YIN Mind and YANG Mind

EQ and Energy Series Part 3: Yin Mind and Yang Mind

Yin and Yang appear to be two, yet are one presence in the universe. Where there is space, Yin and Yang may move about in an elaborate dance. Like how light cannot be distinguished without the contrast of darkness, this is the spiritual science behind the push-and-pull like relationship of Yin and Yang. There are many symbols of these two directional currents of energy in the universe: plus and minus, male and female, giving and receiving, and music itself with sound and silence. To understand one, the other must be considered–Yin and Yang are the embodiment of polarity and dichotomy, existing as two but stemming from the One.

Two Minds

It is commonly understood that our brains are made up of two hemispheres that are very different, but do a great job of creating a cohesive experience of reality and allowing us to survive and thrive in it. These two hemispheres in the brain point to an interesting dichotomy at play in our lives that extends well beyond our physical anatomy. The brain is a tangible organ that can be dissected, whereas what we refer to as the mind is less easily understood as it is not physical in nature. The two sides of the brain can, however, be seen as the physical manifestation of two very different experiences or functions of the mind: the Yin mind and the Yang mind.

The Yin mind features our ability to be yielding, adaptive, and accepting. Whereas the Yang mind is seeking, calculating, and demanding. To understand the essence of these two parts of the whole, we can look at a fundamental life system such as our breath. Yin energy is restorative, it is the inhale that draws rejuvenating air into our lungs and fills us–the self– with life. Yang energy is exhaustive, it is the exhale that is outward bound beyond the self. We all have Yin and Yang energies in us, however, we may not be aware of them let alone how to strike a balance. Another way to view these energies to understand our two minds more deeply, is to look at another illustration of Yin and Yang energies: feminine and masculine energies.

*The symbol for masculine (R) is taken from the astrological symbol for Mars. The feminine (L) is taken from Venus.*

Embodiments of Yin and Yang

From ancient times female and male gender roles divided tasks into two major pillars–tasks related to caregiving and keeping a comfortable home, and tasks related to protection, exploration, and hunting. Feminine energy–Yin–encompasses the maintenance of one’s physical home and inner world harmony, whereas masculine energy–Yang–relates to one’s outer world involvement and activities. In our modern day society, the traditional gender roles have largely collapsed, and the new challenge is to balance both the masculine and feminine energies within ourselves. It’s a touchy subject right now to talk about masculine, male, men or feminine, female, women as those words are undergoing a collective kind of ‘detox.’ However, when we look beyond the connotations and derogatory associations, we can see that this collective ‘detox’ is a result of our desire to redefine new terms that allow each of us to have the masculine and feminine within–to support the duality of our inherent human condition.

Our physical body may house one set of reproductive mechanics, but we no longer have to be limited to the traditional gender roles associated with those mechanics. Now, each of us can play with our masculine and feminine energies–our Yin and Yang energies– and not be defined by them. Once this paradigm of gender and gender roles collapses, in what new and refreshing ways can we witness our Yin and Yang energies dancing in and through us? I believe it is a great time to begin growing our awareness of our Yin mind and Yang mind, and cultivating the ability to shift between the two and recognize when we are falling out of balance. In other words, many of us are ready to approach our own mental wellbeing with more conscious awareness and conscious participation.

The Yang Mind

Labels create separation, categories and division through which we then understand our world. The Yang mind’s special ability is to break things down into smaller and smaller pieces and organize them using labels. What we have yet to awaken more collectively to is that when we send our energy into labels, it creates separation, categories and division within our experience of ourselves in relationship to others. In other words, we experience ourselves as non-integrated and not whole. It is like a beautiful landscape that gets cut into many puzzle pieces and no longer experiences the whole picture, but puzzle pieces where some pieces fit together and others do not–some we like and some we don’t. This is what the analytical thinking mind does. Each time it breaks something down further, it creates a new opportunity to cast further judgment onto whatever it has dissected. It is a tool, but it is not a representation of ALL that we are. It is itself only one aspect of the whole–one piece of us with a unique function that is part of the whole.

