Whether you spend most of your days behind a desk and evenings lounging on a couch in front of the TV…or you’re dealing with way too much stress and drama….or you’re feeling dulled by depression, it helps to move that stagnant energy out of your body.  Most people familiar with New Age and metaphysical tools know that Reiki and massage are good ways to move energy around in the body and get your “chi” flowing again.

Physical exercise can also routinely and regularly move energy within the body.  Heart-pumping, deep-breathing cardio, active yoga poses, resistance training, kick-boxing, bellydancing, team sports–they can all stir you on a physical and cellular level. 

Spiritualize your workouts by thinking of how the exercise of your body-as-a-temple is energy that is brought to life within it, purified, moved around, and charged.  Get rid of your stiffness and sludgy feelings not just by moving your body, but moving the energy inside it. 

Thinking in terms of “energy” and clearing it, getting it to flow?  So much better than dreading a visit to the gym.

I’ve spent so much of the past month concerned about the effects of the Gulf Oil spill on my allergies and asthma that i didn’t notice the shift in the “energy” in the coastal environment where I live. 

Since I first smelled the wind-driven, gagging, petroleum smell from the controlled burns in the Gulf of Mexico on the evening of 19 May 2010, I’ve been more concerned with managing to hold my breath while I run between the car and my house or the car and my office.  It was intermittent at first, once every week for a day or two, but as of this week, it’s constant and I cannot exercise outdoors,  walk through my garden, wash the car in the driveway.  It’s a struggle to take the trash to the curb or get the mail without finding my air supply cut off by the first hint of fumes in my throat. 

Still, I missed something–the metaphysical changes in the Gulf Coast area over the past 2 months since the BP oil spill and Deepwater Horizon. 

Once a month, my spiritual circle meets at my house, which is about 5 miles inland, and my guests come from as close as two blocks away to as far away as 25+ miles inland.  At our June “Sunday Night Gathering,” some of my guests noted the same strong smell in the air, as well as a haze.  Then one of them commented on being able to “feel” the oil in the air, and I realized, yes, it’s true.  Some of us who sense energy shifts do feel the oil, not just as a haze or stench but in the metaphysical sense.

It is heavy here.  Not so much greasy as suffocating.  There are no better words for me to tag the feeling of it except heavy and suffocating.  I think that says it all.  It’s an image of tar blanketing our faces and bodies and cutting off the breath of life. 

If you’re unaccustomed to thinking about locations in the “energetic” sense, let’s try a different example that might be better understood.  Every location has a different “energy.”  I’ve travelled the States extensively in my career, before limiting travel due to child custody issues, and every city I’ve visited has its own energy…what some might call a personality but more than that.  By “energy,” I mean also a spiritual aspect to the location’s personality. 

Though I live near the beach–formerly a perk of where my career landed me–I love the mountains.  If you’ve driven the Blue Ridge Parkway, you might have noticed the powerful energy there.  It’s ancient and fresh at the same time.  You feel the freshness of heaven there even before you lower your car windows and taste the clouds hanging in the air  around you. 

Gettysburg, where I’ve visited twice, makes me physically ill as soon as I hit the battlefield perimeter.  I mean violently ill.   I feel the fear and death all around, and the museum full of sweetheart’s photos and broken spectacles taken from those who died there sings to me of longing for home and loved ones never to be seen again.  It’s an empath’s nightmare.

After Hurricane Katrina, I could not go back to New Orleans. What had been relaxed, easy, and a little exotic suddenly felt as if the ground itself had been poisoned.   I’ve also declined to visit Ground Zero while in New York City and I won’t return to The Alamo either.    On the other hand,  while visiting the United Kingdom, the guide pointed out the Black Mountains as our bus headed back toward London.  One glimpse of them and I had the deepest yearning to go there that I have ever had in my life for any place.  I could not explain it but the energy of that place, growing smaller in the distance, touched something in me that I hadn’t known was there. 

My guest was correct when he noted the change in the energy, that you could feel something different in the air beyond the obvious smell or the resignation and anger of the local residents.  The oil here has had an energetic impact, a spiritual impact on this location.

I know that oil, not just gas, has become a mainstay in our lives and that we as a species have contaminated our planet and our bodies with petrochemicals. I know that the computer I’m typing on was made with oil and that the clothes I’m wearing were made with oil. I know that the shampoo bottle in my bathroom was made with oil, right down to the adhesive labels.  I know that oil is pervasive in every aspect of our lives.  Yet energetically, the sheer magnitude of the oil spill feels as if it’s contaminating life in a much bigger way.  The energy is shifting that way and the personality of this entire place is on the brink of change, and not just wildlife.  It feels poisoned.  Contaminated.

It feels as if we are changing the very elements of what we are.

The next time we gather at a festival and chant that familiar song, will it still be

Earth, my body;

Water, my blood;

Air, my breath;

And fire, my spirit?

Or will it be

Earth, my body;

Oil, my blood…?

Ley Line #2: The River of Life…or…Souls?

Whereas most houseguests don’t notice the first ley line in my house, those of us who live here didn’t really notice the second one—we still don’t—until visitor after visitor pointed it out to us.

I don’t think that this particular ley line has been present during my entire tenure in my house.  I’ve had many very gifted visitors in my home in the past decade and none of them have noticed this particular stream of energy.  It’s been suggested that recent Earth changes might have caused some ley lines and energy vortices to move, particularly earthquakes, tsunamis, and tiny pole shifts.  But that’s not the really fascinating thing about this ley line.

This stream of energy is more like a river.  It’s not straight at all and has a far different quality to it than the creativity stream or sweet spot.  I don’t think it’s a “vile vortex.”  There IS a tranquility to it, surprisingly, but it’s otherworldly.  It enters my front door, flows down the hall, veers to the East into another room, sharply to the North, and then spiraling down through the wall.  (see map)

Followers of the Egyptian pantheon have likened it to a River of Life leading souls back home.  It’s like the path just outside of the gates of Heaven, leading peaceful souls back to the Source.  There is no sense of danger, anger, or upset in this powerful stream.

For the past few years, houseguests have reported hearing footsteps or light conversation in the path of this stream.  (I don’t hear or see them.)  Strangers have come to my home and inquired about the ghosts coming inside and heading quietly down the hallway.  At least a dozen unrelated persons have described this River of Souls to me, both in the nature of what they see and hear, its explicit path, and the lack of harm or ill will they sense.

Basically, they don’t bother me and I don’t bother them.  They’re curious about me and me about them.  I know there are many things unseen in our world—call it paranormal, call it dark matter, call it spooky—but I do find it fascinating  to think of the movement of the unseen world in a particular pattern that forms a stream of energy.

continued from Part 1

Ley Line #1:  The Stream of Creativity

I’ve known about the first ley line since around 1995, not long after moving into this house.    I had a desk set up in a home office where I could write chapter after chapter of my novels on my nice new computer but it wasn’t the best place to write.  The best place was at the Northeastern side of my dining room table, either in the last chair next to the window or the end chair next to the window.  Two chairs away made a difference.  In that one spot, sort of diagonal across the table, was a stream of energy about 3 feet wide that was pure bliss when it came to creativity.  I could sit and write 50 pages in a few hours a night—this is where I wrote Access and later Dark Revelations.  I didn’t need earphones or headphones or BrainSync music to focus.  It was like stepping into a river of creative energy and tapping it.

This ley line was relatively straight and stayed in this particular place until around 2009 when noticed a shift for reasons unknown.  In its initial (since I’ve lived here) path, I could trace it, by the feel of where I was in a room, from one end of the house to the other (see map below). Later, when I was introduced to dowsing, we could follow its path.  It passed through a particularly interesting corner of one bedroom, through the foyer, through the dining room, through a portion of the kitchen where people always tend to congregate, and through the home office area to a spot where my daughter often had a desk and was very productive.

I know the ley line was there first, but somehow important things ended up in that stream of energy—two altars, spots where people gathered, spots where people created or worked.  Spots where people wanted to read or write or brainstorm.  So some of the more creative tabletop areas lined up with the ley line.

In the fall of 2009, while my home office was being refurbished, I moved my desk.  Initially, it had been in the middle of the northern wall of the room until around 2002 when I moved it to the northwestern corner of the office.  Lots of work was done in both areas but I always seemed to have to push against the work, really make it happen.

With the electrical repairs to the room, which necessitated painting, I didn’t want to move every last thing out of the office because I still needed to work.  I shoved my desk to the middle of the room so that I could keep all the computers hooked up and stay productive while giving the repairmen room to work.  Something about that spot felt really, really good. After the room had been repainted, I decided to leave me desk near the middle of the northern wall, about 3 feet from where it had felt so good—and it still felt good.

In fact, there seemed to be a direct line from this feel good spot to the next.  The stream of energy had changed.

I talked to others in my household and found that the stream previously documented in one of the bedrooms had moved from the corner over by about 4 to 5 feet. With that shift, a stream seemed to open up in another room next door.  When we mapped the stream, it had definitely shifted in the house.  I’m not sure if it shifted to match up with our new pools of creativity we were working from or if it shifted and we matched up to it, but I think, probably the latter is more accurate.  After all, I have been very hard-working and creative in some close-by areas but it wasn’t until I moved my desk that I felt the difference, even though I moved it only a few feet east of where it had been for most of the decade.

Since this particular ley line is so conducive to creativity, I try to arrange my creative efforts to take place within the stream, and when I do, it’s like getting a tailwind!

This ley line is recognized by most people who stay in my home for more than a few days, but those of us who live here all the time tend to notice quickly how guests react to it, even if they don’t see/hear/feel it in any psychic way. My favorite experiment was during a 10-month time frame in 2008 and 2009 when I was dating a lot of different young hotties who would walk into my home and head for the same spot in my house. Whereas guests seeking serenity and safety immediately go to the sweet spot in the heart of the house, those seeking the buzz of creativity and excitement stroll immediately to the any open spot in the creativity ley line.

In fact, I have a habit of snapping iPhone pictures of my dates to use when they call me next time, and there are a good dozen pictures that hilariously were taken in the same 18-inch square because that’s exactly where every one of these guys go when they walk into my home to pick me up.  I didn’t even realize it until a friend pointed out that every “boy picture” in my phone had the same background and looked as if I’d snapped them all on the same night!

(continued in Part 3)

The more I learn about these ley lines, the more questions I have, such as:

-          Do all ley lines move?

-          What causes ley lines to move?

-          Are the ley lines here first or do we create or move them to where we put our energy, such as at sacred sites or altars?

-          What are the qualities of a ley line that spirals?  Is it a vortex?

-          Are ley lines for different purposes?

-          Can I map the ley lines in my house?

The Power Spot:  The Sweet Spot of Serenity and Sacred Space

The first power spot in my house was evident to me within a month of moving into this house, back in 1993.  I wasn’t comfortable in the house—it was too big and still had too much of the previous owners’ energy from their divorce and drama.  I had grown up in an exceptionally modest home and was not accustomed to  such a nice dwelling, even though we’d gotten a great deal on it.  The house was so big that at least a half of it was closed off and had little or no furniture for several years.

Still, there were a couple of places in the house that felt…good.  Serene.  The first I noticed was the strongest, and it was in the heart of the house.

We had bought an old, recovered sofa for $50 and in the natural arranging of the living room, the sofa ended up in that sweet spot.   If I felt bad, I could curl up on that sofa and feel great.  If I felt tired, I could nap for 20 minutes on that sofa and feel rejuvenated.  When I replaced the dilapidated sofa in 2003, the energy was still there.  Later, around 2005, I re-arranged the room and felt compelled to move my main altar—or sacred spot—to that exact spot.

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It’s funny to see how houseguests respond to these energy spots in my house.  With the first power spot, I often have people  sit—just SIT—on the floor in front of the spot (since the altar is on the spot itself but the feel-good energy expands out to the East of it now).  As big as the house is, when a guest visits and brings a pet, that pet will leave the rest of us and go lie down in that sweet spot for the duration of the visit.  The same is true of small children.  Everyone is drawn to that spot and they always feel serene and safe there.  (continued in Part 2)

If you find this review helpful, see the suggested reviews listed at the bottom of this article.

Esther and Jerry Hicks’ The Teachings of Abraham DVD X of the Law of Attraction in Action series, Let Loose!, is a 2-DVD set, a little over 3 hours long, that’s been excerpted from their July 2008 Stamford, CT, Workshop.  I bought it from the Abraham-Hicks website for $30.  HOWEVER, I’ve “attracted” a better deal for you, and you can get it–new–for 1/3rd to 2/3rds of the list price here.  Still, this one was worth the full retail price.

So that I’m not telling you exactly what Abraham advised for every question asked on these DVDs, I’ll tell you areas of concerns I’ve had that were answered for me.  Funny, how that happens.  I don’t have to ask a question myself–the answers will come to me through the questions of others.

My big epiphany during my third listen to this DVD was that it never works for me to match my vibration to someone else’s.  This could simply be said as “stop trying to be what other people want me to be because that’ll just make me miserable.”  If you’ve listened to much of the Teachings of Abraham, that probably seems obvious but it hit me in a way that surprised me.  I may have wanted a relationship with a particular person in the past who shared a vibration and then…didn’t…but any time I ever tried to figure out what was going on with a romantic partner so I could adjust my own view of the world, even subconsciously, the result was disastrous.  I cannot worry about what’s going on in some  silly man’s head because it doesn’t matter.  The only thing that matters is what’s going on in mine, and if the vibration is the same, then life is all the sweeter.

