Ep 139: The Power of Energy Awareness for Life Transformation

When I met a friend whose life had been upended by unrelenting stress, his journey toward harnessing the subtle energies within him struck a chord with me. That's when I realised the profound impact of aligning one's personal energy flow with their everyday lives. In our latest episode, we invite you on a captivating excursion into the world of chakras and personal energy management. It's not just about the clock ticking away; it's about the invisible currents that drive our capacity to love, create, and thrive. Through an intimate narrative, we reveal the intricate dance between our energy centres and our emotional and physical health, urging you to look beyond traditional productivity measures and tune into your own, unique energetic rhythm.

We venture further into understanding how our natural energy rhythms can be a compass for not just our well-being but also our spiritual growth. Here, we uncover the silent whispers of energy blockages that could be masking themselves as mundane issues—like those persistent knee aches—and guide you through an inner journey exercise that fosters a deeper awareness and appreciation for your own energy. From the revitalizing touch of Reiki to the liberating movements of Conscious Dance, we highlight a spectrum of practices that can reconnect you with your body's energy flow. This episode is an invitation to elevate your personal energy awareness and, in turn, begin transforming your life from the inside out.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Truth and Transcendence brought to you by BeingSpace with Catherine Llewellyn. Truth and Transcendence, episode 139. How are you right now and how is your energy, because that's the topic of today. Do you feel imbalanced? Do you feel in harmony with yourself? Do you feel stretched in a painful way? Do you feel stretched and challenged in an interesting and exciting way? Do you feel that everybody else has more energy than you or that everyone else has less energy than you? Are you experiencing energetic mismatches with people around you or do you feel there's a kind of a harmonious energetic matching with the people around you?

Speaker 1: 1:06

All of these questions are the sort of things you may or may not already ask yourself, and I think most of us, when we hear the words energy management, immediately start thinking about time management. How many hours sleep are we getting? How much energy do we have for our tasks? That kind of thing, and actually focusing on it at that level or on that level, can be terribly useful, because we all have an awful lot to do, and I think I could do a whole series of episodes about that, this kind of addiction that we have in our culture to always have more to do than we seem to have time for I'm not saying all of us all the time, but it's a systemically, it's a general, a general thing in our particular social dynamic, in our culture, that we run our lives on the edge and to the point where if someone's sitting doing apparently doing nothing, just thinking or reflecting other people around them can come to believe that that person is actually wasting time or being lazy, whereas in fact they might be being the most creative. They've been that day, that week, that month. So our ideas about what energy management is and why it's important vary quite significantly. So there's that level of time management, performance management, productivity management, that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 2:43

But actually I'm more interested in a much more fundamental and subtle aspect of energy. So we already know that in order for us to be physically healthy, the blood needs to be able to travel around the body at the right kind of speed, at the right kind of momentum, carrying the right kind of nutrients, bathing the cell no, bathing whatever it bathes as it goes along appropriately. And we all think well, the heart has to work well in order for that to happen. And also we need to keep our toes and our fingers mobile so that we don't start blocking the flow of blood and so on, and actually there are all sorts of new insights coming through these days about blood flow and how that affects health and what affects our blood flow. Well, if you take that same idea and apply it to energy flow in the body, our energy flow in order for us to be really healthy and optimum harmony with ourselves, our energy needs to be flowing freely and fully. Our chakras need to be expanding and contracting in an appropriate and healthy way. There needs to be a free flow and very often in our particular education, we don't learn about that. We don't learn about energy flow, we don't learn about energy centres and we don't learn about how those affect and manifest in our well-being and, in fact, in everything about us. Our ability to think clearly, our ability to have imagination, our ability to experience love and connection and affection, our ability to be creative all of these things are fundamentally governed by the flow of energy in our body. However, because most of us don't know about this or haven't really explored it or inquired into it, what we end up doing is trying to solve these issues and questions and problems using our rational mind. So that's where we try to, for example, if we feel like our energy is not optimum or not in harmony or not in balance, we'll try and solve it by trying to come up with a rational solution, trying to come up with methods and techniques to sort it out.

Speaker 1: 5:21

I had a conversation with somebody a while back who was experienced energetic mismatch with his partner and he said I think I know what I'm going to do. I've heard of some breathing exercises. I think I'm going to do them rigorously. I'm determined I'm going to do it and I'm sure that will fix it. And I said well, how do you know that's the right thing for you to do? And he said well, are you saying that breathing exercises are not a good thing to do? And I said no, of course not, but each technique is relevant for a different purpose and for different people, in different ways at different times. How much do you know about your existing energy flow, energy pattern, energy rhythms, energy signatures? And he said well, why are you asking me that? I don't want to talk about that, I just want to do these exercises.

