Energy

I am looking very closely at Energy these days. Not just the get-up-n-go pep kind of energy, although that really is a much bigger part of the other kind of energy than I had figured, but really the cosmic energies, the cosmic forces that play and dance and laugh and sing around us. I've given them some lip service, carried a vast fascination about them, studied them, but always allowed my attentions to them to wax and wane dependent upon whatever else was going on in my life. Whenever I have less than way-too-much going on, however, that is where my attention naturally slips.

I will admit it fully: I believe in astrology, numerology, tarot, angel cards, goddess cards, psychic readings, energy healings, clairvoyance, ghosts, "crossing over," and all sorts of the realm of the supernatural. I believe in the gods and goddesses of the ancient religions, the angels and the saints, the boddhisatvas and the avatars. (how did "avatar" become the term for the little cartoon drawing people use on games? it's the name of the wisest and most ancient incarnate souls! bizarre) I'm very much like the Cowardly Lion, twisting his tail and muttering as a mantra, "I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks!" I believe in magic, I know the trees and rocks are alive, and I know that there are benevolent and malevolent forces at play in our lives. I love Harry Potter! (There, I've said it. I read HP7 in less than 24 hours the first time, and in the 18 months since then, I've read it at least 18 times. It's been an enormous education for this process, as, like Harry, I have had to stow my wand beneath my robes and go to face my "death" without defense. But, I digress. We'll talk about Harry Potter later.)

And, as much as I believe in the esoteric, I also believe that it is all very organized, logical, intertwined and planned out. I believe in Free Will, and also that our Free Will is all organized towards a planned result. I love Human Design! When I discovered Human Design, it blew my mind apart - and then I got too busy to fully engage in it. I am my own worst enemy, always.

My faith structure goes like this: I exist in this body. I am a soul having a human experience, which requires a body, a human body. It's very much like - I live in Texas, therefore I require a car in order to have a fully Texan experience! (it's really so true, in so many ways!) But even in Texas, you get out of your car occasionally (it's not LA, after all! that's something else altogether). We get to choose our cars, we get to choose how well we take care of our cars, we get to choose our fuel for our cars, and we get to choose who else rides in our cars with us. And sometimes, if we're not careful, our cars can get stolen or damaged while we're not paying attention to them. We can pick up hitchhikers, or carpool. And there are a whole lot of people who don't have cars - they have to ride the bus, but they'd really love to catch a ride or borrow your car. And then there are the really smart people who just have bicycles, but that's a different story (they matter in this one too, though!).

So to keep the story going: the people with cars are ordinary people. The people without cars are disincarnate souls. The people with the bicycles are boddhisatvas, here, incarnate, but traveling at different speeds and using different energy sources. Our friends and families and people we share rides with create positive energetic connections, as long as they help pay for gas and don't make us drive out of our way all the time and don't turn up the radio so loud we can't hear what we're saying, and it's nice if they share by driving you in their cars equally the same. When they don't do that, or when we do that to them, it creates an energetic drain. When the people without cars steal our cars when we're not looking, our car can get involved in all kinds of mess! It's registered to us, so it looks like we're doing it, and it's hard to prove that we weren't involved. And if we pick up hitchhikers, we have no way of knowing what they are going to do, as an unknown person. Same with disincarnate souls. We have no control over their actions.

With our physical cars, at night (or whenever we're away from them) we lock the doors and roll up the windows and hide our valuables. We need to do the same with our bodies. With our physical cars, we get tune ups and we drive the speed limit. We ask our passengers to help pay for gas. We need to do the same with our bodies and with our energies that we are sharing our bodies with.

Not all shared energies are bad! Some are very beneficial - such as the shared energy of children and lovers. It's when the shared energies crowd out the original energy, the Driver, that things start to get crazy. Your body becomes a clown car, a school bus, the truck on the Beverly Hillbillies.

My belief in this, which allows for my belief in all the other magic of the world, has been solidified by what I have been experiencing this week. According to my energy healer, I was carrying about 30-40 people in my body. I was using over 60% of my creativity for my work, my job, I should say. I was using about 94% of my energy for my job. I was grounding my job - and by job I mean the entire business, not just my section of it - through my body. My 6th and 7th chakras were buried and crammed up against each other in the center of my head. There was very little ME in me, and it was evident in my life. My house was a mess. Not just a mess, but a heaping pile of mess, and I simply had no energy to take care of it. I was so barely present in my own body, how could I bother to be more than barely present in my house? Any attempts I made to clean or decorate my house were thwarted by the huge demands of the energies residing in my body which would pull me back into taking care of it/them instead, and my house would deteriorate almost immediately. My boyfriend commented that he had never actually seen the bottom of both sides of my kitchen sink at the same time in the (then) 5 months we'd been together. Sad but so amazingly true.