The DVD segment on psychics in many ways echoed one my articles, “3 Reasons Psychics Are Bad for the Law of Attraction–and 1 Good One.”  The Abraham-Hicks approach is a little closer to what I detailed in “3 Keys to Not Giving Away Your Power to Spiritual Advisors,” but with an extended explanation.  I found the description of how a psychic reads vibrational energy to be quite fascinating and worth the price of the entire DVD if you’ve ever visited a psychic, a Tarot reader, or some other intuitive.  For as much work as I’ve done personally on reading the energy of someone else or connecting with them empathically, I now have a much different awareness both of how to help clients I’m coaching to change their world and how to change my own when the predicted future looks bleak.

One of the “hot seat” questions led to a better understanding of a recent difficult time I went through (aka, “contrast”).  The discussion was on asking for help and how sometimes help comes to you and sometimes you are the help for someone else.  Between this segment and another on lawsuits, I found a deeper understanding of some concerns in my life over the past few months.  I’ve noticed on workshop downloads, DVDs, and in the live workshop I attended in Orlando that people in lawsuits really want to know how to pivot to something better-feeling because it seems that nothing like a lawsuit can drag you out of your sweet spot, aka “the Vortex.” The choice seems to be one of whether to continue fighting in a lawsuit because it’s the right thing to do (for various reasons) or to let it go and be free of it.  Hey, these things can be tiring, right?

I’m not in a lawsuit, but I have had to deal with some investigations I never wanted to be involved in.  I had a choice of letting it go and not having to focus on the grueling daily aspects and simply move on or…fight for what I felt was right.  Through this DVD, I was able to see that I may not be “in the Vortex” while putting my efforts into standing up for what’s right, but I do feel a whole lot better than if I let unethical and illegal matters that have affected so many people, plus myself, be swept under the rug. I would feel like a failure, a coward, and a victim if I kept silent.  Instead, I am the one who has been able to help others.  They all asked the Universe/God/The Powers That Be/etc, for help with their situations and I was the one in this tapestry of connections who brought it all together into a design we all understood and could take action on.  I asked the Universe for help in one simple matter and got it, but by sharing my clarity with other interested parties, all their lives have changed.

These were the most pertinent questions this DVD answered for me.  The rest was of good quality, too, and Let Loose! was certainly worth buying, listening to, and sharing with friends.

For the best price I’ve found, buy here.

Lorna Tedder, Ostara 2010

From the upcoming book, Passion to the Third Degree; originally published in 2007.

I am exhilarated, mellow, happy, calm, peaceful, powerful, amazed, excited, sleepy, and awake all at once. Ah, I feel wonderful.

You know it’s a great ritual when you feel the energy coursing through your body to the extent that your whole body is rocking with the waves and your ears throb from the pressure. I love the way a good rit can do that to me.

The sounds of the night birds were beautiful, as was the moon, so clear and full.

No Great Rites this Beltane. The Goddess had something else in mind. I’m eager to sit back and watch. There’ll be rites enough.

No doubts. None.

Now if my ears would just stop pounding….

And of course, I do reek of dragon’s blood, rose oil, and wine….

I have a spare bedroom I’m painting and refurbishing so that it’ll make a beautiful guest room when my daughter is home from college or has friends over.  I didn’t finish it earlier in the year when I was too busy, but I’ve had plenty of time to wrap things up in the last two weeks.  I haven’t.  I know better.

I’ve been avoiding putting any of my creative energy into this room for one reason:  someone did something extremely hurtful to my daughter and me a couple of weeks ago and I know that all that anger and hurt would just go right into my creation.   And anyone sleeping in that room would feel the angry energy bouncing off the walls.

I’ve been very picky about who I’ve gotten to help me with refurbishing my house and yards.  Captain Earl has done wonders for my gardens and lawn, and it’s a sweet energy there when I walk around the outside of the my house.  He’s helped with my indoor creations, too, including my home office, to create a beautiful serene, lovely place for me to create and work.  When Justin was here with me, he helped me “build castles” out of my home, doing all sorts of chores and handyman jobs enthusiastically, and helping me design my rope-lighted patio.  With Todd, he commented often on all the things in my house that he appreciated, though he wasn’t part of building this serene place where I live.

I’ve long understood that what you put into a creation is energy and that energy stays with it.  I saw this with the clothes my mom made for me while I was growing up and with the clothes she made for my daughters.  Every stitch made with love–and putting a little part of herself into every stitch.  The girls always  told me how loved and safe they felt in dresses Grandma had made them.

So my guest room with the planned teal and tan paint, the bamboo curtain rods, the wood blinds, and the walls hangings will wait a little while longer.  My serenity is returning after a terrible upset, and when I’m sure that all I’m broadcasting is love and peace, that’s what I’ll put into this room.

When I was first looking for a like-minded spiritual group in Northwest Florida, I found several existing circles rather easily.  These were people who were either pagan or pagan-friendly, with anything from a nice mix of different religious beliefs to a finely honed circle with a specific focus.  I contacted each of them and, without their knowing anything at all about me, they all told me that they were currently closed to new members. I felt a little miffed and rejected at the time–weren’t they even willing to meet me and give me a chance?–but now I understand.  A few did offer an explanation  about energetic harmony but having not had my own group before then, I didn’t understand the precariousness of the balance of energy among a small spiritual group, circle, or coven.

Last year, I closed my own group, my fourth, to the public.  Why?  To maintain the “good energy” we’d achieved.  I didn’t want to close it completely and I did want to be able to grow it here and there as members deployed or moved away, so I made to closed to strangers but current members could bring a guest or two occasionally if they thought it would be a good fit.  And, of course, I could bring in other people whenever I wanted, given that it was my group and I was the High Priestess-slash-Facilitator of it.

Wow, have there been lessons!

1. If you’re starting the group, set the rules to suit you. I’d had several small circles between 2003 and 2006, but internal politics always played a role.  Some members wanted to host at their homes, and that just didn’t work.  For the circle I started in March 2008, I decided that the meetings would be at my house every single time.  No exceptions. I enjoy having friends in my home, but I also didn’t want to go back to the problems my second group had where I was often making my way home at 2 AM from a healing circle I’d been misled to think was 40 minutes away instead of 2 hours away.  I wanted the control of when the meetings would be, how often, and without having to worry about babysitters or, more importantly since I was having some problems with my night vision, I didn’t have to drive after dark.

So, in exchange for that control, I set it up so that I provide dinner–usually something simple and buffet-ish, we socialize and discuss the previous gathering’s lessons for the first hour while enjoying dinner, and then I teach an hour-long class or workshop that ends in a free-for-all of questions.  That’s the way I wanted it, and the energy in my house is usually pleasant and steady.  This is a far cry from driving an hour at night to have dinner that won’t be ready until 9PM, teach a class, and have to break every few minutes because the hostess allows her unruly kids to interrupt almost as often as she and her husband yell at each other.  Hey, I don’t think that makes me a control freak…but if I’m making the effort to start a group and teach it, then I make the rules to suit myself.  The people whose energy is congruous with mine will show up.

2.  Be aware of the strangers you allow into your house because they can be the best and worst things to happen to your circle. You never know where that energy’s been! My previous circles had been crafted from friends, best friends, and friends of friends–often with their own agenda.  Circle #2 came to a screeching halt after a married member of the group began inviting her newfound married lover to our meetings so they could meet in a safe place…not to mention sneaking off during my workshops to have loud sex in my bathroom.

When I started my current group, it was after looking around and meeting one-on-one with potential candidates for over a year.  I finally decided to just see who was out there and started the original Wiccan Concepts group in Niceville on Meetup.  I paid all the fees myself, didn’t charge admission, provided dinner and class, and still had at least 75% of every RSVP list turn into a no-show.  That’s a frequent problem on Meetup, yes, but in spite of that, I met my core group through that service.  The first three people to show up  on the first night are still tried and true members after two years, and one of the three chose to pursue Wicca as an Initiate.  Other core members joined within the year, and we had a really nice energy together with true caring among the members.  That kind of balance of energy is what you want to aim for because if the participants are in harmony, then you’re working together with that energy instead of using it to pull in different directions.

Just a side note here:  Though I didn’t originally intend it, my home is a sanctuary for members of my circle.  It’s the one place that some feel they can come to get away from stress and drudgery and luxuriate in an evening of magic and friendship.

Of course, if you’re inviting the general public into your home, you really don’t know what you’re getting.  I got wonderful and I got…problem children.  Normally someone whose energy didn’t mesh with the group would show up once, insist everything be his or her way, and then stomp off in a huff.  I didn’t cry over it.  Occasionally, someone with their own set of problems would show up and spend the evening putting me down or being disrespectful of what I was teaching–I still cannot abide people talking on their cell phones or via sign language while I’m trying to hold a class.  Some would show up and really mesh well with the group but had too many issues with parents or family not wanting them to attend and soon they faded away.

The final straw that caused me to close down my Meetup group and move it to a private, invitation-only basis was  when my daughter caught one of the first-timers going through her things in a cabinet, and later we realized that some of my daughter’s cherished possessions were gone.  Okay, big hot button:  you don’t steal from me.  The Wiccan Concepts group is still on Meetup but–little did I know when I canceled the group–MeetUp allows other people to take over a canceled group and claim it as their own if the moderator steps down.  Otherwise, it’s a good option for meeting candidates for your group whom you’d never meet.

3.  If someone doesn’t show after several invitations, drop it. I’ve had several cases where someone begged me for an invitation, then never showed–usually after I’d cooked for them and made sure enough parking was available so as not to upset my neighbors.  On one hand, I’ve not really understood.  How can you beg to be invited because you’re sure I can show you the one thing you’re looking for and then stand me up several times?  The irony is that the thing they’re looking for is almost always at my house and available to them.  Perhaps the thing I have to offer them is something they shouldn’t really have?  I don’t know, but my rule is, if you turn down my invitation three times, you don’t get invited back.  If you ask to come repeatedly and yet never show, you don’t get invited back because I don’t think you’re serious.

4. Beware of inviting people you’re romantically involved with. I’ve done this several times and have had great and terrible luck, depending on the guy.  In an earlier group, my date was welcomed with open arms and enjoyed the evening, with lots of good input; however, the other women really wanted his attention, and not spiritually.  In my current group, my sweetie quickly became part the group and was adored for himself and for his Tarot talents.  He attended multiple meetings  and was very much a part of the group harmony.  The energy was powerful and balanced.  More recently, I’ve invited three different guys I’ve been involved with.  They’ve all either turned me down instantly because they weren’t comfortable with subject matter or simply didn’t show.  The difference is that the first two men were held similar spiritual interests while the other men in my life haven’t been interested in either attending a gathering or becoming part of the group because their relationships with me lacked the spiritual element.

5.  Other than the lack of consideration, don’t worry about the no-shows. Not long before I decided to pursue formal training in Wicca, I learned a valuable lesson from Maggie Shayne, who created a special open circle with Evelyn Vaughn and me at a Romance Writer’s of America conference in Washington, D.C.   Someone on the way to the open circle, which we led out in a park-like area, had twisted her ankle and couldn’t participate.  Maggie passed on to me that sometimes people aren’t part of the ritual because of reasons we aren’t meant to know.  If they’re supposed to be there, they will be.  I’ve seen people come to rituals and celebrations with anger and jealousy that disturbed the balance of energy, so I no longer question that…though I will question why someone can’t pick up the phone and let me know not to plan for them.

6.  Just because a person is your best friend (or even your spouse) doesn’t mean she should be part of your circle. I brought my open-minded, pagan-friendly, New-Age-Christian, bestest-friend-in-the-world into the periphery of my first circle and more heavily into my second and third.  It wasn’t smooth.  We both wanted it to work but it just didn’t. She was used to being a teacher whenever she was in a crowd and those natural instincts always took over.  No matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t be a student.   She struggled with being in “learn” mode vs “teach” mode, and  only occasionally was the energy nicely balanced, usually when we were working together to help someone else.

7.  Just because a person is harmonious with you doesn’t mean he’ll be harmonious with the group. I have had people I adore shock me. I have had friendly, balanced relationships with individuals who shared many of my beliefs and were open to learning and I’ve excitedly invited them to attend a couple of meetings, only to drop them from the invitations later.  I couldn’t believe how different they were in a group–patronizing, negative, disruptive.  It was as if they suddenly forgot they were guests or students in a class, or that the other attendees were  not there for a newcomer’s advice but rather, for what I had to teach them.

8. When inviting new people, try to meet them one-on-one before considering bringing them into the group. There are people I’ve lunched with and never looked back at.  There are others whom I lunch with regularly, but will never invite them to a group function or a workshop.   The energy just isn’t right for the whole group.

9.  When inviting new people to join the group, start on a trial basis. They don’t have to know it’s a trial.  After attending once or twice, you’ll have a feel for whether they contribute to the group energy or detract from it.  You don’t want to commit yourself and then have to end a friendship because the rest of the group can’t bear to have them in the same room.

10.  Consider having long distance or deployed members join the meetings by Skype or speaker phone. I’ve done this with members of different circles, and while it wasn’t the ideal of having them physically present, it does allow for some interaction we’d all be sadder without.  It’s still very possible to “attend” a class by webcam or phone, and even to allow different members of the group to pair off with the phone or webcam for a Tarot reading or detailed discussion.

