The Power of Energy

The aura is like a balloon and sensitive to its environment. Too many "holes" from negative energy within oneself or from others collapses the balloon.

Last night between 10:00 and 11:00 PM I was picking up static in my energy field. I sensed people talking about me negatively, disapprovingly. This affected my thinking about myself and I started to have self-doubt. Observing, I understood the energy drain. People are ignorant/in the dark, not knowing how their energy affects another. If this drain happens to my body imagine what negative thoughts/emotions do to the body of Gaia. How does human behavior affect climate change? Who is willing to look at that? Why would people want to clip my wings and extinguish my fire with their opinion and judgment? Do some people want me to be silent and invisible? Why?

Here is a current post by David Marshall Spangler that says a lot about relationship:

The Power of Healing

DAVID’S DESK # 81 David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however the material is ©2014 by David Spangler. www.lorian.org.                              In the summer of 1959 when I was fourteen years old, my Dad and Mom left me for two months with my grandmother in Monterey, California, while they went to Phoenix, Arizona. Dad, who had been unemployed for several months, had just been hired as a business consultant by an Arizona firm, and while it was only a temporary job, it had the prospects of turning into a permanent one. My folks felt I might be bored hanging out in Phoenix where I knew no one. Monterey, however, was home not only to Grandma, whom I loved, but also to an aunt and uncle and a couple of cousins.             It was an idyllic couple of months; the days passed quickly until it was time for my parents to pick me up for the trip back home to Old Deerfield, Massachusetts (Dad’s temporary job, by the way, did turn into a permanent one, which resulted in us moving to Phoenix in December of that year, a move that in turn led me onto the path which ultimately resulted in my doing what it is I do now….but that’s another story and one I tell in my book, Apprenticed to Spirit). As the time of their arrival in Monterey got closer, I became more excited until when they arrived, they found me in the midst of a full-on asthmatic attack.             I’ve had chronic asthma since I was a baby. While it can slow me down now and again, I’ve been fortunate in that major attacks have been relatively rare. But this one was frightening, so my parents immediately rushed me off to the nearest doctor. He turned out to be a middle-aged man who took me into his office and began to talk with me. In those long-ago days, doctors actually had time to spend with their patients, so there was nothing rushed about our conversation. He asked me about my summer, about Deerfield Academy where I went to school, about the things I enjoyed doing, and so on. He didn’t prescribe anything; he only sat there talking in a calm, friendly way as if we were the best of buddies. In twenty minutes, my asthma was entirely gone and my breathing was unrestricted, something that was unprecedented in my experience. His entire treatment was based on conversation and friendship. Of course, he knew that many asthmatic attacks are triggered by emotion and stress, as mine had been through the excitement of seeing my parents after two months of separation (the longest we had ever been apart up until then). All he did was “talk me down” and give me his presence, but it was enough.             A man I’m proud to call a friend is a Sufi teacher named Himayat Inayati. For years he was the head of a Sufi healing order, and as part of his work, he would annually host a conference on healing to which he invited healers of all kinds from all over the world. Although I am not a healer, he often did me the honor of having me as a speaker as well. This was the case when he hosted the last of these conferences nearly twenty years ago or so now.             What I remember vividly from that event was a walk Himayat and I took in which he reflected on his experiences over the years of running this annual conference. He said, “David, I’ve known a great many healers and I’ve seen them present a wide array of healing techniques and methodologies. Often, what one healer has to say contradicts what another presents, and their approaches couldn’t be more different. You’d think one would be right and the other wrong. But what I’ve seen is that at one time or another, they all work!”             This is a powerful statement, and the corollary is that at one time or another, all healing approaches fail. So whatever the power of healing is, as Himayat also observed, it goes beyond technique or methodology.             Some years ago I was out for a walk. Walking is a form of meditation for me, a chance to let the rhythm of my body draw my mind into a quiet rhythm of its own. It’s often during my walks that I have my best contacts with my non-physical colleagues. Sometimes this is deliberate and sometimes they just show up. This is what happened on this occasion. I had been thinking about healing and the nature of the power to heal. This is exactly how I was considering it: as a healing power, a mysterious ability that we could develop. I tended to think of this power as a subtle energy of some kind that flowed from healer to patient, correcting whatever was wrong; but what exactly was the nature of this energy?             As I walked along thinking these thoughts, I became aware that someone else had appeared and was moving along next to me. Without preamble and as if we were continuing a conversation we were having on some other level, which we may well have been without my conscious knowledge of it, this presence said, “There is no healing power. There are only healing relationships.”             This stopped me in my tracks, literally. I stood there on the sidewalk, a large field filled with blackberry bushes on one side of me and a road on the other with cars going by, and just thought about what this being had said and its implications. Right away I realized that, for me at least, this perspective changed everything. Thinking of healing as a “power” turned it into a commodity, something you either had or didn’t have. It might be something you could gain, but how did you gain it? This question was like asking how one gained money if one didn’t have any.             