and nationalist rage surround us. It is tough to stay present and openhearted all the time, so most of us don’t. Even a regular meditation or yoga practice only goes so far.

Having potent, accessible tools for moving and shifting energy on the spot makes a huge difference. A dear friend and mentor used these Andean energy tools constantly post-9/11.

As a Red Cross volunteer, she spent three weeks in Manhattan doing crisis counseling. During her off hours, she’d walk the streets “eating hucha”—the heavy energy that surrounded her and everyone—feeding it back to the earth. She cleared and lightened the field constantly to lift the grief and shock.

While eating the heavy energy of others is an advanced practice, the principle is relevant: when you gift the energy back to the earth, there is space to fill with something lighter.

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, your “joy-body” (my term) contains all the love, wonderful experiences, and associated emotions that you collect over the years.

Like the pain body, your joy-body stores family, ancestral, and collective joy. It feeds on positive, transporting experience.

What’s the importance of this?

You have a choice about what you feed, what you eat, and how you digest what comes your way.

Energy Alchemy

Instead of identifying and labeling your emotions, instead of telling your stories of hurt and betrayal over and over again, you can work with the energy itself.

You can learn to notice energy that no longer serves you, release it, and fill with something lighter.Just as you blow out one breath to take in another, you can release the heavy to make space for the light. In my Energy Alchemy^TMtrainings, I teach you how. 

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 you freedom to move in and out of feeling states with fluidity; to change your energy; and to avoid getting stuck in those “heavy” and redundant thoughts that occupy 75% of your thinking. Instead, fluid awareness, gratefulness, and joy can become your state of mind.

Imagine…

Imagine a world where leaders talk about how brilliant and wonderful other leaders, religions, culture, and countries are…

You need not wait for the leaders; you are the one you’ve been waiting for!

You can notice your own thought patterns, topics of conversation, and the energies behind your words, and learn to shift the heavy doses of negativity you are used to.

You can visualize a peaceful, harmonious world.

You can let the universe unlock your inner wisdom and guide your life path.

Practice and repetition embeds transformation in your body, psyche, and habits. Noticing, releasing, and filling helps you move from pain body to joy body. The more clear you become internally, the stronger a conduit you can be for balance, cosmic healing energy, and bringing your light to the world.May it be so!

Meg Beeler—Author, Shamanic Guide, and Spiritual Mentor—helps you heal your spirit and find your luminous presence through mentoring, training, healing, and community ceremony. A lifelong explorer of shamanic, animist, and meditative consciousness, Meg is the creator of Energy AlchemyTM, founder of the Earth Caretakers Wisdom School, and  author of Weave the Heart of the Universe into Your Life: Aligning with Cosmic Energy. She works with clients worldwide and lives on Sonoma Mountain in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.megbeeler.com