Speaker 1: 6:14

And off he went to use his willpower, which actually uses energy, to force himself to do these exercises, even though he had no way of knowing whether or not. They were the most relevant and useful thing to do. And guess what? He didn't do them. He did them once on one day and that was it, and then he gave up and decided this wasn't his thing. Such a shame. What he could have done instead is, as I recommended, spend some time each day just tuning in and noticing and observing himself, and maybe jotting something in a notebook or a journal and then going back after a month and looking to see what patterns he's observed. So that's just one example of a situation where somebody is so locked in to the rational, head-based solution to things. But even a beautiful opportunity like a breathing exercise or a particular protocol of breathing actually becomes unhelpful for that person because there's no connection between the real experience in that person's body and a knowing and an intuition of what will actually work and help that and then utilising something that's available as a complete split between the current experience and what might be done to support and help and aid it.

Speaker 1: 7:46

So clearly, from what I've just said, self-awareness is a massive component of our ability to work with our energy in a way that's nourishing and healthful for us, and what that means is observation. It means observing how things are at the moment. So, for example, how do we feel when we wake up in the morning? How do we feel when we're with other people? Are we feeling? How much do we allow ourselves to feel? Or how much are we stuck in our heads simply trying to make sense of life, make sense of our relationships, make sense of our dealings and dynamics in our work?

Speaker 1: 8:34

One of the effects of not being self-aware around our energy is that we're more likely to go out of balance because we're not tracking it and B when we go out of balance, there's a natural tendency to try to achieve balance or regain balance, and that process will trigger a mechanism which will attempt to redress the balance by either getting rid of energy or drawing in energy. And when we are doing that without awareness, we're doing it unconsciously, so we can end up either splattering other people with our own excess energy or we can find ourselves drawing energy from other people, and some people actually believe that this is okay. But I learned a long time ago that this is really not okay because my energy signature and your energy signature are not the same. So if I'm trying to siphon off your energy unconsciously, of course, in order to boost my own. It's not going to nourish me. In fact, it's a bit like being given a blood transfusion with the wrong kind of blood. It doesn't work and in some cases it can be actually dangerous.

Speaker 1: 9:51

Equally, the person on the other end of the equation may or may not be conscious of what's going on, and very likely not particularly conscious of it, and they don't understand or realize why they feel exhausted when they're around the other person. So, in this example, someone spending time with me and me unconsciously siphoning energy off of them. They feel exhausted, they don't know why, and if they don't stop and question it, they might then go into the other pattern which a lot of us do, which is where we then try and hype ourselves, ramp up our energy in order to meet the challenge or meet the requirement. I've done this myself. If I've been, years ago, when I used to sometimes be working with people or even social relationships, if I could tell this was before I learned about energy, if I could sense, even on an unconscious level, that that person's energy was depleted or that they were actually drawing energy from me. The kindly benevolent part of me, what one could say the unhelpful, self-sacrificing part of me, depending on how you come at this, would actually respond by trying to hype up my own energy so I had more energy to give to them, which is, again, an utterly unproductive thing to do. It just doesn't work.

Speaker 1: 11:20

And then everybody's exhausted and everyone's trying to nourish themselves off other people's energy that doesn't match their own in the first place, and I don't know if you've ever found yourself in a situation where you just feel a bit flat a lot of the time or where other people are just a bit flat a lot of the time. Commonly, this is because people are drawing energy off one another or feeding energy to one another completely unconsciously, and this has a deadening effect on everybody in the situation. Be forternatively you find yourself in a situation where you feel lively. You don't feel always completely, 100% energised, but you feel alive. Sometimes you're tired, sometimes you're very wakeful, sometimes you're energetic, but the whole thing seems to work in a perfect flow, in its own perfect rhythm, and somehow, when you need rest, you're getting rest, and when you're enthusiastic, you're able to pour that into something, and the people around you, that's the same.

Speaker 1: 12:29

Now, when that's going on, nobody is siphoning energy off anybody else. People are following their own natural energy rhythms and when they feel a lack of energy, they're resourcing that accurately through things like rest, food, possibly certain kinds of exercise, certain kinds of meditation. Whatever it is, it's going to actually support and assist their energy flow. Or in some cases, it's a question of clearing out stuff that we don't need. So, for example, telling people the truth about things, fronting up and making the communication we don't want to make. Sometimes things having not done those things is what blocks our energy. A bit like it again in the bloodstream, some sort of blood clot will actually prevent the blood flow, which will cause all sorts of problems for us. An equivalent thing can happen in our energy flow. So if our energy flow is blocked due to some sort of emotional blockage or psychological blockage, or even a physical blockage so, for example, the knees I'm in an age now where I know a lot of people who've had knee replacements because the knees just stopped working properly.