When we live predominantly in the Yang mind, we will experience the further breaking down and scattering of our energy as it follows an outward reaching motion of thoughts led by what we often call, ‘curiosity.’ Think how the universe expands and keeps reaching further and further outward. Or imagine after we blow out a candle, two more appear to take its place, then four, and so on like cell division. As we blow them out, we become breathless and tired–our energy becomes depleted. This is often what it can be like to look up something online only to get sucked down all kinds of rabbit holes and go off on all kinds of tangents just following that Yang energy of curiosity. This is the Yang mind. When we let it run rampant, it’s like a small excited child that rules our headspace. Without discipline we can become very scattered and experience ourselves in a less coherent way because we leave our energy in such a variety of places.

Words are also a reflection of the Yang mind’s function of labeling things. The more words we know and use, the more usage we get out of our Yang mind. Another side effect of labeling with words is the cultivation of what many refer to as polarity. If we are to label something as big, we simultaneously create its opposite because labels rely on and are born from observing relationships which are inherently relative. If a tall person stands next to a short person, they remain tall. However, if they stand next to an even taller person, they are the new short. Labels provide us intricate ways to understand all kinds of relationships between the self and all else.

Through the unique feature of the Yang mind, we are able to experience another kind of conceptual playground that we call time. Your physical body is only ever here in the present moment, but energetically, you can be feeding some of your attention into memories and concepts of the past–perhaps reshaping it– or ideas for the future. The Yang mind is able to break down stimuli into more and more complexity and play with it conceptually, again driven by the inherent quality of Yang energy which is curious, seeking, and exhaustive. Are you exhausted from reading about the Yang mind yet? If the Yang mind looks like a hamster wheel that is always turning, creating heat and fire in our minds, then let’s cool it off next with some Yin energy.

The Yin Mind

Yin energy is often illustrated with the water element because of its yielding, adaptive quality. When water hits a boulder in its path, it flows around it and continues on its way. Our Yin mind possesses these same qualities. If you imagine a big empty bubble of space and introduce a thought, it would pass right through the space–in and out the other side. The Yin mind is one that allows things to be as they are–even the most seductive thoughts do not have the power to take us for a ride when we are in our Yin mind. When this aspect of our mind is exercised and strengthened, we possess the ability to simply hold space–be space– and be in a state of neutrality. You can envision this mental bubble of empty space like a womb. The Yin mind is about receptivity and being a receptacle.

We see curiosity and outward motion as an energetic force when we are in our Yang mind, so when we shift into our Yin mind we may be a little surprised at how differently it operates. The Yin mind functions largely through the act of letting go. This enables us to enter a state of incubation where we perceive our mind as being restful or just very present while absent of judgment. We can enter the Yin state while doing familiar repetitive, meditative activities such as washing the dishes, folding clothes, or shredding paper. In this incubation state, we are not shifting into the Yang mind that hops from one thought to the next and likes to dissect. When we are in our Yin mind, we experience ourselves as the powerful receivers that we are. Ideas may appear in pictorial form in our mind’s eye or perhaps as a whisper or inexplicable knowing. Our Yin mind is very creative in how it receives, that we may find ourselves being drawn to a location, person, or thing without being able to articulate why. Particular words jump out at us from signs and papers as if speaking to us. We perceive patterns and connections effortlessly. That beautiful landscape that was broken and scattered into many puzzle pieces by the Yang mind, begins to reassemble itself effortlessly with the Yin mind. There is a kind of intelligence that is effortless–magnetic–and when we are in our Yin mind, we experience things coming to us. For these reasons, the Yin mind can be considered the house of our extrasensory perception.

When we sharpen our ability to recognize and shift between Yin and Yang mind states, we will perceive our reality differently just as the collapse of gender roles is shifting our perception of reality. ‘Doing’ and ‘being’ are two states of mind that we shift in and out of that are neither good nor bad; better or worse. What can be very illuminating, however, is to look at our society and world at large today in these same terms–the balance of Yin and Yang. If you hadn’t guessed already, we are living in a very Yang-dominant, lopsided world. ‘Doing’ is coveted far more than ‘being,’ and productivity is sought and worshiped often at the expense of an individual’s overall health and wellbeing. (A closer look at this in EQ and Energy Part 1). Another pair of words that embody this relationship between Yin and Yang is “giving” and “receiving.” Going back to the wisdom of our breath, we can find in it one of our most profound teachers. If we attempt to give more than we receive, it is the same as attempting to exhale more than we inhale. We will become exhausted, scattered and less effective.