For me, the hardest part of having a successful group is in maintaining the balance of energy.  I’m now enlisting my daughter to help more with hostessing and sergeant-at-arms duties, mainly because I feel I need to give some attention to newcomers while not forgetting about my tried and true core group.  Sometimes newcomers demand a lot of attention–which has more of a “take” feel that pulls on the group energy, and those people don’t tend to be a good fit for the group.  But every now and then, someone new attends who is respectful and willing to share and just fits in from Day One.  Those people don’t drain and lower the group energy:  they amplify it.  It’s a delicate balance but well worth it if you can achieve it.

Photo credit by eyesore9; creative commons license

First dates are perhaps the best example ever of energy bubbles and making those first important energetic connections with someone else.  That’s because there are few other situations where we are thrust into an environment with a new person and expected to stay and hold our own for at least 20 to 30 minutes before deciding if we want more.  Wouldn’t it be fun is we could see the energy bubble around us in living color?

I write a lot about energy, a rather nebulous term for people who’ve never been around healing circles or bonfire drumming.  As an empath, my awareness of energy has grown to the point where, even though energy is invisible, its effects are not.  I feel it much as I feel the wind.  I can’t see it but I can see it bend the trees, and I can hear it howl or sing sometimes, and I can feel it.   I think we can all feel it if we’re aware of it and use it to diagnose how well a first date or first meeting is going.

A typical first date–even if you’ve been talking to the other person online, via email, via text, and on the phone or even webcam for months–is fertile ground for studying how energetic connections form, or don’t.  Like most people, I tend to have an upsurge of energy and excitement just before my date shows up.  It’s anticipation, wonder, curiosity.  I’ve had some people walk through my front door and felt as if I’d known them all my life, and the energy between us has been gentle, passionate, flowing, caring, happy.  I’ve had low-key DVD/wine/cheese/sitting on the floor dates in my family room that were just one big colorful energetic bubble and floating blissfully skyward as he exited my home and then allowed me to sigh my way off to bed and sweet dreams.  These are the ones I’m dancing around the house over and can’t wait to talk to him the next day.  That’s the kind of date I want, every time.  Who doesn’t?

The horrible first dates aren’t as easy to feel the bubble, possibly because it bursts at first glance or so soon after that you’re not even aware of it.  It’s just a huge disappointment that hits you so early that you don’t hang around to watch that energy bubble float between you.   But who cares about those dates?

The best use of the bubble to diagnose a first date is when you’re not sure how the date is going.  Those…mediocre dates…that sort of fizzle at some point.  A great date is the kind where you lose track of time because you’re so caught up in each other’s energy and that bubble just gets bigger and brighter and before you know it, you’ve been locked in deep conversation for three hours  and spend the next five making out because you can’t bear to tear yourselves apart.  You are both in that bubble and floating away, spinning, with it.  A mediocre date is the kind where the…pacing, if we were watching a movie…begins to lag.  If the pace picks back up, the energy bubble is stable.  If not, it either fizzles or pops.

For myself, about the longest I can sustain the energy of a mediocre date is 30 minutes, though most of the time, it pops at about 20.  (Yes, I date a lot, and most of my dates are great these days…though every so often, one will surprise me.)

That’s the point where suddenly the energy falters.  It doesn’t matter how good-looking the guy is, how nice he is, how entertaining he is.  I know at that instant that the date is over, usually for both of us.  It’s rarely something we don’t both seem to know at the same instant, with the exception (for me) of the rich guy who reverted to his good ol’ boy loud-obnoxious-racist roots in a ritzy restaurant after he’d had a few drinks with dinner.  He was too inebriated to be aware of the change in energy between us.  Most of the time, however, you both can feel the drop in energy.

This happened recently on a really lovely date with a really lovely gentleman.  Sweet guy, and on the surface, we had a lot in common.  About 30 minutes into our date, though, we’d hit most of the most obvious subjects that we had in common and we started getting into more of the subject matter akin to whom we are under the surface.  That’s when little things about our differing value systems popped up and I felt the quivers in the bubble as it began to deflate.  This bubble didn’t pop, it just fizzled, rather suddenly.  It wasn’t one particular question but a short series–how was it I could be happy now when I’d been through a divorce and why wasn’t I still devastated,  what was my most bizarre date since being single and how could I ever have considered dating a potential cross-dresser?  Nothing wrong with his belief system–just much more rigid than my open-to-almost-anything way of thinking.  I saw in his eyes that he could not fathom what I consider “openness,” and I knew that I could enjoy dinner with this man, but that I’d never be able to be myself around him…and him hang around.  It was a little sad to feel that bubble pop, right on time, but rather than drag things out and try to revive the bubble (that never works, ever), I called it a night much like an ER physician calls a death.

Most of the time, the bubble doesn’t fizzle and deflate to nothingness.  It pops after one particular question, whether you acknowledge it or not.  That question varies from man to man, but at some point, a hot button comes up in conversation.  Ylike ou never know until the question is out there and maybe not until after it’s answered if that was the magic question that ended the date.  It’s anything from “What do you think of Sarah Palin?” to “Do you think Nietzsche was insane?”  to “What’s wrong with these wontons?”  The most WTF moment I’ve ever had in a date was 20 minutes into appetizers–after weeks of talking on the phone–when he asked a simple question about what I’d done the night before, I told him, and he lost it with a diatribe on how educated people like me think we’re more important than people like him.  Huh?  I’d never mentioned my literary aspirations before then…just never came up…but in explaining that I had been researching Medieval history for a new novel I was working on, something touched off his hot button and he exploded.   I never had a clue as to what exactly happened back then but I understand better now.  Even though we tried to pull the date back together–we’d met half way and had driven way too far to walk out after 20 minutes–the energy bubble had burst and it was definitely over.

Watching the energy level and letting it act as a gauge in first dates has become something of a game now, not as much fun as great dates but fascinating enough to make mediocre dates more enjoyable.  By the way, first dates never start out as mediocre.  It’s just one of the directions they can take when it fizzles or pops. If that bubble expands, you never want it to end.

Photo copyright:  Aislinn Bailey, used with permission.

Well, she looks at you so coolly,

And her eyes shine like the moon in the sea;

She comes in incense and patchouli,

So you take her, to find what waiting inside

The Year of the Cat.

– “The Year of the Cat,” Al Stewart and Peter Wood

Yes, I came in the Year of the Cat.  The Water Tiger, to be specific.  Maybe that’s why I’m so over-the-top excited about what 2010 has to offer as the Year of the Metal Tiger leaps into action on Valentine’s Day.

Tiger years, once every 12 years on the Chinese astrology calendar, are usually indicative of tiger energies– fierce, bold, full of change, powerful, protective, assertive, unstoppable, spontaneous, exuberant, sometimes a little too brash–but mixed with the element of metal, this 2010 Year of the Metal Tiger could bring a bit of sharpness.

Overall, I expect it to be a terrific year for tigers, even with lots of upheaval and change.  I think the key will be to stay flexible  and expect that there will be great change on both a world and personal level.

Based on history–looking at past Metal Tiger years, there’s been a lot of turbulence in the world at those times, including wars starting and social change.  If I were to predict what I think 2010 will bring us, I would guess that there’ll be some unfounded optimism, quick adjustments to be made, economic drama, and military conflicts that escalate with some surprises.  Keep an eye, for example, on the tie to social upheaval, economic shifts, and political restlessness reflected in the US as the US presence builds in Afghanistan.  Disasters are more likely to be of fire and earth categories, such as fires, volcanoes, earthquakes, explosions, and nuclear/radiological. As a matter of fact, watch for all sorts of unusual breakthroughs and break-a-parts related to energy, particularly the atomic/nuclear/radiological type.

Just for fun, here are a few things that happened in previous Metal Tiger years:

1950: Start of the war in Korea, invasion of Tibet, Atomic Energy Commission began hydrogen bomb, huge focus on communism, McCarthy Era paranoia.

1890: Significant year for shipwrecks, Wounded Knee Massacre,  first electric chair execution, first geothermal well, US Census uses punch cards.

1830: France invaded Algeria, Belgian Revolution, November Uprising (Poland), Indian Removal Act in US, Church of Latter Day Saints started as Church of Christ, first intercity passenger railway operated by steam

1770: Boston Massacre (trigger event for American Revolutionary War), closest approach by comet (Lexall’s) in history, Russo-Turkish War, Falkland Crisis, royal wedding fireworks disaster

Interesting and eerie….   I actually went as far back as the turn of the first millennium and realized that all the bloody battles between countries that I had prepared to list here had no meaning for me–or very little, when I could remember their history. They were just wars and conflicts lost to the centuries.   It made me wonder if, in a few more centuries, the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Korean War,  the hydrogen bomb, etc, will simply be another meaningless footnote in the history of Metal Tiger years.

The eyes are the windows of the soul, indeed!  Yes, her eyes really are that color and those are lichens on the ground in this beautiful natural setting.

Photo copyright by Aislinn Bailey, AisPortraits.com, Niceville, Florida

Some cultures believe (or did initially) that a photographer could steal your soul if he took pictures of you.  I’m not sure about “stealing,” but I now believe that it is entirely possible to capture a soul in a photograph—or if not the soul, then certainly the “energy” of the person.  After observing a few experiments with energy work, courtesy of an interview subject I’ll call “Ruby,” I will never look at Facebook or MySpace profile pics in quite the same way.Though I’ve always loved photography and dabbled in it myself when I was younger, I’ve been blessed to have five professional photographers come into my life within the past year, plus my daughter joined their ranks over the summer.  I love looking at their portrait work, and I sometimes feel like a stalker because I can’t stop looking at their beautiful photographs.  They have a special way of capturing the personality of each subject.  Yet, with professional photos, it’s usually more of the personality than the soul that is captured, in much the same way that a statue or oil painting captures the famed of the past.

My latest experiment seemed to reinforce that professional photos are manipulated too much really to show the soul (vs personality) of that person at the moment.  Instead, they seem to show the energy of the photographer because these portraits become partnerships between photographer and subject.  The subject often assumes a posture suggested by the photographer, a tilt of this head this way or that, just the right lighting, and—if all else fails—a few deft minutes on the Adobe PhotoShop CS3 or CS4 to add sparkle to the eye or depth of color to the cheeks.  Not that a professional photographer can’t capture a soul, but whereas personality can be captured by a professional, the soul is usually best seen through candid shots, particularly those god-awful camera phone or webcam pics.  A professional photographer will make every attempt to make a person look good, regardless of the state of the subject’s soul at a given moment, whether joyous or troubled.

These photo experiments began when Ruby, who often works with radionics and psionics, asked if I had a photograph of someone we were participating in a healing circle for.  We didn’t know what was wrong with the guy but he’d been feeling lethargic with no obvious clue as to why.   I grew up seeing pictures in Baptist church bulletins or on the walls of Sunday School rooms where we noted who was sick or in need each week and prayed for them.  The photographs aided the prayers for healing because they allowed the prayer committee to focus better on the person and visualize them as they were when they were in good health.  None of this is scientific, at least not in the classical sense, though it may one day be better explained via zero-field theory.  However, for spiritual people who work regularly with energy—whether Christian, Wiccan, or some other religion—the nuances of the unseen connections between people are enjoyed without prejudice.

What Ruby, who is a “highly sensitive person” to the extreme, did was to pull out a pendulum and let it swing casually over the photograph.  It was a recent photo,  and a full-body view.  The pendulum swung wide and then in small intense circles as she moved her hand over the photograph.  She asked me to write down the results of her own interaction with the energy she felt from the photo.  So as I interviewed her, she interviewed the photo—and I merely watched the pendulum twirl clockwise or straight or counterclockwise in answer to her questions.

The dowsing went on for almost 1.5 hours.  Ruby asked a long assortment of questions that covered everything from the psychological to the sexual to the gastro-intestinal to things I’d never heard of.  I never saw her hand waver once, though if it had been me, I think my fingers would have been cramping within five minutes.  I was fascinated by her process and took copious notes.  She would ask how in-balance certain chakras were and work from there to see how close on a scale of 1-100 the person was to total vitality.  On ones that were out of balance, she’d use a different scale to find the magnitude of particular problems, looking especially at barriers to vitality.

Ruby uncovered a host of minor problems that were a drain to our friend’s health—and by the way, he’d given permission to do any kind of prayer or energy work for him so he’d feel better.  These minor problems were all rather normal except for two that were extremely high:  parasites and heavy metals.  She asked me to pass along the information to our friend, which I did.  He reported later that he’d gone through a detox program for parasites and later heavy metals and that after the heavy metal detox, he’d felt particularly good again.  He’d regained his energy.

That was my first experience with this sort of thing.

The next time, Ruby noticed a photo in my home of another old friend of mine.  It was an old photo, taken at a time when he was still married to his first wife, and he appeared quite happy and all-smiles in this great candid shot at the beach.   There was always something about the photo that bothered me, but I could never put my finger on it.  She commented on some things going on in his life at the time the photo was taken, things she couldn’t have known, but the photo felt that way in spite of the smiles.

According to Ruby, the energy of the person (not to be confused with personality) is something that she can feel in a picture.  Couldn’t I feel it, too, to some degree? she wanted to know.

The short answer was yes.   I could look at the picture with all the smiles and fun and there was just something…off…about it.  There was a sadness there, a sense of loss.  Always had been.  There were problems in his marriage at the time.  But I’d never really thought about it.  When I relaxed and let my mind wander, I could almost sense his energy in the photograph.  There was a certain sadness in the eyes, in spite of the smile.  I think anyone who looked closely enough would have spotted it.