Speaker 1: 13:56

Now I also know people who almost had a knee replacement and then realized that what was happening was that the knees were not being properly taken care of by the rest of the body. They were not loosening themselves off, they were not stretching, they were not doing strength work, they were not doing all of the things that actually help keep our knees working beautifully. And so what that meant was the knees were tensing up and there was an energy blockage in the knee area which then affected the rest of the legs, the feet, the hips, the lower back, the upper back, the shoulders, the neck everything being affected by the energetic block in the knees. And I know somebody who does a Tui Na Chinese massage and he was telling me, because I had a knee problem at one point, I went along for some treatment and everyone was saying, ah, yes, arthritis, it's got to be arthritis. You can get a knee opt, no problem. I really don't think that's my particular path. So I spoke to this guy and he said, yeah, the thing with the knees is you treat the knees and then something flares up in the hips. Now, it's not because you cause a problem in the hips, it's because the problem in the knees was possibly caused by something in the hips, or the hips, by trying to compensate for the block in the knees, have now been affected negatively equally the back, the feet, the ankles and so on and so forth. And so he treated my knees, my hips, my lower back, my knees, my hips, my lower back, and now I'm back, having the knees that I wanted and needed and that are absolutely fine.

Speaker 1: 15:56

But all of that was around. You know where's the energy blocked, where do we need to release the energy and how can we do that? So why have I chosen to talk about this on Truth and Transcendence? Because one of the aspects of ourselves that helps enormously when it comes to growth, spiritual expansion, transcendence, transformation all of these is good energy flow, because this is the fuel for our growth, it's the fuel for our learning, it's the fuel for our transformation. So if we do nothing else, nothing else at all, in order to help ourselves to grow and expand, if we simply focus on our natural energy flow in our body, that in and of itself will naturally and necessarily enhance every other area of our lives, including growth, expansion and transformation.

Speaker 1: 17:04

So where might you begin? If this is something you've never thought about or never tried, where might you begin? I'm a great fan of inner journey, so if you just lie down comfortably you can do this lying in bed at night or in the morning Close your eyes, relax and just imagine that you can observe your energy or feel your energy in your body and if you immediately have a thought which says, no, I can't see my energy in my body, I can't feel it, I can't hear it, I can't sense it, I can't smell it, I've got no idea what it's doing, that's fine. That's the rational mind which is convinced that all of this is nonsense. So just ignore that and just say if I could sense in some way what my energy is doing in my body, what would I be noticing? If I could, what would I be noticing? And then just see what occurs Now.

Speaker 1: 18:10

Some people get images of light moving in the body. Some can see colours, some can see textures. Some people feel warmth and cold as an expression of energy. Some people get just a kind of an intuitive sense. Some people can actually hear sounds, like a sort of a rushing sound of the energy is moving very quickly, or a kind of a stuck grinding sound if it's stuck, or any and all other variations.

Speaker 1: 18:43

You know we've decided that we have however many senses we think we have. Well, who even says that's the case? That's just an agreement we've made so that we can kind of communicate, broadly speaking, about our senses. But maybe we have many, many, many more that we don't know how to articulate, we don't know how to begin articulating. So we're just saying, if I could sense what my energy is doing, what might I notice? And just notice it, breathe into it, have a little bit of gratitude for noticing that and then just move on with your day. And if you do that on a regular basis, you will very probably start to notice some shifts occurring, because, just as the scientists say, when you observe an experiment, the experiment is affected by the observation by the observer, and the same is true with our own energy. So that's a great place to start.

Speaker 1: 19:43

Having done that, you might try Reiki. You might try Pellewa, which I've spoken about before. You might try Conscious Dance, where we are moving and following our energy. You might try various forms of massage. Shiatsu is very good for this, chinese massage is very good for this. There are a whole number of practices and protocols and modalities that help us to connect with our energy and to notice what it's doing and to help to free up blocks and to help the energy flow more freely.

Speaker 1: 20:19

And the last thing I'll say on this particular thing is reducing the levels of toxins in our body also really helps with this whole process. So you know what I mean by toxins and you know whether or not you are habitually putting toxins into the body. And, by the way, stress actually creates toxins in the body, even if you're being very good and not putting any in yourself. Stress actually creates a chemical or alchemical process that generates, that creates toxins in the body. So I hope I haven't depressed you with this conversation about energy and I hope you're not sitting there thinking, oh God, I've got no idea about my energy, I'm doomed.

Speaker 1: 21:13

Absolutely not the case. You are functioning, you're doing what you're doing, and what that means is your energy is working pretty good if you look at what you're able to do in your life. So it's not a question that just by thinking about it, suddenly things get worse. That's not true. However, just by thinking about it, sometimes we become more aware or where things could be improved. So I invite you to look at it in that way. So thank you for listening, have a fantastic week and I'll see you next time.