Energy Healing as a spiritual practice
It’s more than likely you already have a spiritual practice, you just may not realize it.
Anything that helps you connect to your Spirit, helps you feel better, calmer, more relaxed and happy, can be considered a spiritual practice. It’s a practice because it’s never done, never finished, you keep doing it. The intention for a practice is to be mindful rather than on autopilot – to have your focus of awareness fully present so you can experience your practice fully, deeply and wholeheartedly.
Setting a specific routine for a spiritual practice might be too ambitious if it doesn’t suit your lifestyle. You don’t have to spend 20 minutes in meditation every morning if it’s too big a commitment. If you can do it, great, but if it’s more than likely that you won’t be able to do it, you may spend the day feeling bad about not doing it, which defeats the purpose in the first place. A spiritual practice should be manageable and something that you enjoy and can do anytime you want, whenever you feel you need it.
When I ask my clients if they have a daily spiritual practice some of them look at me sideways, as if I’m speaking a foreign language. For me, a daily spiritual practice is vital for good health. Taking time out every day to reconnect with yourself is like a reset, it helps you get your priorities back in the right order instead of allowing yourself to drift and the energies around you to magnify your fears and doubts.
We do so many things on autopilot that we may not even be aware that we are doing them. For example, I always used to forget if I’d locked my car when I’d parked it. Then when I was miles away, my heart would leap up into my chest, and I’d be worried, ‘Did I lock the car?’ I’d never remember! I’ve lost count of the number of times I had to go back to the car just to check it! I now mindfully lock my car every time I park by stopping for a moment before I walk away and bringing my attention and awareness to it. Sometimes I even say ‘I am locking the car now’ as I lock it. From time to time I’ll still ask myself if I have locked the car, and I can say for certain the answer is always ‘yes’. Once we have awareness, we are present, and we have a choice. The key is to get the awareness.
The problem is, when we tune out our mind tends to wander, we lose awareness of what we are doing and we tend to gravitate towards the things that are upsetting us. By doing this, we are feeding our energy and awareness into things we don’t actually want to grow. Pulling our energy back from wandering thoughts, from what we are feeding, is so important, and if we incorporate this into a daily practice, we get better at doing it.
We are surrounded by people, and whether we spend time with them every day or not, we still get affected by them. For the most part, people are not responsible for their emotional energies and tend to ‘dump’ them on other people and walk away. I’m sure you’ve experienced this. It’s not that people do it on purpose, they just don’t know what else to do. If we can check in with ourselves every day, clear what is not ours and reorganize what is, it stops a build-up over time, which can make us sick.
‘I met with the girls for lunch. It was the usual chatter, but Rosemary was very quiet. I knew something was wrong, so I asked her, and she burst into tears. She told us that she thought her boyfriend was going to break up with her. We held her hand and listened as she went over all the things that were going on in her head. When she was finished, her eyes were brighter, and she looked better, but I felt tired. When I went out of the restaurant, I felt a heaviness in my chest, and it stayed there all day, in fact, now that I think of it, it didn’t lift from me until after dinner.’
Does this sound familiar? It’s not that Rosemary knowingly dumped her emotional pain onto her friend, but her friend wanted to look after her so naturally she took it on, and she went home with it. Rosemary felt better, but her friend didn’t.
When we are on autopilot, if our thoughts are feeding the fears and the doubts, we resonate with the fears and the doubts, and are more likely to pick up on other people’s fears and doubts too. Studies in positive psychology have shown that we have a tendency to feel more stressed when we are surrounded by stressful things such as media reports or violence on television. So even if we are not surrounded by people, we can be surrounded by media that affects us in the same way.
We also prefer to go with the crowd rather than stand out from it. Our basic nature wants to help, too, so we have a tendency to get drawn into feelings, behaviours and stories that belong to the group, rather than to us as individuals. In Ireland, where I live, people love a good story, and they tell it and tell it and tell it again, so much so that the story itself takes on a life and an energy of its own. When the story is about murder or suicide, war or epidemics, the stories can take more and more of our energies away from us and we contract our biofield, and feel smaller and smaller and less able to function.
It’s time to recognize that if we take on other energies that are not ours we can drown under the weight of them. We also need to recognize that if we give everything of ourselves away to everyone else, we have nothing left to give. A daily practice is vital to remind us of what belongs to us and what does not, and it gives us an opportunity to reconnect to our intuition and raise our vibration. This is being responsible for our energies, and as I said above, most people are not responsible, so perhaps now it’s time to take responsibility and just do it. Every day. It’s not that you are going to change the world by having a spiritual practice, but it’s more likely you will be able to find happiness and balance in your own life if you do.
We have a tendency to take on other people’s heavy energies.
We also have a tendency to give our energies away to other people, situations, fears and emotional/physical pain.