But a relationship was different. Anyone can form a relationship. We form relationships all the time, everyday, with people, things, places, creatures. We might not always be good at doing so, but there’s nothing esoteric or mystical about it.             Thinking about this there on the sidewalk, the memory returned of my asthmatic attack when I was fourteen and of the doctor who did nothing more than establish a relationship with me by talking to me. And I thought of Himayat’s comment that every healer or healing technique that he knew of, no matter how much they might contradict each other, had worked at least some of the time. If the healing were not due to the methodology, might it not be due to the relationship which the healer was able to form with a patient (and vice versa) in those circumstances in which a healing did take place?             After this experience, I had a series of dreams over a matter of years. Although the dreams were very different, they also had in common the fact that in the dream someone was injured or ill. The person who healed them in the dream (which sometimes was me, though not always) always did so by forming connections with the environment that surrounded them. I remember one dream in particular in which I, as the healer, was in a forest. A friend had fallen out of a tree and was badly injured. I looked up to the trees around us and opened myself to them in love and appreciation. Immediately from all the nearby trees, energy began to pour into me that then flowed into the person who was injured, healing her. I had done nothing but enter into a loving relationship with the trees.             I’ve thought a lot about this over the years. The question for me has changed from “what is a healing power” to “what is the healing relationship in a given situation?” If I’m with someone who is ill or hurting, I don’t immediately think “how can I heal them? How can I help?” Now I think, “How can I relate to them in a healing way? How can I relate to the environment around us in loving ways that enhance the potentialities for healing?”             This is not so much a methodology or technique as it is an awareness and an attitude. In drawing healing out of a situation that needs or desires it, I don’t see myself as trying to exert some magical inner power of healing. Instead, I see myself as being part of a process of forming the connections that allow wholeness—and thus healing—to emerge as a natural outcome of those connections.             Sometimes what constitutes a healing relationship is just what you would expect. It’s an act of forming a loving, compassionate, caring, energizing relationship with someone or with a situation. But sometimes it’s something else as well. Sometimes it’s a matter of reaching out to feel connected to what is already healthy in a situation or an environment. We tend to think in terms of binaries: something is good or it is bad, it’s black or it’s white. But life is far more complex, far more “ecological” and filled with interconnections and patterns that don’t fall neatly into one thing or another. Thus, when I was ill, parts of me weren’t functioning as they should, but other parts of me were doing just what they were designed to do and doing it reasonably well. I wasn’t “all sick” or “all healthy.” I was a combination. I learned that I could help the “sick” parts of me by seeing the “well” parts of me as allies and drawing on their wellness to bless the whole of my body.             Likewise, when I’m with a sick person now, I want to be as fully in relationship to them in the moment as I can be, but I also cast about for what is healthy in the environment to which I can connect. My objective is not to “draw healthy energies” to channel them to the sick person. My objective is to participate in a circuit—maybe “circulation” is a better word—that allows the life of the whole system to flow without obstruction, drawing out an innate wholeness. Part of my interpretation of what it means to form a healing relationship is to simultaneously connect lovingly to what is working as well as to what is not and to see both as part of a larger system.             Does it work? Sometimes. Not all the time. I’m still exploring, still learning.   I’m thinking that healing means learning how to become a participant in a wholeness, a dynamic system of connectedness, that already exists, rather than simply learning how to “make wholeness happen” in some specific and often isolated part of that system. What I do know, though, is that the comment that healing is a relationship rather than a power itself carries a healing potential. It means that healing is an ecological phenomenon, that is to say, a phenomenon based on interconnections, integration, coherency, and wholeness. This, I think, is an important idea to grasp.             The challenge that we as a species—and all too often, we as individuals as well—face is that we are obsessed with power, usually interpreted as the power over something or the power to control something. We want to make things happen according to our will. But what we need is to instead pay attention to relationship and connection, partnership and collaboration, and to what might be called the “emergent will” of the world system as a whole. We really don’t have power over nature, and we delude ourselves if we think we do. An event like Hurricane Sandy or the current onslaught of arctic temperatures afflicting much of the United States, or the droughts and floods affecting millions of people around the world all give testimony to how little power we have.             But we can learn to live ecologically, which is to say, in integrated, coherent, balanced, and yes, loving relationships with the rest of the natural world. If we do so, I daresay we could heal our world. We would certainly take a huge step in healing ourselves. And that would be powerful indeed!