– Preparation
As long as a lot of this is unconscious, we’re not going to understand the mechanics and so can’t act directly on them. We’ll just continue to react from them.
Thus, we need three things:
1 – refined perception (energetic literacy, making it conscious and clear)
2 – some context for what we’re experiencing (understanding)
3 – techniques to address specific issues (skills)
This article is a summary to point to resources for all three. The most important part to understand is the need for energetic literacy. Direct experience will bring some understanding and skills naturally. But it can be very useful to take advantage of the expertise of well experienced teachers.
A lot of energy healing I’ve seen uses a bit of sensing or muscle testing. It doesn’t directly read the chakra databanks or thought forms or subconscious code and thus doesn’t directly address many specific issues. Often what is offered is temporary relief or mitigation of symptoms. Sometimes, “healers” will even lay on ways to mask symptoms, making it harder to address. Direct perception allows more direct techniques to actually resolve the issue at source.
Thus, developing refined perception or seeking the services of someone who has is much more effective than generic healing. Best though is learning some yourself so you can evaluate offerings. Some are decent, some are superficial or even a little deluded, and a few are waving carrots to ensnare you subconsciously.
This is very much like Gutenberg literacy – learning to read. Would you want to depend on others to read for you? Or would you like to be aware of what’s happening energetically inside and around you? The list of advantages is surprisingly long.
Secondly, I’ve noticed that some techniques have mixed benefit. While there may be some healing, there can also be the introduction of other debris unintentionally. If the healer isn’t skilled, they can unintentionally muddy your energy or can leave you open, as the next point explores.
Thirdly, if you take away something, you need to replace it with something better. Otherwise, you leave an empty space that will refill with what it’s used to. Take away darkness, introduce light.
The Yoga Sutra tells us ignorance is the main cause of suffering. Knowledge of our true nature is the cure.
– The Second Element
In my experience, the first and most important practice is an effortless meditation. This is because it serves several purposes. For one, it brings direct experience of who we are within, pure being. This (samadhi) is the #1 way to eliminate ignorance that leads to suffering.
Secondly, the deep rest, inner light, and expansiveness that result are very potent ways to resolve a lot of energetic debris. Without living it out. Pretty much everything we’ve talked about is helped by this.
It also breaks many bad habits of resisting life when we begin to enjoy who we are, right now. The old texts say samadhi roasts the seeds of karma.
– Stress
The first of our western understanding about inner energy is illustrated by research on stress. Western medicine defines stress as the body’s reaction to a change that requires a physical, mental or emotional adjustment or response. Dr. Hans Selye, famous for defining both positive and negative forms of stress, defined stress as “the non-specific response of the body to any demand placed upon it“.
You’ve undoubtedly heard of the fight or flight response, but more recently they’ve discovered a third channel – freeze (hide). The bodily response to stress is to prepare us for adaptation. When a threat (change) arises, we go into an action mode. Blood is withdrawn from the forebrain and digestion and immune system and instead flows to the muscles.
Stress is a normal part of life but can cause problems in 2 ways. First, if we’re stressed but don’t process (digest) the experience, it becomes stored internally (aka energetic debris). It can take time to process big experiences but if we avoid completing it, we continue to carry it. It begins to colour our experience, affect our health, and so forth. Secondly, if we’re chronically stressed, common in modern society, the fight-flight-freeze response almost never lets up. We never have the time to finish processing experiences. Our digestion and immune system gets compromised, our higher brain is muted making us stupider, and the system gets severely fatigued. As we’re saturated, we also tend to respond to new stressors irrationally.
Very intense experiences cause what is commonly called Trauma. Of course there is the physical trauma that may arise from an accident and is treated in a hospital ER. But there is also emotional and mental trauma such as a soldiers PTSD. Everyone has had experiences that were very difficult to “swallow”. These become deep impressions in our energy body.
Trauma has been described as the inability to process something or digest an experience. No experience in itself is negative or positive. But if we’re not prepared for it, it can be an overload. Even ignorance can be seen as unprocessed experience.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used to speak of stress in terms of kinks and knots in the nervous system. Sanskrit has names for different types of this, like Vasanas (desire impressions), Samskaras (strong mental impressions) and granthis (knots).