We need to take our energies back, clear them and heal them, so we can come into balance and stay healthy.
Just as a car needs petrol so it can keep driving, our Life Force Energy is the fuel that drives us. We need to take time every day to take back our energies from areas that are draining them, to feed and clear them of other people’s needs and wants, and to heal them to raise their vibration. When we do this, we come into alignment, resonate with peace, joy and love and are at our best.
In order to create your own spiritual practice, you need to choose something you enjoy, something that can fit into your day, and something that doesn’t feel like a mountain to climb! I’ve outlined some ideas here that you might like to try. Give them a go and see what works best for you.
If you want more inspiration, do come and visit me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or my blog, as I regularly share exercises and meditations that people find very helpful. I also hold online classes in which I help you create your own daily spiritual practice. You can tell me how you get on with these exercises and share your experiences with others on social media.
Before we start creating our own daily spiritual practice, let’s take a quick review of what we have learned so far, so you know what you have to work with.
Your energy is not always in your body: You found the focus of your awareness, brought it into your body, and felt how different that is to the normal way we live, with our Life Force Energy being mostly outside our bodies, up around our minds. Let’s change that, and have ‘being centred’ as the new normal!
You function best when you are centred: You then learned how to centre yourself properly by bringing the focus of your awareness down through your body, connecting into your heart. This is invaluable as it really helps you feel more contained in your body. It feeds your body with more energies too, so you are healthier, and have a good connection to your intuition and a clear way of getting a yes or no answer.
When you are grounded you stay in your body: You brought your energy connection down to Mother Earth to anchor yourself and feel strong and secure. You learned how to bring energies up from Mother Earth to cleanse yourself and help you feel supported.
Getting big in your energies is a good thing to do: You learned how to connect to a source of higher vibrational energy outside your body. You tuned in to the energies of healing, of unconditional love and light, and learned how to expand your energy field so that you can step into your true potential. You also learned how to send some of this energy to people you love.
You don’t want to carry other people’s energies: You’ve been doing clearing work throughout this book even though you might not have known what it’s called. Breathing out anxiety is clearing it from your system. Like clearing the dye from the swimming pool, you’ve learned that raising your energies to a higher vibration clears out all the energies that are at a lower vibration. When you are at a high vibration and clear in your Life Force Energy, you are able to be your best self.
When combined with conscious awareness, intention and permission, your Life Force Energy can be the key to creating stability and happiness in your life. It can help you feel more connected to your intuition, so you are aware of how you feel in your heart as well as what you think in your mind. A daily spiritual practice that keeps you connected to all of these aspects of your Self empowers you to be able to reach your full potential as a human being.
Just as we can bring our energies back to ourselves, we can also send other people’s energies back to them, gently and with love. Now in the case of Rosemary, it might not benefit her to have her emotional pain come back, so we can also send it to Mother Earth to be processed, just as she processes our own anxieties and emotional pain.
Here is a simple method for clearing other people’s energies from your energy field. This is something that will really benefit you if you do it regularly, as part of your daily routine, as well as doing it when you feel you need to.
We ask for the energies to be released for the highest good of all, because we don’t really know what is best for others. For example, if Rosemary’s friend was angry for being ‘dumped on’, she might try to send Rosemary back her own emotional pain. Perhaps that would make things significantly worse for Rosemary, and push her into a clinical depression. We will never know all the answers. Rather than make the decision yourself, let the universe do what it does best.
Clearing other energies from our energy field isn’t restricted to energies from people. When there is an event or a situation that involves many people, they might all invest their spiritual energies, including you, and it can get ‘muddy’ and difficult to focus when it comes to making a decision. An example might be a wedding, where too many people want to help with the arrangements, or a work situation where politics are involved.
Can you remember a situation or event that preoccupied you for a lot of time, weighing you down and making you feel drained just thinking of it? Did you feel like you wanted to run away? Sometimes feelings of avoidance are because your energy is being drained, and you don’t have anything left to give. Your avoidance is not because you don’t want to do it, or because you’re being lazy, it’s because you are scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to your energy levels, and you need to preserve yourself.
This technique starts with you taking back the energies you’ve invested in the situation/event so you feel better in yourself. Then once you feel grounded and centred, you can give back the energies that are not yours. Use a situation from your past for this exercise now, so you can see how it feels to release the energies around it. Then you can incorporate it into a spiritual practice and use it whenever you need to.
Having the awareness that you may be carrying energies belonging to others or to situations enables you to disconnect from them and bring yourself back to yourself. Without the awareness, what usually happens is that we think it’s all our own stuff and start to analyse what’s going on, create negative thought patterns, get caught up in heavy emotions and make things worse.
If your first stop is always to clear your energies, and then check in and see how you feel, you get clearer on what is your stuff, and what is not. Using clearing techniques as part of a daily spiritual practice stops these energies from building up over time, and helps you have a better awareness and connection to yourself.