“Do you have other photos of him?”  Ruby asked.  When I told her I didn’t have any recent ones, she suggested we search for his image on Google.

We found  it.  I tested  her belief that I, too, could feel his soul in this picture.  He was smirking in this one but there was a heaviness around it.  He was smiling but his eyes weren’t.  I didn’t know what had happened to him, but one look and I could tell he was in trouble—even if it hadn’t been a mug shot.

We found another photo of him online. Not a professional photographer’s work, but a decent photo. He looked nice, dressed up, professional.  But there was a deep feeling of darkness and oppression in this photograph.  He still looked much the same as when he’d been a close friend, but looking at his picture, I didn’t even recognize him.  I felt no connection at all.  It was as if I were looking at a stranger.

Ruby suggested I check out other photos to see if I could discern the state of the soul of someone I hadn’t seen in a long time and didn’t have a current history on.  In a way, it was fun because I got the hang of it quickly, yet it was too often very sad and I stopped after two or three tries.

I looked up several friends from the past and, regardless of the smiles, either their traumas or their hardness showed through the eyes.  Even if they were the picture of health, the feeling of oppression was still there.  These were clearest in quickly snapped camera phone photos and especially in webcams pics.  Some of these people had changed so much that I felt no connection of friendship to them at all anymore.  They looked much as I remembered but they felt like strangers.  I decided not to reach out to re-acquaint myself.  As an empath, I just felt too sad whenever I looked at their images.

There was one, though, that struck me differently.  I had not seen the woman in years, but she looked 10 years younger than the last time.  Back then, she’d been married to an alcoholic who abused her regularly.  In her new Facebook picture, she was laughing in the rain, drenched by a nearby car’s pounding through a puddle, but literally dancing.  Even if the photo had been of only her face, her smile was magnificent.  It went all the way up into her eyes and lit up the screen.  Absolute joy radiated from the photo.  When I reached out to her, I found out she’d left her husband, gone through counseling, started a new life, and was enjoying every minute of what  the world has to offer.

Some photos capture the appearance.  Others, the personality.  The ones that capture the soul, though, can tell a sensitive person exactly how you’re doing and how life’s treating you.

Hold the bashing.  This is not a pro-abortion article or an anti-abortion article.   If you think it is, you’ve missed my point because you’re looking to bolster an opinion you’ve already made.  This is something altogether different that almost no one talks about.

First, a little of my own history:

I have two beautiful, intelligent, compassionate daughters who are everything I could ever wish for. The older daughter was almost miscarried at 10 weeks, and the younger one sent me thrice to  emergency Labor and Delivery  over the three months before she was born.  I’ve gotten pregnant more than once while on birth control pills, which my newest gynecologist believes is because I tend to ovulate unusually early.  I have also miscarried several times–two pregnancies I felt ambivalent about and one I really wanted–but something rather unusual happened with the last two that made me rethink everything I used to believe about abortions, miscarriages, and incarnation.

What I believe and why:

Over the decades, I’ve come up with my own beliefs about life, death, autonomy, trauma, and spirituality. That’s the benefit of reaching middle-age–you’ve got enough data to slot and see what shakes out if you care to look.  My conclusions don’t fit cleanly into popular belief systems but then, I’m not a fan of just accepting what I’m told is true.  I have to experiment and experience life for myself and draw my own conclusions.  I fully admit that my brain seems to be wired a little differently and that I see things differently, but then, I’m finding more and more people have similar beliefs but are too afraid to discuss them for fear of being ridiculed or ostracized. I guess I’m used to it.

Most of the anti-abortion debates (or pro-life or whatever-rhetoric-will-best-evoke-the-required-necessary-response) center around when life begins and who has control over that life.  My personal belief, based on many things I’ve experienced and observed, is that yes, life begins at conception.  However, en-souled life begins sometime after that.  I don’t know when.  I think it’s different for each child.  (Why shouldn’t it be?) From my own full-term pregnancies, I definitely felt that both babies were en-souled–the souls integrated with their bodies, in other words–definitely by seven months.  Some people believe that occurs at the point of quickening, which made a lot more sense when we were less technologically advanced and didn’t have the advantages of ultrasound technology to detect a living fetus.  I wasn’t able, in my own experience, to sense the soul fully integrated when I first felt my babies move.  Who knows–maybe souls wait until the body is physically viable before committing.   I can’t say definitively–I had no idea in 1989 and 1992 what to look for.  To be honest, I was not as aware of the non-physical aspects of life, especially what’s on the other side of death or birth, when I was pregnant with Shannon and Aislinn.  That was before I began to meditate or explore shamanic journeys or look beyond the physical world.  I don’t know when exactly that Shannon and Aislinn’s souls integrated into their bodies but I do believe, based on what happened with two miscarriages, that it wasn’t within the first couple of months.  That doesn’t mean that they weren’t…around.  I’ll explain that later.

In working through these issues emotionally, I shall always be boundlessly grateful to shaman Kristin Madden who shared her own metaphysical experiences during pregnancy in her book Pagan Parenting and to shaman S. Kelley Harrell.  I was fortunate enough to have Kelley share her profound insights into what I consider being a portal to allow these souls to enter this world.  I was constantly amazed at how aware Kelley was of all the nuances of pregnancy and childbirth as she experienced them herself, and I wished that I could have been that aware during my full-term pregnancies.  Maybe it’s because she became a mother later in life than I did, but I tend to think it’s because she’s one of those highly sensitive people who understand the spirit realm in ways that most people never know exists.  The unusual things I experienced with my last two miscarriages, after I’d become much more aware myself, seem to be fairly common among other shamans I’ve spoken with, but other than a strange tale my mother always told me, I’ve rarely heard anyone who doesn’t have a specific gift for such things talk about it.

The spooky stuff:

I grew up hearing my mom tell the story of how,  before I was born, she saw me in the processing plant where she was working at the conveyor belt.  She saw the little girl coming toward her and was upset that a child was in such a dangerous place alone.  Except that as the child neared, the little girl disappeared.  She wasn’t in the physical realm.  That child was me, and I do recall being about that age when I visited my grandmother at the processing plant with my mom.

My dis-incarnate children, at least for the last two miscarriages, did not come to me as children.  Not at all.  They came as adults. The first time, I was not as developed spiritually and the effects weren’t as pronounced, but holy crap, this last time was…breath-taking!

I have had this happen to me only twice in my life since I became spiritually aware, and both times, I was newly pregnant and didn’t know yet.   Both times, until I figured it out, it scared the daylights out of me.  This has otherwise not been a normal occurrence for me.  I’ve had a lot of strange things happen in my life–things that qualify as “high woo-woo”–even early in my life when I was a devout Christian.  The miscarriage experiences have an entirely different texture from anything else I’ve experienced or observed.

The first time, it was a man of about 25.  No more.   He was tall, wiry, with brown hair to his shoulders and much like mine.  Other than that, he looked like his father.  I refer to  him as “Dagan” because I felt he should have a name.  The first time I saw him, he was in the periphery of my vision but not there when I turned.  He was close, as though I could reach out and touch him.  Here’s where I feel I’m writing science fiction:  he was somewhat…transparent.  If you’ve seen movies where people fade slowly from reality until you can see through them or if you’ve played with PhotoShop and reduced the color on a background to, say, 20% instead of a nice solid 100%, you have an idea of how he appeared.  For a while, he was right in front of me in this way, solemn and wearing long, dark clothes, like a robe.  His presence made me anxious and he backed away for a while, keeping his distance, but appearing in my dreams and meditations where I felt I had a little more serenity.  He talked to me sometimes in those meditations but mostly, he just watched.  At the time, I hadn’t even completed my cycle or taken a pregnancy test.  Within another few weeks, I was having tell-tale signs, and Dagan continued to hang around, always close by, even when I didn’t see the thin shade of him there.

Zena, which is what I call the woman who appeared the second time this happened, gave me a much more intense experience, but I was also more  able by then to assimilate news of anything that was paranormal in nature. She came out of the blue like a bolt of lightning. I must have been two or three days pregnant at most as I now know I’d had some implantation symptoms just as I’d had with Dagan.  Those were the only two pregnancies where I noted implantation symptoms, but then, maybe I just wasn’t paying attention before.  I called her Zena because she was very tall and somewhat fierce.  She looked much like Aislinn, except taller, very willowy, and with long hair the color of dark chocolate.  She was beautiful and appeared to be about 25.  The first time I encountered her, she was standing directly in front of me, inches away, and was as transparent as a reflection.  I had a weird feeling in my solar plexus chakra that night and had to be held to calm down enough to sleep. I didn’t, for several days, know who the woman was but was starting to suspect I knew.  She was right there in the ether in front of me.  I knew who and what she was, but I didn’t dare voice what I felt.   Her ghostly appearance and the way she was always soooooo close to me was the first of the pregnancy signs.  The others showed up a week or so later.

Negotiating the Miscarriage:

I’ve recently been introduced to several shamans (not the ones already mentioned) who talk about the deep trauma of women who chose to terminate their pregnancies for various reasons and live with deep guilt.  They help these women find peace with their decisions, but they’ve also discovered what I call the “energetic abortion” or the “negotiated miscarriage.”  They urge women who are facing untimely or unwanted pregnancies–not always the same thing–to go into a meditation and talk to the soul who wants to come through as a new baby.  By becoming pregnant, they’ve opened a doorway into our world and those souls are standing at the door and waiting for the vehicle we call our physical bodies to be ready to carry them into life.  Rather than go through the trauma of a unilateral decision and an abortion clinic, the woman talks to the unborn soul and they work out what’s best for both. The report I got back was that in most of these cases where the woman is able to communicate with the waiting soul, they experience a miscarriage, which is also known as a “spontaneous abortion,”–not to be confused with a medical or surgical abortion.  This method of soul-level negotiation, according to one source, allows women to find peace more easily with a untimely pregnancy that ended without outside interference.  I know my background in contract negotiation is showing through when I say this, but it was something agreed-to by both parties.

That’s not exactly what happened to me.

Sometimes it’s the unborn soul who re-negotiates.  And that’s when it’s terribly hard on a woman who miscarries with no insight into why, especially if she can think of a billion reasons to blame herself.  It’s hard enough when you do have insight.  I have no idea why I miscarried earlier in my life, except that Shannon wouldn’t be here now, at least not in her current form, if that baby had come to term.   It might have been Shannon’s soul in another body but it wouldn’t have been the same because I was pregnant again only four months later, to my surprise.  My circumstances had changed somewhat over those four months, and the timing and marriage were suddenly much better.

With Dagan, he showed up at a time when everything in my life was falling apart.  My husband and I were fighting all the time and I was contemplating leaving.  In fact, I never even told him I thought I was pregnant. I started to, but before I could get the words out, it was assumed to be another argument and I got cut off.  I felt too wounded then to say anything and just kept it to myself.  Then one night a month later,  tensions were high and I was so miserable.  I fell asleep and Dagan came to me in a dream.  He told me he was going to leave, that the time wasn’t right.  I agreed that the time wasn’t right but I didn’t want him to go.

“If I stay,” he told me, “you will never leave him.  You will stay here, where you’re unhappy, for me.”

I woke up bleeding.

He did, however, tell me that there would be other opportunities for me to mother him and that he might come through then.  I know I did feel his presence a few times after I got into a new relationship that failed, but eventually I let Dagan go.  I knew that soul was ready to come through and had waited for the opportunity, but without a relationship in place, the opportunity never solidified.  I do think that by now, he is in the world with some other woman as his mother, but it’s not me and never will be.  It was his choice, and we re-negotiated that sacred contract between us.

With Zena, it was different.  I was worried about how a pregnancy would affect my health at the time, but she was very much wanted and I would have welcomed her into the world, even if that meant raising her alone.  I went into a meditation to try to meet with her.  She already had a strong physical effect on me, especially in my third chakra.  I was under a lot of stress at that point, and my normally low blood pressure shot way up.  I told her in that journey to meet her, soul to soul, that I would welcome her regardless of the physical hardship but I was willing to let her go if it was for the best, if something in particular happened that would have a disturbing outcome for her.  We were both waiting to see if that would happen.  For much of the time, she was not very communicative.  She was watchful.  The last time I saw her in a meditation, the decision had been made. She was not coming through for me–her sacred contract was with her father.  It was more important for her to come through as his child for him than to come through for me.  If the pregnancy continued, she would be with me but not with him. This was about what she needed, about what he needed.  And I had to give that some room.

After the meditation, she was no longer standing in front of me.  She was no longer anywhere around me.  The next morning several of my pregnancy symptoms had abated. More the next day.  By then, I found out what we’d feared had happened, and she was gone for good.  For me, at least.  Not for him.

If I knew now….

If I were doing this all over again, say having a baby with some exciting new man in my life, I think I would definitely be more aware than ever before.  I’d also meet that waiting soul in meditation and welcome him or her and make sure there were no surprises.  I’ve made peace now with my children who never were my children.  These last two were negotiated miscarriages where we both had a say, or at least some input, into the decision to go.

Can you feel psychic connections across time and space?

As in, can I connect with someone from 2 years ago or from 2 years from now? I don’t know.

I haven’t been able to, at least not much. Or have I just never really thought about what’s also known as energetic connections, empathic connections, and quantum entanglement?

I’ve connected with people in the future–their feelings, at least, and some in the past, particularly with past life work. I’ve seen intuitives do this at least 5 years in advance. So it should be a yes to this question since time isn’t really linear.

