Developing your energy awareness is an easy way to move through the world with more grace and less reactivity. It empowers you to develop clarity with your boundaries, and is a powerful way to shift out of old habits that no longer serve you.  

Energetic Protection

Do you get knocked sideways by other people’s energy? Feel buffeted by someone’s moods? There is a simple solution!

The one I like best uses visualization, intent, and some words. I do it daily, and more often if I am especially vulnerable or going into a challenging situation. Try this:

This bubble and these words let you receive love and compliments, for example, but not take in someone else’s rage or frustration. They let you hear without empathically experiencing. And intending to take in only “what is appropriate” acknowledges that you don’t always see the whole picture, and the universe may have a bit of learning for you.

If you never heard of doing this, you’re not alone. Most of my clients do not know how to set energetic protections or boundaries when they come to me. And the culture itself muddles compassion, empathy, and being empathic, so many of us are not sure where the boundaries should lie.  

Energetic Awareness

The simple patterns of energy awareness and practice I write about here are based on what I have learned from indigenous wisdom keepers in the Andes.

They are based on experience and the effects energy practices have 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 about Energy Alchemy^TM. 

The basic principles of Energy Alchemy include releasing, filling, connecting, and expanding. How might you empower yourself with these tools?

Attuning to Higher Frequencies

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 (dense, heavy energy) attune to higher frequencies (lighter or more refined energy), not the other way around.

Say you feel depressed at the state of the world. When you release that energy because it's keeping you from taking action, and attune with a higher frequency—like a child's joy or a warm spring day—you can fill yourself up with that lighter energy. You're no longer weighed down.

When the Dalai Lama or some other great spiritual teacher enters a room, you experience an 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 a factory or office building: the density of energy in the office makes you feel heavy; the lightness of trees and wind and water lightens your mood.

The principle of all energetic releasing and filling is also based on the reality of your interconnection: you are affected by and pick up energy from the people around you 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 you have stored another similar trauma of your own, or your family’s, in your body, the triggering is much worse.

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.

As changes in the world speed up, you find yourself working harder to stay clear, clean, and open. Energetic releasing and filling can be applied to all energy, no matter where it comes from.

Think of this: Every meditation practice teaches that your feelings and reactions arise, then change, then change again; your pain and mental responses are not you.

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.

Connecting and Expanding

Learning to keep your energy body clear and light is key to being present, and being empowered. Whether you are facing a partner’s rage, a disaster, a child’s disappointment, or the state of the earth, these practices help you be as clear, open-hearted, and as filled with your natural radiance as is possible.

In this state, you can support others, send 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 all that you love—humans, creatures, trees, mountains, 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 despair 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.

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.

Build Your Energy Skills!

Learning how to maintain energy stability has changed the lives of many of my clients and students. I'm passionate about teaching energy skills because they empower you on whatever path you are on.

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 Alchemy^TM, founder of Earth Caretakers, 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