Sometimes we invest so much of ourselves in something that it might be difficult to call our energies back. We think about it all the time. We visualize what we want, we hope, dream, expect and get disappointed if it doesn’t happen the way we want it to, when we want it to. We may feel we have some control over a situation or a person by being so invested, but in fact, our energies are jamming up the works.
The most amazing thing about using this technique is that when you take your energy back you free up space for the energies around whatever the issue is to clear by themselves. It’s like the saying, ‘If you love someone, set them free.’ With a deep trust that everything is going to turn out in the best way possible, let go of your attachment to the outcome or a need to control the situation. Take a step back, breathe and clear your energies and see what happens!
How will you know when you’ve come back completely? When you feel more grounded and centred around the situation or person, when news of them doesn’t throw you off balance, when you don’t feel as much emotional upheaval if you think about it.
What we think about, or worry about subconsciously, we ‘feed’ with our energy. So, when we set our conscious awareness to clear something, it’s wonderful and it works, but then when we bring our focus to something else, our subconscious mind might slip back and reconnect to what we just disconnected from. This is why you have to do this work more than once. This is why you have to keep checking in even if it felt like you were fully disconnected from it.
Why does this happen? Well, these subconscious connections have probably taken some time to grow, and so it’s not surprising that they may take some time to fade away. Keep going! There is usually work to be done on a deeper level. This is a process. You are learning a new way of using your energy as a resource for positive change and growth.
One way to help clear out negative thoughts and beliefs is to write them down and work through them. Write out a list of the things you are deeply worried about, and the negative thoughts you have about these situations, yourself, or anything else that is disturbing you. If you can clear them yourself with your energy work, then go for it! But don’t be afraid to ask for help; remember that this work will help you free yourself up to have the happy life you deserve.
Use the major exercises we have done for centring, grounding and expanding, and turn them into your own spiritual practice. Once you have put the time in, they get easier to do, and you can then do them over a shorter period of time.
For example, you could take five minutes to centre yourself, then take five minutes to ground yourself, then take another five minutes to expand. You might just want to take 10 minutes to ground, or another day you might prefer to take 15 minutes to expand.
Always notice how you feel and do only what you feel you need to do that day. Pushing yourself too hard is not healthy and may create a dislike in your subconscious mind of doing any energy work at all. You may also notice that as you are doing healing work, your mind concentrates on the work you are doing and lets go of thoughts that may upset you or worry you. Just that alone may be enough to help you feel more like yourself again.
This work is mindful. Bring your mind purposefully with you and away from worrying thoughts of the past and the future. Focus on something you are doing now, in the present moment.
Anything you do mindfully can become a spiritual practice. You can wash the dishes and feel better afterwards, if while you’re doing it you stop feeding your energies into anything that worries you. Just bring your focus of awareness into your centre, into your body and experience, and wash the dishes in a mindful way, instead of just doing it on autopilot.
To do this effectively, your thought process may be like this:
I run the tap, the water is warm. I get the sponge, I am pouring in the washing-up liquid, I mix the water and washing-up liquid and make bubbles. The bubbles are beautiful, the light touches off of them in a beautiful way. I put the plates and cutlery into the sink. I let them sit there and I look out of the window at the sky. The sun is going down, there are so many colours to see. The sky looks like a painting. I am breathing with the sky. I feel my feet on the ground, I can hear my breath. I bring my awareness back to the dishes and start to wash the first plate.
Not like this:
I run the tap, the water is warm. I get the sponge, I am pouring the washing-up liquid. I can see the price tag on the bottle and I remember going to the shop to buy it. My gosh, washing-up liquid is so expensive these days. This one was ridiculously expensive and that person on the till was so rude to me. I’m never going back into that shop again…
And certainly not like this (!):
I run the tap, the water is warm. I get the sponge, I am pouring in the washing-up liquid. I wonder how long this will take as I still need to complete that work project. Sigh. It should have been in last week. I really should have worked late last night to finish it, but I was too tired. I know that it will take at least another day or two before I can get it finished. I tried to tell my manager today but she was too busy to talk to me. I’m going to have to talk to her tomorrow about it; I hope they don’t bring this up at my review meeting…
Do you see what I mean? Staying in the present with what is happening now, in this moment, is a spiritual practice when you bring your full awareness into it. Feeding the present moment instead of what happened in the shop, or what is going on at work, is what fills your soul up. This is you, feeding yourself. This is mindfulness as an Energy Healing practice, giving you more energy for what life brings.
Take about five minutes to do this exercise.
If you had trouble doing this, don’t worry, it’s a practice, and it takes practice!
