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!

Get Well and Stay Well, Even When Everyone Else is Sick

Autumn is around us. I can tell because the leaves on the Seattle trees are changing colors and starting to fall, sweeping around streets and trails with the wind. Mornings are chilly and crisp, and it smells cold. I've brought out the space heaters, stocked the tea cabinet, and my stomach asks me for soups and heated foods instead of raw salads. Also, all around me, people are getting sick.

I took a three day vacation a few weekends ago and when I got back to work my co-worker said, "Oh, by the way, watch out -- everyone's sick." She was right. Our office manager had a cold that lasted two weeks. Some clients were calling in sick and others were coming in sick. When I asked them how they were feeling, so many of them said, "Oh, you know, I've got this cold that's going around."

There is lots of science out there about germs and how germs are spread. I know my aunt watched some Opera special on germs and became almost OCD about public bathrooms. How was it that she had been in public bathrooms all her life and hadn't caught some terrible disease? Oh my, better protect myself with toilet liners and hand sanitizer and not touch door knobs or shake hands or look at people too closely...can I contact disease through eye contact? 

I exaggerate. A little.

I'm not arguing that science has been able to show how germs, viruses and bacteria travel between people, places and things and have the potential to make us sick. But what makes some people sick and not others? Science says the immune system, and I agree, but I want to add another layer to that. Not only do we have a physical immune system that relies on our diet and lifestyle for strength, we also have an energetic immune system, and its strength relies on the information we have about how we get sick, how we stay well, and what belief systems we have in general about health and wellness.

Sickness, like everything else, is essentially a vibration. Whether or not we get sick depends, in large part, to whether we match the vibration of sickness.

When I was in graduate school I got sick a lot. I was under so much stress that my poor immune system was shot. I was also at the beck and call of my graduate professors, my thesis, and to my fellow students. I'd feel myself start to get sick and I'd say to my body, "No! Not now! I can't afford to be sick this week/this semester/until after this test!" I'd drink tea and exercise and go on with my busy-ness and stress. But I could feel that vibration of sickness working to pull me down. Eventually, when the test was over (or the project, or the thesis) and I had no energy left to fight, I'd get sick. It was usually over a holiday or a long weekend -- you know, during some time when I could "afford" to be sick.

I'd given up my fight -- and matched the vibration of sickness. I know I matched the low, icky vibration of sickness because of that feeling of it pulling me under, into its depths, and taking over.

There are some things in life that are inevitable. Like death. Some day, we each of us will die. But how we live until that point is almost entirely up to us. How we choose to set our vibration of health and vitality is up to us.

Sickness is essentially an attack on our vitality.  Sickness means that something is attacking our inherent right to health and vitality. Whether caused by poor diet or lifestyle, by belief systems that do not serve you, or by accidents, it's all still blockage. Remove the blockage and you restore vitality.

In this day and age, improper diet and lifestyle routines are one of the major reasons so many of us become sick each year. We can change what we eat and how we take care of ourselves pretty simply. The other reason I believe so many of us get sick is by running energetic belief systems that keep our immune system from functioning fully.

One of the main blocking beliefs I already mentioned, "A cold is going around." If your body is running off of the belief system that there is a "cold going around," then a belief that probably follows is, "so I could catch it at any time." This is a belief system that opens the door for the vibration of sickness.

Another is the belief that "I always get sick in the fall/winter/spring." You just affirmed your reality. The universe is there to give you what you ask for.  This belief system opens the door for the vibration of sickness.

A third belief is an unflinching belief in the science of germs. As we discussed, science shows how germs can make us sick. However, science, just like anything else, is essentially a belief system. It's belief that the scientific understanding of germ theory is the final word on disease transmission. That belief limits you by putting you at the mercy of that scientific theory.

So how do we strengthen our energetic immune systems? First, by looking at blocking belief systems that might be contributing to getting sick and clearing those out. It takes shifting our perspective from believing in being the "victim" of yearly sickness to being the owner of our own bodies.  Second, we work on holding our highest vibration of health and vitality even amidst the pressure of lowering our vibration to match the sickness around us.

(There's always pressure to match energy -- matching energy is natural for us. It's one way we can relate to the experience of others. There's energetic pressure to match the vibration of sickness, even if the afflicted person doesn't want to spread germs. Part of this pressure is from the strength of a very large societal agreement that we have about belief in germs and germ theory that says if one of us is at the mercy of germs, we all should be. Disagreeing is like energetic rebellion.)

If you're not sure about what your belief systems are or how to remove them, Intuitive Wellness Coaching can help. We can do exactly what I'm describing so that you can have a vital year of health and wellness!

What happens if you still get sick? Learn from it, and don't beat yourself up over it. Gather information about how you got there, what you were feeling, what the beliefs were that you or others around you held, and then practice wellness. Pull in the vibration of wellness and allow yourself to truly have it. Ask yourself what wellness practices you can do to get well and stay well, and see what responses you get. In my meditation, I was told to drink lots of broth, add green juice to my mornings, and to eat lightly. Listen to your body.

Wellness is a practice. Practice well.