Energy is Real - Notes

These are the notes I wrote for the Mysterious Studies podcast episode Energy is Real. I am uploading them here for those who find it easier to take in information by reading, or who is interested to see the notes that the episode is based on.

Energy is Real. Well, obviously. We know that we all use some kind of energy to do be able to function. And in a similar manner, our machines or our dogs or whatever, they all need some kind of energy. Plants get their energy in the form of sunshine, water and nutrients in the soil. But let’s step away from the realms of biology and chemistry for a moment. Or maybe, actually, this is all also connected to those realms...but I digress.

What I want to talk about is the kind of energy that we can just...sense. That discreet frequency or vibe of a room, or of a person, or even an object. And this kind of energy, well it wasn NOT seen as real when I was growing up. And that is why I have to start this whole thing with those words: Energy is Real. To allow myself to create this space where I share my own experiences and views of energy. To create this place where I can allow myself to discuss energy as real. I know that these days these spaces exist more broadly than they used to. Maybe they existed even back then, I just didn’t find them until later. In either case, for the longest time, I felt like there was something wrong with me, because I sensed energies that other people didn’t seem to be aware of, or simply didn’t want to acknowledge.

A pretty mundane example is when I was talking to someone, and was feeling like there were multiple levels of interaction taking place at once. There was the level, where they were making sounds and speaking words. And then there was the level, where I felt the energy. Whether I felt it from them, if I simply projected it from myself, or if it was some kind of a combination, I don’t know. But it was there. And I couldn’t ignore it. I would try to focus only on the words, because that’s what I had been taught to do. That was what was “real”. But ignoring that whole other dimension of the energy meant that I had to use a lot of my own energy to suppress it, and this resulted in social interaction feeling very overwhelming and exhausting at times. I noticed this was mostly the case with people who seemed to harbor a lot of dissonance within themselves, meaning, I could feel that their energy was not corresponding with what they were saying. For example, imagine someone saying how much they love to do something, while at the same time you are feeling a strong wave of fatigue and boredom emanating from them. Pretty hard to believe those words to be true. Maybe true in the sense that the person seems to believe them, but still, out of alignment with the energy underlying them.

Overtime, I learned to simply ignore these hidden energetic levels, as I had learned the hard way that it was far easier to play along with whatever the person seemed to be conscious of than to try to confront the deeper energetic levels, how they were actually feeling. And I decided, that it wasn’t really my business anyway. The most polite thing was to stay on the same level that the person was on.

And to be honest, I was also a person with these dissonances within myself. I used to live within a bubble of my own making, to shield myself from facing traumatic memories. And I wasn’t ready to go deeper until the time was right. And I still have blind spots, things I am unconscious about. We all have that, to some extent. That’s just how consciousness works. There are the conscious levels, the subconscious and the unconscious...but let’s get back to those another time. Now I want to focus on energy.

My turning point when it comes to energy, was when I was working as a teacher, and was meeting many students and colleagues every day. I was on the verge towards some kind of a burnout, and had started going to a therapist to discuss my experiences at work. These sessions helped to a certain extent, but they could not help me with what to do, when I came home from work, and simply felt myself overflowing with all the different energies from the people I’d met over the day, and had somehow soaked into my own being. Simply tarlking with a therapist was not enoug - in fact, that was just another person whose energies I took in, and later felt overwhelmed by. As I was living alone, I had some free time in the evenings, and found myself drawn to explore esoteric and occult subjects. What jumped out at me from these works, was their acknowledgement of the existence of energy - something that I had tried to deny my whole life, but still was very concretely affected by. So through those books, I started experimenting with doing clearing, grounding and centering activities. And to my surprise, the difference was huge.

But actually, it was not a great surprise. I had felt these energies being real my whole life. They did not go away by me ignoring them or trying to suppress them. Maybe they were not as real for everyone, and maybe they did not affect other people in the same way. But as they were real for me, I simply needed to work with them. When I started doing even simple clearing activities, I found myself much more in balance, and less overwhelmed by others’ energies. In the next piece of writing/podcast episode, I will share some simple clearing, grounding and shielding exercises for you to try, if you feel that you could have a need of it too. But first I want to discuss the idea of energies as connected to places and objects, in addition to people.