As for space, with people I’ve had deep personal psychic connections with, I’ve felt them readily (and unintentionally) as far away as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York from here in the Florida panhandle. Somewhat in DC and the Los Angeles areas. Strongly on the other coast of Florida and in Georgia. I can often feel a friend in New York when times are rough for her, despite her happy outlook. I can frequently feel another dear one in Virginia. I’ve also felt the empathic connections as far away as Afghanistan and Iraq but didn’t have a strong connection to them at close range, so I was surprised to pick up even that, especially at that distance. It’s how I knew my friend Maverick was safe even when we lost communication for several months. I was able to reach out to him and know he was okay, though very scared. That’s definitely a huge benefit when it comes to psychic connections.

I can discern a difference in geographical coordinates, as in, if a person here is 2 miles from me and I can feel him strongly, I know when he’s away on a business or pleasure trip. I learned this when a friend moved away and I could discern terrible anxieties in him 6 hours away, though not as strongly as when he’d been upset while living here. It’s most closely explained in thinking of talking on the phone to someone down the street and getting a loud and clear voice but if he calls from London, he sounds farther away and I might get some static. If he’s crying on the phone, I can still hear him, but I can tell he’s not down the street anymore and that he’s upset.

So yes, psychic connections can be felt—though not always clearly—across time and space.

Empathy, empathic abilities, and what I call “energetic connections” (or emotional connections) between people are all about feeling what someone else is feeling. Some of us empaths, or “highly sensitive people,” have these abilities more than others, to the extent where it seems like a curse. If you’ve formed an emotional, empathy-type connection to someone who is terminally sick, mentally ill, or overstressed, the emotions can be debilitating. On the other hand, merging with a lover takes biological to chemical to alchemical thrills.

Examples of such connections:

- A mother’s intuition where she feels her baby’s pinched finger as if it were her own flesh.

- Suddenly feeling something is horribly wrong and getting a call 10 minutes later that a loved one has died.

- A High Priestess who forms a strong bond with the Initiates of her coven and can sense when one of them is in trouble—or doing quite well.

For more information on empathy and “highly sensitive people,” and for the most extensive article archive online concerning “energetic connections,” we recommend the empathy, energy, and psychic categories of this website.

I am totally in love with this artist’s work.  Please check it out.  Photo Copyright:  alicepopkorn; creative commons license.

Psychic Spying can backfire in the worst sort of way—you can not only alert the person you’re snooping on, but divulge your own deepest, darkest secrets.

Several years ago, I was at a metaphysical festival in Florida where I met various healers, intuitives, and vendors of all sorts of New Age items and services. While waiting for my daughter to return from a booth hawking fairy designs, one of the less busy psychics handed me a flyer with her resume, testimonials, rates, and—imprinted in bold letters across the top of the page—a message that said

N O    P S Y C H I C    S P Y I N G

Beneath that, she detailed how she wouldn’t check up on your romantic interest’s other, er, interests or anything that wasn’t directly related to you. She also wouldn’t snoop on your children to see if they were having underage sex or hanging out with a forbidden playmate, or if your husband was thinking of having an affair.

I laughed when I read it because I knew exactly what she meant. A shaman I talked with more recently, with my daughter present for the appointment set-up, warned me that he wouldn’t tell me the results of my daughter’s reading because she was over 18 and was entitled to her privacy. I grinned at him and explained that it had never crossed my mind: we’re already close and she tells me most everything I want to know and beyond that, I have a rather stellar intuition of my own.  A few hours later, my daughter and I shared a lengthy car ride and compared notes gleefully.

But the point on psychic spying is well-taken, and for reasons that most people don’t realize.

I don’t consider myself a psychic, though I am very intuitive and often have the knowing. No matter. I have clairvoyant friends of such high caliber that I don’t compare. However, I am an empath, and I understand how these energetic connections and psychic connections work.

The reason a psychic, shaman, empath, etc, may refuse to participate in psychic spying goes a level deeper than ethics. Some will certainly do it for the money or curiosity. Others will do it if there is a personal threat to you or it is directly related to you, such as checking to see if a potential business partner is financially responsible and will continue to be so with your money… or if the guy who just proposed has a hidden history of abuse or would begin one with you…or if a mentally unstable rival is likely to go after you with a knife. These are the same things you might find out with a good private investigator but one who has some insight into future probabilities.

But there’s another reason why many intuitives will not indulge your need for psychic spying.

When people try to connect with me through clairvoyant means, I as an empath usually not only know it but I can follow it back to them and see things about them that they’d rather keep hidden. Dark, bad things. I’ve had this happen with boyfriends’ ex-girlfriend drama queens, only to realize that the exes were far crazier than the guys had suggested. In that moment of connection, I could see how disturbed and disturbing some of these clingy young women were, including things that they’d never shared with the mutual men in our lives.

By far, the most disturbing encounter was an over-protective friend of a woman I was in business with. Our business partnership had disintegrated because we had different visions for a project, and no matter how I tried to keep it professional and calm, the woman became unstable, controlling, and abusive. It was personal to both of us, but she was far more emotionally involved and needed to blame someone for the project’s failure—that someone being me.  She was sure I’d gotten rich at her expense and couldn’t understand that our joint venture had been very costly to me financially.  That’s when her shaman friend stepped in to “help” her by paying me a little visit energetically and doing a little bit of psychic spying. The purpose was to see if I was the liar I’d been made out to be.

It felt as if the shaman friend had walked into a dark room where I stood, and that she was standing in the shadows behind me, watching to see if I would celebrate her friend’s troubles or make some motion that would betray my intentions. I was aware of her but she didn’t realize I knew she was there. I had nothing to hide, so my guard was down and I let her see—fully—that I had nothing to hide and that I’d been truthful. At that moment, it was as if all the light around me focused on her and I turned to see her, to look into her eyes. In the same instant, I saw something in her that she’d never let anyone see. I saw her deep craving for self-amputation, and I reeled unexpectedly, showing her that I’d seen, that I’d seen it all because she carried her secrets with her to try to learn mine. She fled the room.

You see, here’s how psychic spying works when the person spied upon is an empath or intuitive—and you really never know: it’s as if you look into a hand mirror to try to see me in a different part of the room without me knowing you’re looking at me. Got it? You can’t see your own face or eyes in the mirror–just me because I’m what you’re focusing on. However, all I have to do is be alerted that you’re looking at me and I can look at the mirror in your hand and I won’t see myself in it–I’ll see your face and eyes.

It’s the same with energetic connections and psychic spying. The thing about these connections is that it’s never a one-way street, not if the other person is just as talented as you are.

I’ve slowly been making the house “mine,” painting the walls in colors I love, bringing in esoteric objects that are personally sacred to me but would make a commercially successful home decorator cringe.  Eh, so be it.  These things delight me. My latest project has been to re-work the guest bathroom, using sunny yellows and backsplash “tins” in copper (shown at left).

It’s all part of an effort to increase the “vibrations” of my home.

I was first exposed to the idea of home vibrations and house energy about 6 years ago when a spiritual-minded friend reluctantly allowed my negative mate to enter her house–and spent the next 6 months yelling at me for messing her the house energy.  She had invited him, yes, but she didn’t expect him to accept the offer.  He attended a party there, in an awful mood, but the house energy soon got to him and he relaxed and was having a wonderful time…until someone pointed it out to him.  I watched that home’s effect on person after person, and it was one of the few homes where I felt totally at ease kicking off my shoes and walking around barefoot–much like my own guests often do now.

My kids’ friends normally love my home.  They want to play with the many geodes and rocks or gaze at the crystal pendants that catch the sunlight in late afternoon.  The men I date are usually awed by the replica swords on the walls or the odd layout of certain rooms.   The house seems to chase off people who don’t belong–one of my younger teen’s wishy-washy acquaintances is “freaked out” when she walks through the door, but the friends who have been really good for her seem to glow as soon as they cross the threshold.   People who aren’t good for us tend to feel threatened the moment they walk in and can’t wait to leave.

There are a few things I’ve done to raise my home’s vibrations, or house energy, and I’m happy to share them with you here:

1.  Get rid of as much clutter as possible.  Clutter may be just lying there, but energetically, it’s very busy and draining.  It pulls your attention away from what’s important.

2. Get rid of as much plastic as possible. Replace with natural fiber, wicker, wood, metal, glass.  Flower pots are the worst!  Get back to nature and back to what’s natural.

3.  Keep negative people out.  Instead of inviting over a relative or friend who’s only going to criticize your home or you or anything that takes up space on the planet, perhaps meet this person at a different location, even in their own home.  If their home’s energy is loaded with negativity, you can always shower it off but it’s hard to get rid of the negativity that comes into your house on someone else.  You can almost see the dust motes of negativity in the air behind them!

4.  Fill your home with good experiences.  Have positive friends over, and often.  Burn your favorite incense.  Play your favorite music.  Make it a wonderful place to be and somewhere you’re happy to come back to after a day at work.

5.  Select items in your home that are “sacred” to you.  I have at times had an altar in every room.  It’s easy enough to turn a shelf into a place of special memories of your family’s older generations to remind you of your roots and your foundation.  Create small nooks that make you smile every time you visit them, no matter your previous mood.  I have visited some homes that have a temple room or a prayer room, and the energy in that particular space is exponentially higher than anywhere else in the house.   It’s like walking into a vortex of buzzing electricity.

6.  This one’s kinda different but I saw this done in the most powerfully positively-charged home I’ve ever visited–another that I don’t think I ever wore shoes in, even from the first visit, because it felt like I was walking on sacred ground.  The energy in the house, from the moment you entered, felt like whomp-whomp-whomp around you.  I noted this as did as numerous others who attended healing circles there with me.  The occupant was a rather charismatic woman who–I am not making this up–honestly believed she was half-alien.  Her beliefs had to do with the fact that she’d overcome some terrifying situations in her youth and came to believe that only alien guardians could have kept her from being killed, in much the same way as others attribute rescues to guardian angels.  She came to believe that she could not get sick or get hurt, which led to some adrenaline-pumping car rides with her, but she always came out on top in any situation, regardless of whether others got hurt.  She was probably the best I have ever seen at manifesting her desires almost instantly.  She honored her sacred space and her desires by placing small stone or crystal pyramids on the highest points inside her home.  In each room, she had an amethyst, marble, quartz, or even turquoise pyramid set atop a curtain rod holder, a sconce, a lamp, or a window sill.   They served as reminders to her that she could have anything in this life that she desired.  I didn’t always approve of her methods of getting what she wanted, but she was extremely successful at it.

So try any or all of these 6 ways to raise your home’s vibrations.  I don’t doubt that just your intentions to raise them will make some change for the better.

Not long ago but long enough ago, in a serene little home I call my own, I fell head over heels in love with someone I never expected to think twice about.  I knew from that first moment that our time together was short—he was moving away soon, and soon after that to the other side of the planet  to a life-or-death situation, and he’d had troubling premonitions that he would die in that foreign desert.  He was an amazing man, very spiritual and with a strong sense of service to his country and sacrifice for those he loved.  Sitting in my car in front of the Armament Museum, still tasting of a Starbucks chocolate drink we’d shared across town, he kissed me for the first time…and broke my heart.

But that’s not the worst of it.  The worst of it was the unintended drama he brought into my life that led to a touch-and-go situation with my health and repeated harassment from a romantic rival I hadn’t known about for the first month.  It took more than a year, but I was finally able to stop feeding my energy to a woman I now define as a Vampire Archetype personality.  Though I’d certainly felt the drain of energy, I hadn’t realized that I was allowing it to happen and how detrimental it was to me until I discovered the works of Caroline Myss.  It’s damned near impossible to move on from a relationship when you’re being harassed about it daily—and just as impossible to heal physically in the present when you’re giving your energy to a wound in the past.

Several months before this breakthrough, my very psychic pal (whom I jokingly call Obiwan) told me that on a specific date, I’d read a book that would be of tremendous help to me in healing a medical problem that originated during my relationship with this man.  She also told me that it would be a rather old book related to spirituality.    I shrugged off her forecast.  There’s plenty of brand new material on spirituality, much of it on my To-Be-Read pile, so I didn’t see myself backtracking to older works.  I forgot all about it until two days after I’d finished the book.  Technically, Obiwan wasn’t 100% correct:  I didn’t “read” anything and it wasn’t a “book”—it was a  9-hour audio download of a speech that had been out for 10 years, Caroline Myss’ Energy Anatomy.  I quickly followed that one up with a 12-hour audio download of another speech, The Language of Archetypes by Caroline Myss.

Caroline Myss is not someone I would be friends with in daily life.  Her personality is far too caustic and arrogant to suit me; however, there are definitely some life-changing nuggets in her material.  I generally don’t care for the work of someone I find personally unlikable, so this is high praise indeed.  Here’s how I came to apply Caroline Myss’ insights to my life, heal an old wound, and unhook a…vampire…of sorts.

When the soldier first began pursuing me, I put him off for  several weeks before agreeing to a first date—and then wondered why I’d waited so long.  I’d thought he was too young for me but he won my heart in a matter of hours.  I still remember our first phone conversation, me walking barefoot in the front yard and looking up at summer stars, a cell phone glued to my ear before he lost the signal yet again.  One of the first things he told me that night was about his high school fiancee’ and how she gave up their baby for adoption without him knowing until years later.  He wanted so badly to be a daddy.  He seemed deeply hurt that he could not be in his child’s life, and I was moved by enough things he said that I agreed to meet him.  In a way, that revelation set the stage for what was to come and how we both reacted.

