Sunday, November 24, 2013

How Families Affect our Energy -- and a few tips for staying sane this holiday season

Every Sunday, my boyfriend and I do our weekly grocery shopping at the local co-op. Today was no exception, except that it seemed like all of Seattle agreed to meet at the co-op at the same time. Cans of pumpkin were hoarded into cards, along with cranberries, organic turkeys, potatoes, yams, pecan and pumpkin pies and lots and lots of wine.

Obviously, people are preparing for Thanksgiving. And my guess was that the more wine in the cart, the more they're spending it with their family.

Don't get me wrong -- I love my family with every ounce of my heart. I call both my parents and my sister weekly to talk about the trials, tribulations, successes and joys of each week. I feel blessed that my family is an integral part of my life and one of the only regrets I have about living in Seattle is the large distance between us.

My family also creates some of my most difficult spiritual and energetic challenges, and it is the energy that is most difficult for my clients to work through as well.

Raise your hand (come one, humor me) if you've experienced something like this: the holidays come around and you get really excited to see your family. You can't wait for mutual show and tell, the family traditions and rituals, and spending time together. For the first couple of days, everything feels amazing and you're so happy you made it. Then, after a little while, a melancholy sort of feeling sets in -- you start to feel a little down, perhaps frustrated, and maybe you start to question some of the choices you've made that aren't the same as your family's. For me, the overall feeling I get is of feeling stuck and confused for no reason that I can pinpoint.

Sound familiar? (If not, you're more rare than a unicorn underneath a rainbow of miracles. Good job, you).

When I read clients who have just spent a lot of time with their families, I often notice that their energy field is clogged with family energy. This is energy that says, "These are our family norms/belief systems/standard operating procedures. You've deviated from this program. Here is a reminder to get you back on track." Clients feel stuck because this energy is laying on top of their own innate energy and acting like a control.

You can think of it like a computer virus. You've got all of your energetic programs running smoothly, exactly the way you want them. You're creating your own way in the world, setting your energy high and manifesting your dreams, then all the sudden your software starts to act a little weird. Everything slows down and before you know it, you're not controlling your computer anymore -- the virus is.

Our energetic field is responsible for our whole reality. It is an intricate and elaborate system created from our belief systems, karmic patterns, past time information, present time thought patterns, emotions and creativity. We can compare our energetic field to a computer system -- a healthy energetic field is running completely on its own energy in order to create its reality, just like a healthy computer system is running only on the programs we chose for our operating system. An unhealthy energy system is one running on pre-programmed ideas or lies hidden as truths, just like an unhealthy computer system is stuck or inefficient because of crap software that we don't really use, viruses, spy ware and malware.

So, back to how family energy can act as a virus.  In order for a virus to be effective, the person planting the virus must intricately understand the system, and the system must have a weakness in order for the virus to be successful. When we are born, we knew very little about how to survive in the world. We looked to our parents to supply us with information about how the world works. In essence, we actively allowed our families to program our energetic system for us. We had to -- our survival depended on it! But it doesn't any more. Part of becoming an adult is separating from ideas and beliefs that we don't resonate with, which often means a continual separation from the energy that was pre-programmed into us and a move to reprogram our energy system with our own ideas and values.

This is how energy healings work. When I work with a client, I'm basically helping them wipe their energetic hard drive of anything that's contributing toward ill health, feeling stuck, or otherwise not serving them so that they can replace those energies with their own creativity, beliefs and personal power. When we stand in our own energy, we feel better, more ourselves. Our self esteem increases and we are able to have more certainty about our life path.

It's relatively easy to clean the energy body of foreign energy, especially of co-workers, friends, acquaintances and even romantic partners. These energies are more like extra programs that you download from the internet -- they may benefit you in the short term, but eventually they can start to cause problems. When they do, you can just uninstall. But family energy works more like a virus because that's the energy you started your life with. Family energy understands your system completely because it created your first belief systems, emotional patterns, thought patterns, and the basic, underlying story you have about your life. That story creates energetic pictures about who we are at a base level. Family energy recognizes these pictures and says, "Haha! You're still mine! You have my blueprint! You've deviated a bit, but it doesn't mean you don't recognize me! Match me, match me!"

I am in no way saying that our beloved families are consciously malicious (at least, mine aren't -- you can decide that for yourself). The impact of family energy is unconscious on the part of the family members -- it's more like their love, hope, worry and fear are more easily channelled into our sensitive systems. Family energy just works differently in our bodies than the energy of others. As one of my psychic colleagues said the other day, "You can learn and grow as a psychic, and move more and more energy and become less and less reactive to people and situations around you. But when family is involved, all bets are off."

So what can we do about it? Before I go into a family situation, I take extra time to get grounded, set my energy, hold my vibration and take extra self-pampering tools with me. I check in with myself throughout the visit to notice if I'm still holding my vibration. I set up extra energy readings and healings with my colleagues.  And I always try to employ the two best tools of all -- neutrality, and lots and lots of amusement. This holiday season, I suggest you read through my old posts that include these tools and try them for yourself.

If all else fails, at least you've got the wine  :)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!


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