Until we can honestly acknowledge that a balance of these two energies is needed, we will continue to operate in the same way. Sometimes it takes physical sickness or pain to wake us up more to Yin and Yang imbalances–whether of the mind or elsewhere in our lives. I see our ability to work with Yin and Yang as starting with our ability to acknowledge the equal importance of both and not the semi-unconscious limiting beliefs that say activity is better than rest; giving is better than receiving, or that sound is better than silence and so on. When we discover we are feeding such distorted beliefs, we can take strides to introduce more of what energy is lacking. We can also practice feeding our vibration thoughts that disempower these limiting beliefs. (A closer look at this in EQ and Energy Part 2). The lesson of Yin and Yang is about balance and seeing wholeness despite polarity and the perceptions and illusions that stem from it. It is a beautiful lens and useful tool in seeing the world as a dance between two qualities of energy rather than a competition.

Cultivating Yin and Yang Awareness

Imagine a bunch of pens in front of you, each a different color of the rainbow and various tones in between. How do you decide what color pen to use? If we were to tap into our Yang mind–our logic–we might say to ourselves, “My favorite color is blue, so I’ll choose the blue pen.” If we want to tap into our Yin mind–our intuition– we would look and see which color calls to us in that moment and pick it up. Where logic tells us there is an overarching right answer, our intuition tells us there is an aligned choice in any given moment. Intuition is anchored in our inner landscape and is a kind of navigation system that serves us by helping us relate to our external environment. Our intuition operates on a subtle energy level–like a whisper–so to access it, a degree of inner quiet and stillness is very helpful. When our Yang mind is overactive and busily seeking out answers to things, one after the next, it can override and diminish our intuition–the Yin mind. How do we quiet our thoughts so we can experience more of our intuition? We can turn to the raw materials that the Yin mind absorbs like a sponge–colors and pictures.

Pictures and colors have the ability to communicate vibrationally to us in ways that words cannot. Words stem from the analytical mind that breaks whole, integrated things into pieces and plays with them in a kind of conceptual playground. Whereas pictures and colors move us forward in our mind, into the mind’s eye–the screen where we see imagery and use our imagination. We can put up three different colored apples in our mind’s eye right now and just observe them in silence. As we look at each one, the setting may become further embellished, and what we refer to as ‘ideas’ may present themselves in pure visual form there. Or perhaps soon after we put up these three apples, pictures or memories carrying a similar vibration pop up in visual form as well. Maybe we see a memory of cutting up an apple in the kitchen, or seeing one in a cafe. The word for this we often use is, ‘associations’. On the energetic level, like-vibrations light up similar vibrational matches within our experiences, and the Yin mind is the empty space that ‘houses’ these vibrations temporarily, again like a mental womb.

In the previous EQ and Energy posts, we covered what it means to have permission to feel good in our bodies and then explored how thoughts feed our vibration. As we’ve explored two qualities of energy in this post–Yin and Yang– I’d like to build off the previous posts in this series by offering some general suggestions on how to exercise the Yin mind more in our Yang-dominant world.

Shift from a Yang thought to a Yin picture

The next time you find yourself circling in a lower vibrating thought loop, create a picture in your mind’s eye not of what worry or fear you have, but of what condition or outcome you desire. Your Yang mind may be like a wild horse that continues to go rogue, but as often as you can, introduce this Yin picture into your mind’s eye and practice looking at it and feeding the light of your attention to it. The Yang mind quickly picks up speed and snowballs, so by practicing looking deeply into a mental picture of your own creation, you begin to drain the excess heat–Yang–from your mind and cool it off by using the Yin mind.