Several dates later, by the time we were inseparable, he sat on my bedroom floor and confessed he’d had a more recent ex-fiancee’ who’d ditched him before he had an interest in me, and that he was concerned about her threats to harm herself because he still cared about her. That I could understand; if you can love a person enough to plan to marry them, you don’t just stop caring overnight.  We prayed together for her in my backyard at 3 AM, that in the faraway place she lived that she would stay healthy and safe.

I was in great health at this time.  Feeling wonderful, both physically and emotionally.  All my chakras, the main theme of Myss’ speech about energy anatomy, seemed to be wide open and active.

During this time, life in my house was peaceful, fun, serene, and happy—for everyone, including him, including my daughter, and especially me.  We were together every moment we weren’t at work—even grocery shopping was fun with him trying to carry all my groceries inside at once and making me laugh with his boyish antics or warning me that I need never take out the trash as long as he was around.  Yeah,  my serene and happy household became deliriously blissful while he was with us for the next month or so.

Even when he called to tell me his ex-fiancee’ had called to say she was four-months pregnant and wanted to get back together but that he wanted to be with me.

That’s when the drama set in, even before she knew about me.  My neighbors expressed concern over his profanity-laden phone calls in the hammock with him yelling “I don’t want to marry you anymore!” while swearing to take care of his child.  My friends at our social gatherings worried over him when he spent hours on the phone, not knowing he was within earshot, begging her not to hurt herself while she hung up on him again and again.  My daughter and I cringed when she would berate him so loudly that we could hear her on his phone two rooms away. I talked with him about legal custody and his parents’ advice on lawyers to make sure he could be part of his son’s life.  I held him on nights when he sobbed that she would take his baby away from him if he didn’t go back to her. He was a very gentle man who was in over his head—and pulling me down with him.

I had begun having some second chakra medical problems at that point, related specifically to our relationship.  I didn’t know why then and my doctor repeatedly misdiagnosed the situation, but Caroline Myss’ speech on energy anatomy later made the connection for me.  This was an emotional wounding that meant someone else had to make a choice and I was one of the two choices.  According to Myss, emotional wounds that are left unhealed become physical wounds.  I got my first correct diagnosis the day the ex-or-maybe-not-ex-anymore-fiancee’ found out the extent of our relationship by snooping through his email accounts, voice mail, social networks, IM logs, and ultimately through my personal online journal that he’d unintentionally led her to because, as he believed, he had nothing to hide.  That was the day the harassment started, enough so that my family and friends were worried for my physical safety.

You know, I don’t think I could ever be with a man who, in a choice between his child and me, would choose me over his child. Ironic as it may be.  And especially one who wanted his little boy so badly.   I stepped aside. Though I wasn’t happy with the way he handled the situation, I didn’t fight to keep this man because that would only have made it harder for him.  I already knew he was leaving town in another few weeks and leaving the country soon after, so I would be deprived of his company anyway.  We made promises to each other when he left town, and among those was that the drama with her would stop and that she would stop harassing my family and me.

She didn’t. The drama actually got more absurd.  And to this day, he has not kept his promise to keep her focus from me, even though he went back to her  and became a daddy.

My second chakra wound only got worse, with more problems, more incorrect diagnoses, more medical tests, more invasive procedures.  Myss talks a lot about how putting so much attention on past wounds or focusing on old hurts—I’m paraphrasing—steals your energy and that that is energy that goes to keep you healthy and heal you.  If your energy is distributed to another person or an old situation, then it’s not there to heal you in the present.   This was an incredibly useful observation for me to make, many months harassment later.

I could explain the empathic connection that developed between her and me even before he left town, but unless you’re very open-minded, you won’t understand.   It’s almost supernatural how many times I would hearing her screaming at me, and at that very instant, she was tracking me online or trying to get into my personal logs.  But unless you understand quantum entanglements and empaths, I’ve lost you.  So let’s look at the more mundane reason for this energy drain on me and forget the less tangible black-magicky kind of stuff.

Unlike most drama queens I’ve observed, she could not simply smirk that she’d “won” and prance away, never to think of me again.  I say “most” because in the five years I’ve been divorced, I’ve dated several men who were still attached in some way to an ex, who  learned the guy was moving on and swooped in to do something to scare me off.  Like setting up the guy to be arrested for trespassing when picking up his kids because of a phony emergency or having his kids interfere with a date by dumping them unannounced at his front door on the mom’s night with the kids.  That kind of thing.  Then once I was no longer a “threat,” off she went, never to bother me again.

That didn’t happen in this case.  She got my contact information through his email accounts and used it to email me, which is easy enough to block, but more disturbingly, to call and text me.  She would send text after text, ranging from threats to guilt trips to pleas to reasons to hate him.  She would call 40-plus times in an hour and hang up when I refused to answer.  My daughter would go to bed with headphones on to keep from hearing the ringing, well past midnight, or I’d have to turn off my ringer and never know if my elderly mom was trying to reach me.  She would have him call but with her conferenced-in so that she could listen to our conversations without me knowing but, of course, he always told me when she’d be on the line.  My home phone would ring until I answered it and hang up—always an unknown number.  She tried to pretend she was him, IMing me when I knew his computer was broken.  She dug around on the Internet to find out everything she could and tried to friend me on social sites to get into private information.  She found articles written that mentioned an Army officer who was planning to visit me for the weekend and immediately assumed, without looking at the six-month-old publication date, that it was him.  She found one-sentence posts to a friend that said  [the cross-dressing defense attorney who pursued me for over a year] was after me again and assumed it was him.  She found references to a difficult decision I had to make and assumed it was about him, even though the public and private discussions centered around whether I wanted to make a business deal with a writer whose work I adored.  She found messages to my daughter in Orlando to meet my other daughter and me in Gainesville and assumed I was on another trip with him.  She found a mention of a new guy that my friends knew I’d had a date with  and assumed (somehow) that it meant I had seen her baby.  She found private online forums I was a member of, such as discussions of sexuality and psychology, and joined them.  I was on a miscarriage self-help forum and deleted my posts there before she could read them.  As my medical problems worsened, I desperately wanted to ask an online forum for advice but dared not since she’d found others I was on.  She posted demands for an apology to my personal family blog when I wrote about a certain relative–who used to beat her babies–because she assumed everything I wrote was about her or about him.  (In the case of this article, she would finally be correct.)  She brought in other people to read what I’d supposedly written about her  or review my personal photographs with her.   And on and on it went, ad nauseum.

This was, for the most part, a regular and grueling part of life up until I listened to Caroline Myss’  The Language of Archetypes, which showed me a perspective I had not seen before and gave me a way to deal with it.  All during these months and months of harassment, I was dealing with my medical situation but I didn’t see improvement until she vanished for  a while.  Out of the blue, after her being all over my websites in the middle of the night for week after week, she disappeared.  The anonymous calls stopped, the cyberstalking stopped, the emails and anonymous posts to my family blog stopped, the attempts to friend me on various social networks stopped.  All overnight.   For almost four blessed months.

I honestly wondered if she was dead.  Or in a coma.  Or in jail.  Or had just sworn off computers and phones. In any case, I had four whole months of peace and quiet from her.  What a pleasure to go about my business without feeling her demanding my attention or flinging drama at me!  No threats, no demands for apologies, no following me everywhere I went online.  She’d stopped.  It didn’t last but while it did, it was wonderful not to have her focusing all that hate in my direction instead of working on her relationship with the father of her child and taking responsibility for her own unhappiness.    Energetically, the focus was off me and I wasn’t always drained.

In fact, my medical problem stabilized and—I’ll know soon for certain—may have healed completely.  I was able to reclaim the distribution of my energy from her and from her constant reminders of the emotional wound of a choice I still believe was the right one for him.  That reclaimed energy has helped me to feel better and healthier than I have since I first heard her name.    But here’s where the speech on archetypes comes in.

The archetypes themselves are quite interesting, and I quickly identified a few that applied to me.  Writer, of course, being probably the first and foremost because it’s how I communicate best, how I work through my own issues the best, how I teach best.  I can’t not write.

Late in the 12 hours of audio, Myss talks about some of the more unusual archetypes, including the Vampire Archetype.  This is not the darkly elegant or erotic vampire of an Anne Rice novel but  something I’ve trouble with from time to time, because my nature is to feel responsibility or compassion for others to a point where they demand too much of my energy if I don’t draw strong boundaries.  Myss explains it this way:

There is such a thing as the Vampire archetype, meaning that there
are people who thrive on the psychic energy of others. People, for
instance, who complain a great deal or who are severely emotionally
needy can leave one feeling as if they had been up for a solid 36
hours. They tend to want the other person to make their life decisions
and to work out their problems.  (more at http://www.myss.com/features/askcaroline/detail.asp?id=59)

Yes!  I can identify!  “A solid 36 hours.”  OMG, yes!  In more situations that just this one, too.

Not only did Caroline Myss call this archetype to my attention, but she gave me a way to deal which now makes Myss an invaluable teacher in my opinion.  I’ve been letting this person feed off my energy since she first realized how bonded her child’s father was to me and that while he felt he had “nothing to hide,” he was terrified of her power over him. I never really slapped back, didn’t go after that restraining order,  or set a distance between us because I was compassionate toward her situation and her child.   I’d been giving her my own power instead of taking care of myself.

How do you deal with a Vampire Archetype?  According to Myss’ speech, you stop feeding it.  You unhook it, detach from it, cut it off from your veins.   I canceled home phone, blocked various emails, blocked my cell and text numbers, made my social networks all completely private—even at the expense of no longer being able to talk regularly with certain elderly family members who don’t understand passworded networks.  I rearranged my blogs and articles and even stopped writing new material for a while so she’d lose interest.  I brought myself to a point of distance, of detachment, where I no longer have any concern whatsoever for what happens to this person or what her situation is. I know that sounds cold but I didn’t defend myself early on, not because I felt guilt or responsibility, but because I’m empathic and kindhearted.  Something I cannot afford with some people.  So I drove a stake through my compassion.  For her, but for him as well.   I’m no longer worried that things will be worse for him if my articles, the vast majority of which have nothing to do with him, are mistaken as love poetry about him or something equally ludicrous and send her into yet another frenzy.  If so, then that’s his issue to deal with and he can consider it a delayed reaction to matters he should have taken care of when he was still here with me instead of 6,000 miles away.

I’m looking forward to that next doctor’s appointment and to test results that show I’ve completely healed.  My energy is mine once again.

Super sensitive. That’s what I am. I’m still trying to assimilate the weirdness (thus far) from yesterday’s eclipse, August 5, 2009. I had some strange physical effects, and it felt like the veil between the worlds was thinner than ever yesterday. In fact, I know it was, based on what happened late in the evening.

Physically, my senses were…MORE

While working on a refurbishment project both inside and outside my house, I had begun to notice a pattern I’d somehow missed. It’s a pattern of doing without, of sacrificing, of settling for less than I want, of living with other people’s cast-offs. It’s obvious now only because I have gotten rid of so much accumulation over the years that I can now see what’s left, and it’s mostly the things I’ve felt I could not let leave my life.

I still have a few hand-me-down pieces of furniture when I’d really rather have a very different look and energy in Shannon’s old room now that she’s left home and something different for whenever she’s visiting. I’ve thought about it recently, about getting a double bed for that little room so that future couples vacationing at my home will have something more comfortable than a single bed. I’ve seen exactly the headboard I want. Then I thought, no, I could save a few hundred dollars by hanging onto the old stuff, even the uncomfortable old stuff. Just close the door and live with it. I could, as so many times in my life, just “make do.” Not what I want but there are a good dozen excuses why not, starting with the economy. The one reason why seemed to be that it was something that I wanted. I can afford it, I have room for it, I want it-but that’s not good enough. I don’t care if it’s the best or the priciest or the cutest little antique. The bottom line is whether my really wanting something is enough to have it.

And I’ve decided that it is.

The same has been true of replacing the long-gone hot tub. Too expensive. Too lavish. Too much upkeep. Too…whatever. Yet something I enjoyed immensely and have longed to have again. What’s stopping me? Me. It wasn’t something I reallyreallyreally needed, even though it would be wonderful for my knee injury or relaxing away stress. I settled for less than what I wanted.

And I’ve decided to change that, too.

All around my home, this change has been taking place over the past year. I am now beginning to have the gardens I’ve long wanted. My house is still freshly painted from last summer, with the floors in the foyer and kitchen re-done, new countertops, new curtains, and all the little idiosyncrasies that bring people to love my home. It’s full of candles, scents, sunshine, prisms dancing on the walls, lots of color and stone and wood and metal and fabric.

My home is an intricate reflection of my inner world, and even my gardens remind me that the reason I have 3 shades of azalea in one small bed is because I didn’t think I could afford the few bucks more to have what I really wanted. This isn’t a cry for rampant commercialism that I’m espousing: instead, it’s about being true to pursuing what I really desire instead of going nearly all the way to my goal and then settling at the last few steps of the mile. It’s about getting what I want. Both in and around my home-and in my life.

I have my sanctuary, I have upbeat new friends and an solid Circle, I have talented lovers and deep love and warm affection, I have AMAZING daughters, I have fun trips and interesting classes, I have students and clients who bless me by knowing them, I have creative projects and popular websites, I have emotional support and incredible relationships with loved ones near and far, I have books that delight me to write, I have a prosperous job that has better moments now than before, I have music in my home, I have flowers on my table, and I have a now-healthy body that serves me well and is served well.