Energy is interesting, the way that it can be connected to a person, a place, or an object. I have come to accept that my own memories and experiences probably color the energy I feel connected to things, but that does not mean that the energy is any less real. It is real to me, because I can feel it. In this space, let us allow both of those to be real: the subjective experience is real. And the energy can be just as real, even connected to a subjective experience. After all, we are all tied to the filter of our own being. That is how we can actually sense and feel anything, through our own being.

When I feel the energy in a place, I am sometimes wondering how much that energy is coming from the people that frequent the place, the history of the place, and how much the physical materials, and the layout of objects affect the energy of a space. Probably it is a combination of all those things. To look deeper into this, I suppose Feng Zhui, focused on the study of energy flow through places, would useful. But so far, my own studies have mainly consisted of experimenting with clearing and shielding practices I learned through various books (I’ll share my favorites at the end of this writing/in the podcast show notes).

I have noticed that I am much more comfortable staying in an unfamiliar place, such as a hotel room, if I first do a clearing of residue energies and then connect with the space. I think that it is important to acknowledge that our reality consists of multiple levels of existence, including both the physical and the energetic. In a way, describing these separately may be a bit of an illusion. But I am feeling a need to do so, for simplicity’s sake. So, when I eneter a space, I feel a need to connect to it, on the energetic level as well as the physical. Maybe I stroke the walls, feel the materials, and then close my eyes so I can better get a feel for the energy of the place.

For clearing, centering, grounding and shielding activities, I have found that the simpler, the better. I don’t really feel a need to work with the bells and whistles of using herbs or incense, but can understand how that may be useful for someone. What these physical tools can do is to help you concretize the activity so that your body gets a chance to feel the activity in a concrete, physical way. We are both physical and non-physical beings, so these physical tools can be useful in the way that they help our being to confirm the activity as really being done. But if you are a person who is very experienced in visualizing, you might also simply do the energy clearing of a room by visualizing the event being done in your mind. So feel into what resonates more for you. None of the approaches is more right or wrong, different approaches simply work for different people.

I believe that there can be individual differences in how energies, or simply the physical space and it’s atmosphere affect us. For example, working as a teacher, I noticed that I had a sensitivity to fluorescent lights, and would prefer when the lights were on a lower setting, while some of my colleagues used to turn the lights all the way up, seemingly enjoying the “higher-energy” setting. The affinity to light also seemed to differ between different students, leading me to confirm the idea that the energies or qualities of a space may affect different people in different ways.

With that in mind, I want to share some of my own favorite practices for clearing, grounding, centering and shielding energies, with the disclaimer that these may not work in the same way for someone else. I encourage you to experiment, to find your own way of doing things. For further study, I have also included some of my own favorite resources connected to the subject below.

Resources

This list includes some books that I found useful in energy work. There are many other books on this subject, so if you already have your own favorites, that’s great. I have included descriptions so that you can see my perspective about the resource.

Protect Your Light by George Lizos

This is a very clearly written and useful book focused on working with energies with many useful activities for clearing and shielding. This is a newer book, so it even includes a chapter of clearing and shielding our digital spaces, phones and social media accounts. Many of the activities are based on a visualization approach, (where you imagine your energies cleared, sometimes with the help of energetic beings) so if that does not resonate with you and you prefer something more grounded and physical, then this may not be the book for you. But still, the overview of different types of shields is very useful, as this is something that many other books seem to be less clear about.

Your Aura & Your Chakras: The Owner’s Manual by Karla McLaren

While this book focuses on the aura and chakras (energy centres), it does have some very useful practices for clearing, grounding and centering, both a person and place. What is special about this book is its comprehensive discussions around energetic contracts, so if you are particularly interested in clearing energy between you and other people, this may be a useful resource for you.

The Life-changing magic of tidying or Spark Joy by Marie Kondo

Not energy clearning books per se, but Marie Kondo talks a lot about the energy of spaces and things, and the physical activity of tidying a space does affect the energy of the space too. These books are recommended to those who feel more drawn to grounded, physical activities and tidying as a way of affecting the energy of a space.