Oprah.com | February 21, 2013
How would you define energy? Is it the caffeinated overdrive feeling that gets you through the day or the electrical current charging your laptop? Contemporary thought leader and “Super Soul Sunday” guest Panache Desai offers new ways to bring yourself back.
Whether you are currently in the midst of a challenging crisis or are perpetually plateaued, you have the ability to shift whatever is going down by amping up or expanding your energy. If you are content with everything in your life, then you have nothing to worry about. Keep doing what you’re doing. However, if you are ready to start playing with possibility, these three surefire solutions will change your energy and transform the way you experience yourself and your life.
1. Go with the Flow
After sleeping through the alarm clock, your children missed the bus, so you drove them to school. While running into the office late for a meeting with your boss, you realize you left the lunch boxes on the kitchen counter. You could spend the entire day at work blaming yourself for being a bad mother or you can learn how to go with the flow.
Your emotions are energy in motion, naturally wanting to move through your body. The optimal state is flow. Anytime you judge your feelings as bad or wrong—anger, embarrassment, sadness or fear—that judgment inhibits the flow of energy. If you shut down the emotions you deem as negative, over time you turn off your energetic flow, which creates heaviness and stagnation inside your body. How do you get in the flow? Self-acceptance opens you up, allowing emotional energy to move. Get into the habit of feeling and loving every emotion as it arises until it subsides. So when you begin to beat yourself up for getting angry—or having any other negative emotion—stop, slow down and breathe until the intensity of the feeling diminishes. The conscious recognition of your breath anchors you in present-moment awareness and opens the flow of energy.
2. Be in the Company of the Truth
The people in your life can have a significant impact on your energy, some for the worse—the complainer sister, the creepy co-worker, that ex-boyfriend with the road rage. Whenever you spend time with any of these folks, you feel depressed, exhausted and drained. But a midweek phone call from your best friend, a date night with your husband or a long walk with the dog makes everything feel right with the world again.
Vibrational energy can be tangibly felt, and people are just like tuning forks. A tuning fork creates a sound wave that vibrates a pure tone at a single frequency. If you have two tuning forks and strike one, the vibration will carry to the other, and both will vibrate at the same tone. When you are in proximity to someone with a higher vibrational resonance, your energy will accelerate. The more time you spend with people who prefer to complain or judge or engage in power struggles, the more likely it is that you will vibrate at the level of judgment and criticism. Your energy will decelerate, and you will feel exhausted, stressed and drained.
What are you getting out of spending time with people who drag you down? What’s the real reason you choose to have lunch with Debbie Downer? Perhaps she makes you feel better about yourself because she seems worse off than you. It’s time to take responsibility for the individuals you want to spend time with and how you want to show up in the world. By being with openhearted and truly authentic people, you become a catalyst for your own transformation.
3. Accept Everything (for 3 Minutes)
When you connect to a place of stillness, you access a state of allowing for that precious pause—you leave the hamster wheel of doing. However, this is not a pass to sit on your sofa and snooze the day away. This is an invitation to allow energy to flow that may have gotten inadvertently stuck. Your goal is three minutes of absolute relaxation and profound acceptance every day. You can do this before you get out of bed each morning, in the shower or out in the hallway after a stressful situation. Start by saying to yourself, “I accept…” Then, fill in the blank with whatever is going on in your life in that moment. By making this a daily practice, you take yourself out of self-judgment, begin to recognize the sacredness of yourself and restore your true nature.
Spiritual teacher Panache Desai travels the globe providing experiential programs and inspired-living workshops as well as producing a monthly live webcast series empowering people to free themselves from pain, suffering, sadness and self-limiting beliefs. To learn more, visit PanacheDesai.com.
Printed from Oprah.com on Thursday, March 7, 2013
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