Don’t get angry or frustrated. Simply bring your focus and attention back to the present moment and start where you left off. You will be thinking thoughts. This is not about stopping thinking. It’s about paying attention to what you are thinking so that you stay in the present moment. Remember, the more attention you feed to yourself, the less you feed the fears, then you end up with fewer fears and more of you.
It does get easier over time, so it stands to reason that when you start doing this, you will have more fears than you will once you get better at it. It’s harder work in the beginning but so worthwhile.
What did you find your mind going back to most of the time? Is it a real fear or something that you are assuming is real? Get clear on it. You may want to write down everything that’s on your mind connected to this fear, so you can get it all out into the open, and not hide from it. Remember, being authentic and true to yourself is part of Energy Healing too. Telling yourself that something is big and scary when it really isn’t, takes you away from yourself and is an energy drain. And yes, talk to someone if you need to, take action if you need to.
If there is a real issue that is upsetting you, you will have to do something real about it.
By bringing your intention into mindfulness you can really connect to yourself. You can use power statements (affirmations) and clearing statements with mindfulness to create positive changes in your energy field.
In this next exercise the intention is to call all your energies back into your body. You can change the intention to be whatever you feel you need, such as receiving healing, becoming more relaxed or releasing emotional or physical pain.
Take a few minutes to do this exercise. Bring your awareness and attention into the present moment.
Now move your focus of attention down (or up) your body, speaking (or thinking) your intention to each part of your physical body. For example:
– ‘I bring my focus of awareness to my head.’
– ‘I call all energies that are mine that belong in my head to come back now.’
– ‘I bring my focus of awareness down to my face.’
– ‘I call all energies from my face that may have left me, to come back now.’
You will find that by having a strong intention you automatically feel more contained in your physical body, you feel more centred and more grounded. There is a certainty and a focus when you have an intention, and using intention on a regular basis can increase your self-confidence and sense of self-worth too.
You can bring mindfulness into anything – yoga, football, walking, even cleaning the house. Here are some ideas to start you off:
The key is to be completely in the present moment, not to feed your energies into the past or the future. And as I said before, it will get easier, until you find your way of being is like this more of the time.
We have used breathing a lot in this book as a focus of our awareness, as an anchor to the present moment. We can use breathing to create a spiritual practice too. This is what we have done already with the breath:
Here’s a nice exercise. Use it every day for a week or so to see if it changes anything in your life.
After doing this exercise with me in a session, one of my clients walked home and a complete stranger ran across the road to tell her that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen!
You can replace the energetic source of beauty with happiness, peace, joy, lightness, or gratitude. Choose something that you resonate with, stick with it for a few days and see how you feel.
There is always work to be done, even if you feel like you have reached enlightenment. Enlightened people still have to do the mundane day-to-day tasks like cleaning the house and doing the cooking! You will still have difficult days and wonderful days. The difference is you won’t write off a whole day as a bad day if something upsets you, and you won’t feel like a victim any more, needing something or someone to blame. If you need a rest, take a rest. Enlightened people get tired too!
One of my clients was visibly relieved when I told her that I make mistakes, that I have bad days and that I get upset by things just like she does. It’s not that I see myself as enlightened, but I’ve been using Energy Healing as a daily spiritual practice for many years. I breathe it and live it all day, every day. The first thing I do before anything else is to clear my energies. Even in writing this book, I cleared all the energies in the way of it, so it could be the best book I could write in that moment! My point is this – I still get angry, I still get upset. The difference is, I process it quickly. I let it go, rather than holding on to it for weeks and weeks and turning it into a grudge and never forgiving. I used to be like that – someone would say something nasty to me or behind my back, and I would be upset about it for months. It was like a wound that would never heal. Now it heals very much faster because I choose to focus on healing it, rather than letting it upset me.
Holding on to emotional pain makes your body sick and that brings with it physical pain. Doing your work, clearing the energies and expanding and healing yourself releases emotional pain, and opens up your body so that it can heal itself at the physical level. Looking after your thoughts prevents you from creating more emotional pain for yourself.
These techniques are meant for you to use and to use frequently, as often as you need to. They have helped people move away from depression and be empowered. They have helped people feel more secure in their lives and ‘grow out of’ panic attacks and phobias. When you clear away other people’s energies what’s left is your own, and that’s much easier to work with.
As you probably have figured out at this stage, underneath the moving flowing energies, deep in your subconscious, probably still lie limiting beliefs, fears and emotional pain that may not shift quickly and easily with Energy Healing alone. Do your healing work, and your energies will expand, your vibration will rise. It becomes easier to go deep and excavate the bigger pieces as you heal, so you truly begin to resonate with all the good things you want in your life, and you start to see them coming in as a testimony to the work you are doing.
Once you’re familiar with the techniques, do make the effort to use them in your daily life. Teach them to your friends, to your family, to your children. Play with them, have fun with them. Imagine a world where everyone is responsible for their own energy. That’s a world I want to live in!