It's been a week since the day I began to lose my job. I had my energy healing done 6 days ago. It's taken me this long to (very gently) start to get back into my house, to get it cleaned up, to get it pretty, to get ME back into it. I can't work on it for very long, maybe 15 minutes at a time, before I get pretty wiped out and have to sit and write and re-build. Learning to use my Self-care muscles, getting my house together so I can live in it.

2 days ago, I wrote a post which really hurt a beloved friend. I didn't mean to. In fact, I wasn't even sure where that post came from or why I wrote it. Here is my experience of that day: I had a beautiful day on Sunday. I woke up on Monday, full of excitement and promise for the week ahead. "My Sabbatical starts today!" was my opening idea. I had been given some instruction via Human Design to spend some time listening to my Sacral Center, to write some lists of questions and to just spend some time reading them and listening - literally - to the sounds from my Sacral Center (via throat chakra) to see how I responded. Also on the list of things to do was to start cleaning my house and to start a mild orange-juice fast. Very much a self-care oriented kind of day, exactly what everyone who loves me wanted me to be doing. I wrote some posts in Raw Fu, answered some emails, made my orange juice. It was a lovely morning, so I gathered up my journal, my Michael Tamura book, and my juice bottle, put on my Keens, and set off for the park. I saw in my mind's eye the bench I wanted to sit at, one of my favorite spots. As I started walking, out of nowhere, I felt this sudden sense of worry - of concern for my belongings still at my old job. Like, wow - I need to get this taken care of. I need my stuff. My head was kind of buzzing. And so I pulled out my phone and sent a few texts to a friend of mine who works there, all the while wondering if this was the right thing to do or not. But the sense of worry in my head was really strong. Suddenly, I TURNED AROUND, about a block away from my house, and I went home. "Too chilly to sit on a bench now" was the reason my head gave me. Rather than the sense of worry subsiding with going home, I found it increasing. Next thing I knew, I felt this huge need to write a post for my blog about my worry, including worrying about this friend and whether or not she still liked me and if I could trust her. Someone who had always been my friend, my ally, someone I really loved. I suddenly was filled with doubt, worry, and fear, and I was the furthest away from love, light and laughter that I had been the entire time. I spent the whole day in this sense of worry. I spent the whole day focused on my friend and if she still loved me. Of course, that much energy brought her to read the post, and a friend who was a supporter was now very upset with me. It was bizarre. Why did I do such a stupid thing? Had I not just learned my lesson about what to blog and what not to blog? Where did this come from?

I am an incredibly lucky person. My friend slapped me, hard. She didn't hold back. She slapped me awake, slapped me back into my body. One of my best friends then gave me a hard, long shake. My boyfriend said, "I can't save you from yourself!" I posted the apology, below, and then set to figure out what had happened and why. I recognized the events as I've described them, and I sent an email to my energy healer. I realized that I felt "invaded" when those worry thoughts hit me. Those thoughts didn't feel like "me," but they also felt so familiar that I didn't fight them off. Had I been hit by an external energy force - a hitchhiker? an old passenger who still wanted a ride? had my car just been keyed by someone angry at me?

Before it seems like I'm passing off the responsibility of the actions onto a "devil made me do it" alibi, I want to make very clear: I did it. I wrote the words, posted the message. But more importantly, I did it in collusion. I allowed this hostile force to come into my body, I allowed it way more room than it deserved, and then I shrugged my shoulders, energetically, said, "yeah, you're right," and I did what it suggested I do. I was weak. I took it on. Therefore, the responsibility is all mine. If someone steals my car and uses it to kill a pedestrian, I'm responsible if in fact I left the car unlocked and the keys in the ignition and the engine running. I'm even more responsible if I'm sitting in the passenger seat and navigating, as I was in this instance.

Lesson learned? What I have to learn now is how to discern that which is me, and that which is not. Easy? Not very. It's subtle, because I have been carrying 30-40 people and a whole business in my body! I know what those forces feel like almost better than I know what I feel like. I feel like the foreigner. I feel "good," I feel "happy." When I'm in my own body and fully occupying it, like I was on Sunday, I feel strong and powerful and at ease. The problem is that all those other feelings are so familiar, and we expect, in our culture, "to have good days and bad days." So maybe "I" am just having a bad day? But what if that were impossible? I'm thinking of Dr. Patch Adams, who decided to never have a bad day. Now there's a man in full occupation of his own body!

I have decided never to have another bad day. I have decided never to let another hitchhiker steal my car, not to let another crazy, dangerous driver take over. I have to learn how to lock my car, how to roll up the windows. I don't know exactly how to do this, but my gut, my precious Sacral Center, is telling me that the best, fastest, easiest way to do this is laughter. To laugh, even if it seems fake, at the idea of worry or fear, is to drive the negative energy/entity right on out - "Me let you drive?? Oh that is HILARIOUS!!! Thanks for the laugh, I really needed that! whoooooo!"