I’m often on the interwebs and see some variety of “I’m sensitive to other people’s energy, what do yall do for that?”
And the usual responses range from “washing off the ick”
to “listening to your gut” (aka avoiding people and situations that give you the ick.)
But this is largely the same way we deal with “stress” too in modern society- either:
- deal with the aftermath (individualized medical approach)
- avert the situation (change the environment approach)
There’s a secret, third way too:
- slow down time during the event to observe whats really happening so you can subvert your usual response in real time. (notice the interplay between socio- individual and retain choicefulness about changing self/ other/ society in the moment)
To be clear:
all of these are useful- as humans in physical bodies, as far as I can tell we’re never going to get 100% out of the nuance of being embodied, which includes the beautiful dance of noticing ouselves “icking” in any given moment… and sometimes feeling like we need to shower after or whatever.
However, and this is deeply important as it is endemic: the first two usual responses to (well honestly to most things), are extremely high cost and degrade in efficacy over time. They are not sustainable socially, personally, medically, or interpersonally and they replace *valuing the purpose of difficult emotions/ sensations as a call to attention and connection* with *problems to be fixed/ avoided* Moreover: they create a whole new web of problems when these are our primary approaches. (See also overbloated ineffective medical systems and costs, the social habits of ostracization, incarceration, bloated bureaucracy and policy and legal clusterfuckery ion place of human connection- conversation- negotiation. This is where we “police” each other rather than use connection to create mutually beneficial change.
And here’s the deal: as a human raised arouns some of the most practiced teachers of “energetic” medicine in the past century, and who got a 3.5 year degree in one, and has practiced not just clinically but also has translated that work online, I’m going to give you some for each category:
- dealing with the aftermath:
- change your clothes
- sing/ dance/shake/ qigong/ run: the idea here is to “move the qi” so it can release whatever youve picked up
- meditate/ visualize: sit quietly, center your breathing and locate “where you feel the ick” (if you ‘feel it, it has a “place” in your body) and imagine yourself breathing in and filling with clear, smooth, radiant, “your own” energy- let it filter through that/ those areas, breathe out the ick.
- side note: there are hundreds of variations on this ranging from growing your own internal power that pushes out anything unwanted, to letting it stream out through your feet (and give it back to the trees to transform into goodness- in some traditions the theory is you need a bowl of salt water to catch it- your theory or perspective will live in your body, which i’ll come back to in the “preemptive” section). if its your jam, insight timer has lots of guided meditations.
- notice the story. see if you can recall the phenomena: exactly what happened in the moment you first noticed the ick: was it a word? a gesture? a sensation inside of you? can you go back to that moment and take back your power?
- Pregaming:
- external: stimulating the skin surface, invigorating the physiologic and energetic “boundary” between “us/ the world/ them.” Doing this reminds us of where we start and stop, and cultivates a stronger “barrier to entry” for maintaining clean “interface*” with the world around us
- dry brushing
- ice baths/ contrast hydrotherapy
- sprinting or other quick intense workouts that bring blood to the surface
- internal: qigong for building “weiqi” or “defensive” qi
- this one does something similar to above, but building from the inside (personally I like this for its long term sustainability- manually “tonifying” our weiqi by stimulating it doesn’t inherently build it’s strength over time, and can, if not well rooted/ resourced become depleting over time.)
- there are many variations to this:
- qigong for the lung/ large intestine/ autumn/ metal energetic
- breathwork of many kinds
- visualizaton (see above) of growing/.strengthening our “energetic forcefield”
- Social: avert the options of being in “energetically misaligned” situations. Now tis isn’t going to always be possible, nor do I even necessarilyrecommend it- or rather I recommend it within reason- since aversion really doesn’t strengthen our capacity, which we use for a great many things beyond not havng to confront the ick in generic situations: we use this same “energetic muscle,” if you will, in intimate interpersonal situations, valuing ourselves and our gifts, and letting shit of various other kinds go/ roll off our backs too. But if youre going to do it, here are some easy ways
- In group settings, make clear decisions going in about how you will/ won’t interact.
- Where possible be the host, so you can cultivate the guest list intentionally:
- decide on the mood/ intent/ feeling/ outcome you want for the event/ day/etc and STATE it or even ask people coming in to commit to it: (this is the essence of what neopsychology calls good “containers” it’s really just clear intention and shared values/ ground rules/ shared cultural implementations)
- walk/ interact in less densely populated areas until you build up your energetic muscles if youre taking a hybrid approach (I would absolutely assume life is a hybrid approach here!)
- Slowing down time/ recalibrating our embodied respionse in real time and over time. (building “energetic” capacity for interface or flow-through or new ways of perceiving and acting that are less depleting in the moment and over time.)
- I think this deserves its own post, because it is the most neglected in our current frameworks- even the holistic ones… for now though:
- set some kind of reminder to check in (personally I like a physical visual/ tactile reminder elbows to fingertips for more reasons than make sense to count here), then each time you see/ feel it: notice one of the below (choose one at a time, for at least a day but probably a week)
- your breath (when did it change? did you notice or choose that in the moment?)
- your body (you could choose a place you usually notice holding tension or picking stuff up” for lots of people its shoulders, jneck, aw, belly or hips/butt if you need starting places) is it more/ less tense than last you checked? if so when/ how did you do that? by choice or do you have the thoughts someone else did that?
- have I given someone else permission to “make me feel a way?” um- can I redact that permission right tf now?
- was that tansion pointing to a value misalignemnt?
- What actually happened? (what did I see/ hear/touch/ taste/ smell, not what story am I telling about what happened)
- interface: neither streaming nor pulling energy from those around us.
- *caveat: I hate this. I am really good at it. What I hate is the framing of the word “energy” in modern society. I am overruling my usual insistence that the way the word is used at all is at part of the root of the issue, for the sake of the practicality of helping folks who have a current embodied experience that I do understand, and can translate pretty well for. If a series of practical posts like this around energy are useful, feel free to ask away and i’ll do a series as well as an the applied philosophy around for the sake of what larger commitments I rarely go here this way publicly.
- caveat 2: this was written on the fly in response to one question, but has a lot of other applications, and needs some editing reworking- I’m pulishing it as-is so that it may be useful to some even in its current messy form.