Effortless meditation has a profound impact on how we respond to circumstances. When we expand the container of experience, we’re less likely to be traumatized and become increasingly comfortable with life as it is. Then we can shift out of stress mode and begin clearing our backlog. Each time we settle into samadhi or presence consciousness, we burn some more of the energetic “seeds”.
I also found culturing gratitude allowed profound forgiveness and letting go. I don’t mean making a mood but regular reminders of what we have to be grateful for, replacing the common habit of always thinking about what’s wrong or might go wrong.
Another related help is reframing our perceptions of the world. If we’re prone to take what happens in life personally, we can use a little better context. The Five (Four) Agreements can be useful here.
When we’re stressing about something, we can ask ourselves is it actually a likely problem? Or are we just worrying about ‘what ifs’ and making up problems to obsess over? This is fear-based, driven from not knowing who we are. (See above)
When a problem does arise – first ask: is it My problem?
Many people “collect” problems arising for people around them and attempt to solve them. However, if it’s not your problem, you’re just messing up the energy if you get involved. And you’re disempowering the person who’s problem it is.
a) My problem – I have to deal with it
b) Your problem – you have to (not me)
c) God’s problem – they solve it.
And the divine controls all outcomes. As the Bhagavad Gita reminds us, you control your actions, never the results.
You may similarly be familiar with the “Serenity Prayer“.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
On the subject of problems, recognize that it’s all about perception. It’s a problem because we see it as such. There are No problems, only a perception that something needs to be different. Without expectations, there are no problems.
Of course, this is not to say that some things don’t need to be changed. But all too many things are actually fine if we’re willing to ease up a little.
– How We Collect Our Energetic Debris
We all have bad experiences sometimes. But if we don’t give ourselves the time or opportunity to heal, we simply add that to our collection. What we resist persists.
Our system is built to create habits. This is how we learn to talk and walk and fly a kite. But we’ll also tend to pick up some bad habits along the way, especially from our birth family. When we’re young, we’re like a sponge both mentally and energetically. We lived in our mother’s energy for 9 months before we’re even born.
Epigenetics has discovered that some learning and habits of our parents are passed on to us biologically and would also tend to be reinforced in our upbringing. Add to that the energetic habits we experience for years. That’s the trick about energy. Even if it’s not conscious, we’re tuned to read it and model it. We’re designed to adapt to the environment we’re in.
When you combine habits and the minds tendency to create a story about things, the mind will tend to repeat patterns over and over, be they gratitude or malice. The repetition creates a kind of standing wave that adds weight to our sense of reality. If we culture dark thoughts, we develop negative thought forms that are self-sustaining and confirm our favoured reality. The world responds in kind.
Similarly on the energetic level, if it’s large and sustained enough, it becomes sludge, crusts, or knots. (resistance = inertia = tamas) These can be substantial enough that if we don’t resolve them, they carry forward into future lifetimes until we either heal them or live them out in disease and disaster. These knots create a kind of energetic mesh that ties us energetically to our past difficulties. They are the whoppers that bring us back to the same experiences over and over to find a way to resolve them.
If we’re not very conscious, we’ll also tend to be me-centric, seeing everything as self and other. We thus blame others and circumstances for our life and experiences, giving away our power and failing to be conscious of how we’re contributing to circumstances in our life. When we become more conscious, it can be challenging to see what we’ve done to ourselves but this does open the door to profound healing over time. We gradually learn to stop the collection of dross or karma and then to resolve it more effectively and smoothly.
If we’re not comfortable with our own inner states, we adopt avoidance behaviours to avoid seeing that dross. For example, we’ll stay tired all the time to dull feelings. Or we’ll engage in drinking or drugs as an escape. Or overeat. Or spend our time distracted by overwork or excess TV, computer games, etc.
Now, there’s certainly nothing wrong with a drink or TV in itself. But using them as a form of avoidance is unhealthy for longer than a short break. Otherwise the coping mechanism becomes a form of addiction.
These and many other things can become specific issues for healing.
Davidya
Last Updated on December 13, 2019 by Davidya
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Wow this is really helpful! Thank you for this.
You’re welcome, Emily
Glad you enjoyed.