I have more now of what I’ve always wanted, and none of it is almost there, second best, or making do. I’m not settling anymore. I’m finally getting what I want.

Every time I’ve been pregnant, I’ve been completely exhausted for the first few months, or at least until the pregnancy ended– whichever came first.  It’s an incredible  tired-ness.  I remember that when I was pregnant with Shannon and feeling guilty for my fatigue, someone in the medical field pointed out to me that even though I felt that I was doing NOTHING physically, my body was very active on the inside and the exertion level was the equivalent of climbing mountains, so don’t feel guilty for needing to rest and regain my energy

That’s a little of how I feel now as I try to overcome the taxation of different medical procedures and tests.  I need to re-focus and re-calibrate to keep my energy for myself.  To that end, I’ve started a list of where I “leak” energy (aka, be selfless, be a fixer, take on other people’s problems, or be over-protective) and have decided a few things I will no longer do.   For starters….

- – I will no longer stress over my day job. Most of the stress introduced into my daily environment is ridiculous and petty and the result of typical reactive rather than pro-active measures. It’s almost never life-and-death for the soldiers. Someone else’s lack of planning tends to become my emergency.  Though I can handle much of this with ease, it sucks the life out of me.  I’m turning it back to the people who invented the stress instead of trying to transmute it into something shiny.  I’ve been pretty good at this for the past few months but every now and then, something major pops up that’s harder to ignore.

- – I will also no longer argue with people at work.  If my boss doesn’t want to let me work from home (telecommuting for compensation) while I’m out on sick leave, no problem.  The work will simply not be done.  If I explain to my customer that she’s pursuing an acquisition strategy that’s absolutely not going to get approved and she does it anyway, then I’m going to bust her at Clearance and she can start from scratch.

- – I will no longer deny myself pleasure.  My lovers are the hottest men I’ve ever known and I’m having the best OMG sex of my life—and so are they.  So there.  I waited a long time for this and I deserve it.

- – I will no longer hound my younger daughter about her grades, homework, schedule, etc.  She’s making her own decisions  and she can live with the consequences.  She’s made good choices thus far about various potential vices but it’s the non-lethal things that stress me with her (in the absence of worse).  She’ll make her own choices regardless of how much I stress over her so I can recognize that and be here if she needs me but let her scrape her knees where necessary.  She’s almost an adult and needs to grow into some smart decisions—and that includes recognizing cause and effect.

- – I will no longer answer the call of anyone seeking help who isn’t willing to give something in exchange for my energy.  That means no more freebies.  Compensation doesn’t have to be monetary (not at all) but it does have to be balanced.

- – I will no longer expend energy protecting Justin.   There was a time when I was in a really great place and he was the one who needed emotional support and near-constant attention—and I had high energy levels to nurture him.  Right now, I have to nurture myself and I don’t have the energy to prop someone else up.   He’s a big boy, and having the courage to take responsibility and walk in truth is a spiritual growth experience that he has to accomplish for himself, no matter the cost.  Instead of me protecting him from harsh situations he’s fallen/jumped into, he has to learn to protect himself, quit sabotaging himself, and not put himself in situations that create pain and sacrifice.  We have way too much in common in that last regard.

- – I will no longer bother with “students” and circle-mates who aren’t serious and don’t put forth an adequate effort, no matter how much I like them personally.  Most of my students, both initiated and not, are making great strides on their spiritual journeys, even though they may not always realize it.  The ones who just want to play at it?  Not interested.  They can waste their own time, but not mine.

- – I will no longer get pulled into OPD (Other People’s Drama).  Yeah, this one’s hard because I’ve tended to be too caring and want to help when I see people in trouble. For most of the past year and longer, I’ve been trying not to get involved and insisting that other people handle their own issues without involving me.  That works pretty well until I start being harassed or cornered, or drama queens mess with the people I love who are too stressed or weak to defend themselves.  (That’s my downfall.) Not anymore.  My patience is at an end.  I no longer have any compunction about legal recourse—or , if need be, black magick.  If I have to use energy to deal with OPD, it’ll be to slap someone down.

- – I will no longer worry over my mom and the decisions she makes.  If she wants to spend too much money on a shoddy painter or accept sub-par work from an electrician, it’s her money.   If she dismisses or takes a particular doctor’s advice, it’s her health.  She is mentally very capable and it’s her decision to make.  But if she asks my opinion, I’ll gladly give it.  Until then, I’ll remember that she’s an adult and able to choose for herself—and it’s okay if I disagree with her decisions just as it’s okay if she disagrees with mine.

Photo by Jean Goff; creative commons license   

I’m a big fan of looking over your shoulder every now and then to know how far you’ve come.  I can point to three different events in recent months that have been solid proof to me that I have my self-confidence back, and really, maybe even to a point that I have never before had in my life.  These are really in ascending order of importance and probably won’t mean anything to anyone else but me, but they are definitely flags for me to notice on my journey and to celebrate for what they represent.

If you can say, for certain, that you believe in yourself, then you probably have moments like this, too.  And if you don’t?  Start looking for them because just being aware will help to make them happen.

1.   This used to happen ALL THE FREAKING TIME and I spent so many nights questioning myself–I suppose because I’d been raised to believe that everyone else’s opinion was worthier than mine, whether they were friends, family, or other experts on how I should live: 

An “expert” who doesn’t know me or anything about me walked into the room at the tail-end of a conversation, heard my description of something that’s working very well in my life, and interrupted to tell me, “You need to grow up and get a life or you’ve got a hard road ahead of you, little girl!” 

There was a time when I would have  worried over his opinions (whether he’d caught my comments in context or not) and would have doubted my path, even when it’s working wonderfully for me.  This time, I just frowned and burst into laughter…because I am grown up, I do have a life, and it’s easier now than it’s ever been because I absolutely believe in myself.

2.  Because my ideas are so plentiful and I’m extremely good at brainstorming new ideas for others, I’ve never placed a value on that talent.  In the economics of my own brain, ideas were plentiful and therefore cheap, so I gave them away.  That’s changed now, and I have to remind myself sometimes, “What am I getting out of this–other than just feeling good by helping someone else?”  That helped me place a value on both my talents and my time.  The difference came when I heard from a man I used to have long, long phone conversations with.  In fact, I burned up my prime time minutes in many such conversations with him.

The defining moment came when I demanded the exchange between us give something back to me.  I already knew the things I was helping him with, but I wasn’t seeing any return on my investment in time.  We’d spent many months in long conversations, had taken a break in our friendship, and were about to go right back to many more longer conversations that were becoming more and more one-sided.  I was spending all my time, honestly, coaching him on a situation.   And what was I getting back anymore?  So I demanded I get something out of our friendship as well.  It took him all of one day to decide that he didn’t want to reciprocate, so I ended the relationship.

One of my coaching clients recently asked if I could help him with the same issues that I’d coached my friend on so successfully.  So I do…at a rate of $125 per hour.  If I’d charged my “friend” for all the time I’d spent coaching him, I would have invoiced him for about $10,000.  This is why I’m happy to give my personal opinion/advice but I never offer my professional advice to friends or acquaintances any more.  My time and energy must receive a fair exchange.  I owe myself that because I value myself.

3.  This one’s rather personal, but it probably represents the greatest change in my mindset.  Women over 40 will definitely understand what I mean, and probably a lot of younger women, too:

My very talented and passionate lover had been entertaining me for about three hours (yes, truly) when we suddenly switched gears and found ourselves in a very intense conversation about metaphysics for about ten minutes.   I reached for my drink and we both realized at that moment that my lover had lost his erection.

Like many women, I’ve always had doubts about my sexuality, my body, my attractiveness.  I’ve had my idea of womanhood squashed a few times over  the years, and by the end of my marriage and then early in the dating process, I felt completely unappealing around middle-aged men who had waaaaaaay too many issues of their own.  I think it’s too difficult for men  to accept their own aging process and that occasional impotence is something that just happens, and it’s far too easy to blame it on their partners or for their partners to blame themselves.  A few years ago, I would have been devastated and probably contemplating elective surgeries (oh, wait….I did contemplate that a few years ago).  This time was differerent though.  This time, I didn’t even THINK in those terms but rather that I probably shouldn’t initiate stimulating intellectual discussions  that would shift our focus away from play. 

My very hot young lover, however,  WAS startled by his sudden lack of, um, ardor.  I saw his gaze lock on mine and saw the horror in his eyes of how I might take this indelicate moment.  He was sweetly embarrassed, not blaming, but he sat up quickly, apologizing again and again.  “It’s not you,” he swore.  “What you were saying was just so interesting and–it’s….it’s not YOU.”

And me, I just smiled like a woman who’s never been hurt before and shrugged and said, “Oh, I know.”

Photo by Netream; creative commons license

For many of us–especially those of us raised in an environment of real or imagined scarcity–getting into a mindset of abundance and prosperity is a real milestone on our spiritual journey.  Reaching that peak is a true celebration, yet we can fall off that peak and back onto a pit of impoverished feelings rather quickly…if we’re not careful. 

In keeping an attitude of prosperity, we must either surround ourselves with others who have mindsets of abundance or we must make sure we don’t lose our focus on and thankfulness for the prosperity we enjoy.

To demonstrate, here’s how my relationships have affected my own ability to attract prosperity.

My parents and family:

I’m one of those people who was raised in a mindset of poverty.  If we did have anything of material prosperity, then there was pressure to give it away.  This came from our religious beliefs that poor men got into heaven and charity equaled love and spirituality. My family had plenty of stories of “good women” who “would give away their last dime to help someone else.” This attitude didn’t apply just to material resources but also time and desires.  It came with a ready-made sense of self-sacrifice, that you could never have what you really wanted, and that you’d always have to make some great sacrifice to have even part of what you really wanted.

My marriage:

My two-decade marriage, while materially prosperous, was emotionally impoverished and I never felt I had enough of anything—time, money, love, happiness. My salary as a professional grew quite nicely and yet, I had no idea of my worth.  I never felt I made enough money and I felt that any of the things that made me happy were burdens on my family, especially financially.  Even when we were paying more in taxes than my annual gross salary, I still felt poor.

When I divorced, I was terrified.  I was so buried in my mindset of scarcity that I had no idea if I could make it on my own.  I figured I’d never be able to afford a haircut or a modest dinner out again.  But after my divorce, that began to change and I started feeling prosperous for the first time.  Part of this was that I’d always let other people tell me how to spend my money and, if it was for something I wanted to do that they didn’t value, the answer was usually no.  Now I no longer “had to ask permission” to enjoy any of my earnings.  I began to feel prosperous, though I was still careful with my money.

Prosperous men:

When I began dating again, it was mostly professional men.  I dated several physicians and defense attorneys, as well as businessmen with their own jets. In general, they were all very financially prosperous. With one of them, my prosperity mindset was a brief issue.  He was a sweet man, a physician making about $30,000 a month. He was religious and might have been spiritual as well—there was a strong hint that he might have explored that theme more deeply if we’d been together longer. We dated for a short while, with him wining and dining me at the classiest restaurants around, driving me around in his luxury cars, begging me to spend weekends at his little beach cottage at a resort a few hours way.  I had a little bit of an issue with the way he spent money on me—I had my pride and I felt I couldn’t return these expensive favors.  I quickly came to terms with how we were at different places in our careers and lives and, in terms of percentages, he wasn’t spending much at all on our relationship and there was a balance between us.  I figured out how to let go and keep my attitude of prosperity, thankful for what I had and what he had and that we could share some fun times.

Not so prosperous men—and where I lost my sense of abundance:

Another man who was very special to me—still is—came into my life at a time when I was a little queasy about the money I’d spent on house repairs, especially when my house value and retirement accounts had just taken a considerable hit, thanks to the souring economy.  I’d started to worry about money and felt I needed to cut back.  I felt scarcity creeping in.  That’s when I met someone who earned considerably less in a year than the doctor I’d dated made in a month.  It’s a shame that our country pays such terrible wages to the men we expect to protect us, but that’s another story, and wages have absolutely nothing to do with his value.   Not that his income mattered to me.  Not at all.  But it did to him.

He was very much like me in that he had his pride and wasn’t looking for a free ride from anyone else.  He tended to give away everything, to take care of everyone, to spend almost nothing on himself.  He was extremely spiritual, devout, and had that sense of “spirituality equals poor” because material wealth was not his goal.  He was more focused on service to his country, family, and spirituality—all beautiful, high-minded ideals that really impressed me and rang true to my own values. The other side of that coin was that he had the same mindset of scarcity I grew up with and had lived with for so many years—a lovely theme of entwined nobility and self-sacrifice.  He was in such a state of loss and impossible choices between competing desires and felt he had no way of winning, even if he managed to get just one part of what he wanted. All he could do was try not to lose everything while being more concerned for the health and future of others than for himself.  Many of our conversations were centered around loss and fear of loss and the struggle to save everyone else, everyone but himself.  He was willing to be a martyr if it was required of him. Yes, I knew these themes well.

It was through him that my own prosperity was emphasized, but in a negative way.  My previous relationships with men who brought home high-six-figures were not an appropriate baseline for me to see my own abundance.  With a man who earned much less than I did and who struggled to budget money for food while sending his income to others, I began to see my prosperity in a different light, even to the point of being embarrassed by it.  I actually stopped feeling grateful for everything that I had.  The poor guy could barely afford gas between my house and his work, and I risked wounding his pride when I filled his gas tank once or twice. I was at a place in my life that I felt I’d worked hard to get to, but instead of celebrating it with him, I felt bad about my prosperity, mainly because I thought it would make him feel inadequate.  I understood this because I’d felt the same way, initially, with the $30,000-a-month suitor.

This is not to denigrate this man—all his other qualities made up for any negativity over money issues, and he is one of the most exquisite beings I’ve ever met.  I share this only because of the tremendous insight he gave me into my own attitudes. The deeply spiritual tie to his poverty and self-sacrifice seeped into all aspects of his life, to the point where it sometimes seemed he was giving up all of himself to placate everyone else.  His focus became “what I can’t have” and “what I must sacrifice” rather than how very much the Gods were offering him.

For me, I not only stopped feeling grateful for my prosperity, but I also started to live in those moments of scarcity from my past.  It was too easy for me to remember being in his situation, back when I was in my early twenties and my furniture was Early Salvation Army, my fanciest meals consisted of noodles and tomato sauce, and a friend cut my hair whenever I butchered it too badly.  I wanted him to understand that I knew his financial situation even if I personally no longer had those constraints and in doing so—empath that I am—I put myself back into those days of constant worry about money and loss. 

The first inclination that my mindset had changed came over Labor Day weekend when my garage and car were burglarized. For the past year, whenever I had loose change, I dropped it into a compartment between the front seats.  It was full and heavy, and I’d saved about $300 in coins.  A few weeks before—when I’d had more of an attitude of abundance—I’d asked my younger daughter to take out the money and we’d use it for a special trip but she’d gotten caught up in school activities and hadn’t managed it. Sometime during the night, someone broke into my garage and got into my car, trashing the inside of my car and taking all but a few dollars.  Nothing else in the car was taken, including clothes and electronics.  Nothing in the garage was taken, including lawn equipment, power tools, and sports equipment.  Nothing but small change.  And that’s exactly what I’d begun to focus on—my small change and losing it.  I remember thinking the day before that I was focusing on small change instead of my prosperity.

I didn’t listen to that, though.  I had too much else going on in my life to pay attention.  I was more aware than ever of the abundance and prosperity I had on every level, especially how happy I was, and at the same time, acutely aware of the potential for loss, the probability of loss, the nearness of it.  For all the happiness of that season, there were some very important losses that expressed around me.  Underlying those losses was a theme of scarcity—if not at that moment, then coming soon.  I began to feel I could not afford anything anymore.  At all.  That all my dreams were on hold.  All I could feel was lack.  It seeped into everything.  I felt I had more than I’d ever had in my life, but the fear of loss obliterated the joy.

That’s not to say that my downgrade in abundance is his fault.  I tend to merge with people I care about, and in understanding what he was going through, I lost my grip on my own prosperity.  I had hoped to bring him to my prosperity mindset but instead, I was the one who shifted to his sense of lack and sacrifice. We’re enough alike that I could tune into those feelings easily…too easily.

Finding my way back

When I started focusing again on my home and what I have and what I love, I started to feel that sense of abundance coming back to me. It took a little time, and I gained new insights through new relationships.  It was odd, but I began dating two new men who had a surprising amount in common with the last one.  Same jobs, identical pay, almost the same birthday.  Yet these new men drove fancy cars and bought themselves $90 hoodies without blinking an eye.  It was a shock at first to see that other people earning the same income could take it so far…though they were taking it that far on themselves.   These men are not very spiritual and we don’t resonate on many levels, and they do not live in the mode of scarcity or fear of loss.  I date them for non-spiritual reasons and without any intentions beyond friendship and fun before they deploy. But I’ve learned something from contrasting how they view their material wealth.

My own income has not changed over the past month, and yet, I am back to feeling more prosperous this month, and my bank account is rising unexpectedly and my book sales are suddenly up.  A couple of months ago, I was afraid of missing a payment—something I never do—but today…I am fine.  The difference isn’t in my salary or expenses…it’s in my outlook, and that brings in more prosperity of the physical type to match the mental and emotional prosperity I feel.

Photo by Aphrodite ; creative commons license

“How can I release old resentments and anger?” a friend asked.   She’s a very wise and together person, and very spiritual, so the question surprised me a little.  There’s always that expectation, you know, that spiritual people don’t get angry or carry resentments but some wounds are deep and take a long, long time to heal.

It’s only in looking back over the past four years that I realize how much old anger I’ve released.  It’s made a big difference in healing my life, and though I don’t quite have everything I want in my life just yet, I have a life I enjoy and one that’s vastly different from a few years ago. 

The first step for me to begin to release old resentments and angers was in realizing that it really was anger that I was carrying, from as far back as my early childhood.  I’d never considered myself an angry person…but inside I was furious.  I so seldom got “mad,” but I did get hurt a lot.  That was the key.  I grew up in a Southern Baptist home amidst a church upbringing that taught me that anger was a deadly sin and that I needed to be a good girl, good and forgiving and great at turning the other cheek.  The way anger manifested in me was not as rage but as “hurt.”  I couldn’t tell the difference, and to be honest, I sometimes still can’t.

The second step in releasing my anger was to honor it.  I had to stop thinking of anger as a “bad emotion” I wasn’t allowed to have.  Anger was my way of refusing a certain path of oppression and of demanding that I be respected and valued.  I learned to let it out in mostly constructive ways, to stop apologizing for it, and to use it as a reminder not to allow certain people to abuse either me or my compassion.  It’s saved me many times from letting an old wounding be repeated.

The hardest part of releasing anger is to meet it head on and investigate its root cause.  That means a lot of self-inquiry.  It means looking in shadowy places, shining the light on them, and dispersing them.  For me, it took the shape of a healing journal where I poured out millions of words that later became articles, books, e-courses, and workshops that help other people deal with similar issues.  The writing, for me, was cathartic, but I’ve also written poetry and songs, and if I were talented at dance or painting, I might have tried those methods as well.

Some old angers could be released only through ritual; in particular the Ho’ponopono ritual has been helpful to me.  It’s doubled as a funeral for my tyranical father and a divorce meditation for my ex. 

Another way for me to release old resentments has been to recognize the situation for what it really was and then rewrite it the way it “should” have been.  My article, The Day My Parents Killed the Pedophile,  is a good example and is recommended by many online communities dedicated to healing sexual abuse. 

It’s not that all of those old angers have been banished.  They’ve been released into the wild.  That means some have vanished, maybe for forever, but other still roam around and revisit from time to time to feed, or try to.  It helps to realize that in most cases, the people who wounded and angered me were doing the best they could with what they had and weren’t intentionally trying to hurt me.  It was just part of their personalities, but not something I have to bind myself to.  Some old resentments still float around me, unseen  and unnoticed until one lands close by or bops me on the head, and with those I can sometimes reach out from a different perspective and pop that bubble and it’s gone for good because it no longer has any power over me or chains on me.  There was nothing left but a thin sheen of oily color and no substance at all.

To keep new angers from forming, I’ve become more vocal, allowing my anger to show where I might not have before and with little regard for whether I particularly upset the other person or not.  Not every time, but exponentially more often than a few years ago.  Sometimes it becomes a major confrontation and sometimes it might ensure the partnership will not thrive (it won’t anyway if I hold in the anger) but holding it in only transforms the anger into a cancer (sometimes literally) that eats away and tastes like hurt. 

The big question for me to ask myself is, when my feelings have been deeply hurt, is it really hurt?  Or is it anger?  Or both?   It’s more often anger at injustice and disrepect than anything else.  And if I express myself as “I am so hurt that you….,” do I really mean “I am so angry that you…”?  If I express it as hurt and the relationship is truly a loving one, it can manifest for the other person as guilt rather than as a chance to clear the air.  Guilt only keeps it inside to fester.

Photo by  Northeast Photography; creative commons license

There’s an edginess that’s been in the air for the past couple of hours.  It’s the kind of feeling you get after a fight with a lover or when a dream just got deferred. I can’t pin it down but it’s been intense.  Weighty.  It’s nothing new…but I wasn’t expecting to have it interrupt my pleasant evening.  Someone else’s feelings, that is.

This makes me wonder how many people suffer from depression because they’re so highly sensitive to the emotions of others.  This isn’t like that horrid feeling when Shannon, Brian, and I walked past the meat market, er, I mean bar, in the restaurant a week ago and Brian and I both went, “Ewwwww, what’s that feeling?” at the same time.  It’s always gratifying to be in the company of other empaths who pick up emotions at the same instant I do.  It’s a blessing to have others like that around, really.  They totally get it when you say, “Hey, who just had an emo moment?”

Tonight’s wash of emotions happened fairly suddenly, and I don’t feel thye’re  ”mine.”  I’m going through my usual checklist, and hey, good health habits make it easier to isolate!  It’s even better when the feeling goes away, often rather suddenly and inexplicably.  Except for not knowing WTF just happened.

Here’s my empath’s checklist, applied to this particular instance:

1.  Why am I feeling this way?  Did this wave of emotion come on out of the blue, almost like turning on a lightswitch?
I have no clue why I’m feeling such sadness and upset.  It came on suddenly in the middle of a pleasant evening.  I didn’t just have a fight with anyone or receive bad news, yet I certainly feel the effects as if I had.

2. Did something happen to trigger this wave of upsetting emotion?
No.  I’ve been on an even keel all day at work, even with people having meltdowns all around me.  I’d had plans to do some decorating projects tonight, and I was looking forward to that after watching a movie.   I’ve also had time to watch a movie I’d been dying to see and liked a lot.  There were no incidents that happened right before  the emotional wave.

3.  Am I well-rested?
Yes.  Sometimes lack of sleep will have an emotional impact, but I slept well last night and spent half an hour in meditation tonight.  The latter might be a clue, though, because  during my meditation, I felt very connected to a friend of mine who’s having family problems.

4.  Is my blood sugar out of whack?
No.  Sometimes, fluctuations in my blood sugar will make me either antsy or down but I can usually associate that with particular eating habits and know what to expect.  So far this year, my diet has been very healthy and I’m giving my body what it needs.  Also, the timing isn’t right for any type of “sugar crash,” even if I’d been less mindful of my diet.

5.  Are my hormones out of whack?
Hmmm, well, I am feeling the need for some male company, but no, no raging hormones.  I’m on a new prescription after an abominable time with the last two consecutive prescriptions but I’ve been on it enough days that I’m rather sure I’m not suffering a sudden new side effect. (Being a human antennae for emotions isn’t on the packaging!)

6.  Is there something in my environment that I’m hearing, smelling, seeing that has triggered these feelings?
No.  That includes any annoying noises or flickering lights.

7.  Is there something going on in my immediate environment that’s emotional turmoil for someone else?
No.  In fact, this started before my daughter came home from work cheerful and continued afterward.   I was home alone in a pleasant atmosphere.  There was no tension in the house and no upset with my daughter.

8.  What was my day like overall–before the wave of emotions?
Overall, good.  Pleasant interactions with everyone around me.  Good news on many fronts.  Some financial relief in one area.  A great workout.  Some interesting new things I learned.  A very solid, though busy, day.

9.  Are my stars out of whack?
Whether you believe in astrology or not, I sometimes find that personal astrology chart is facing some harsher transits.  In this case,  I’m actually supposed to be under some very, very pleasant influences this week with lots of good and positive emotions.

10.  Is this the usual pattern for my mood changes?
No. I can get into a mood and stay there for two or three days, whether it’s blissful, sad, anxious, or whatever. My moods don’t swing every 15 minutes–if they do, I know for certain that I’m being influenced by someone else’s emotions, usually someone who’s ADHD, bless ‘em.  In this case, the emotional wave lasted about two hours and crested, then faded as if someone had fallen asleep or escaped into some mindless pastime.

11.  Do I have loved ones who are having obvious–or not obvious–difficulties that might be related to this wave of emotions?
Yes.  I do.  At this point, I’m usually either calling them or checking in on them when I can.  Some aren’t always available.  And some will lie to me that everything’s just hunky-dory so they don’t worry me, but I’ll find out later how upset they were.

12.  Are there certain words or phrases that come to mind with these feelings but seem unusual for me?
When I first realized I was empathic, I had been talking for hours to a suicidal acquaintance.  When my emotions crashed that night and over the next couple of days, I found myself thinking thoughts that were phrased in a particular way that wasn’t anything like me, at all.  When I figured out where I’d heard those phrases before, I figured out that I’d taken my work home with me, in the worst way possible.  IN this case tonight, I am getting certain words, glimpses almost, that give me clues to the identity of my troubled loved one.

13.  Am I overreacting?
This is where it helps to have a good friend who understands I’m an empath.  She knows that if I don’t seem like myself that she should call my attention to it.   I’ve been through a lot of loss in my life, including relationships I didn’t want to see go, but back in October, she saw me fall to my knees sobbing at a professional conference of 200 of my esteemed colleagues and got me out of there.  To me, I couldn’t separate my sense of loss from breathing and lost all perspective.  She got me out of there and started quizzing me, then it became obvious to me that I was going through not only my own mourning for a loss but feeling the raw emotions of the other people involved in the situation.    Though I’d been through much worse in my life, the double and triple wallop of emotions was more than I could take.

After running quickly through my checklist, I can usually figure out that these emotions aren’t mine but ones I’ve picked up from someone I care deeply about. Often, I’ll be on the phone, running through my list of loved ones and calling them just to see if they’re all right.  Almost always, if I can reach everyone I think it might be, I find the culprit.  Once I realize not only that the empathic wave isn’t mine and especially if I know whose emotions I’m picking up, then I can usually release it and get back to my pleasant life already in progress.