Reintroduce familiar, repetitive activities back into your daily life

As technology has advanced, we’ve gained access to more and more services and conveniences that eliminate a lot of the repetitive daily activities the lives of our ancestors were full of. Go back into your garden and pull some weeds yourself. Wash some of your dishes by hand. Hang out your laundry. Buy nuts still in their shells and deshell them by hand. Rather than seeing through the Yang mind lens that seeks to be as productive and efficient as possible, find ways to reintroduce some of these repetitive activities back into your daily life and treat them as periods of incubation where you get to shift into your Yin mind. It is a kind of meditative state that we can access as long as we do not feed into the limiting belief that we are being unproductive.

Practice behaving like water

When things come up in life that obstruct your direct path, practice flowing around them like water rather than going into resistance. The Yin mind is a flow state that we step into when we abstain from passing judgment while still keeping our ability to discern and make decisions. Remember, the Yin mind operates with the wisdom that there is an aligned choice in any given moment. Refrain from judgment so that you can experience more of this wisdom and way of being for yourself.

Treat your two minds like a marriage

Begin to create space between your pure conscious awareness and your thoughts by practicing discerning ‘squeezing’ thoughts from ‘blossoming’ ones. A blossoming thought is one that creates more ease and the release of tension in the physical body. When the Yang mind entertains a low vibrating “squeezing” thought, shift into your Yin mind and show it a picture of a squeezed flower blossom. Then communicate back to it by showing it a blossoming flower.

Communicate with yourself more and more with pictures rather than predominantly with thoughts. It can be very challenging to filter our thoughts when they take us for a ride, but it can be very empowering to show yourself a mental picture that is uplifting or calming. Picture a clenched fist loosening and returning to an open face up palm. Create more space between your pure consciousness and your thoughts by placing your attention on your breath. A Yang dominant mind leaves us heated up and breathless, so we can rebalance our minds by focusing our awareness on our breath and away from our thoughts. This is a fundamental concept behind many meditation techniques.

Our bodies are extremely sensitive and influenced by our surroundings. We can use this to our advantage by placing our attention on beautiful nature scenes, or meditate on the energetic quality of various elements such as wind, fire, water, and earth. What we look at, our body reacts to. The body can’t tell the difference between scenery around it or a mental picture of that scenery–it will react to both. So if we want Yin and Yang balance, we can look to Nature to recalibrate us back into more balance.

Living More Consciously

*Black holes demonstrate YIN properties, whereas the Sun demonstrates YANG properties.*

We can learn a lot about ourselves and the balance or lack of balance of Yin and Yang energy within by examining states of being we often fall into. For example, often trying to figure things out, being logic-driven, or self-motivated all demonstrate Yang states of being. Whereas letting your environment speak to you, soaking in a rejuvenating bath, or consciously breathing deeply are all Yin states of being. This ability to witness and identify Yin and Yang energy all around us and within us has been held by many who have come before us. It is a beautiful lens to look at all aspects of ourselves and our external environment in a way that promotes a deeper, more real experience of interconnectedness and oneness. Life does not have to be shaped around the many labels that perpetuate a sense of separation and division. Instead, it can be a conscious dance where our power of discernment is well intact, but does not create an ‘us’ and ‘them’ reality.

Yin and Yang is also a pair of lenses that fits perfectly on our two physical eyes! We are born with two eyes–with the ability to see two sides to everything. When we attain the ability to recognize and adjust the balance of these two energies within ourselves, we naturally will be able to see the balance or imbalance of them in others. Rather than encourage both of our children to work hard, we may discern that one child needs to be encouraged to rest and not be given as much structure. We will learn to see ourselves and others as constantly shifting in a dance with these two energies and no longer label some people as ambitious and others as lazy, or label ourselves as ‘good’ some days and ‘bad’ other days. We can live more consciously in that we can see the balance or imbalance of Yin and Yang in and around us and make choices that are less bound by limiting beliefs or the cultures that have influenced us thus far.

I’d like to leave you with a visual elixir that is very potent in helping to both see and regain balance of the Yin and Yang energies within. Hold your finger out and draw a circle in the air. Regardless of where you begin to draw the circle, you will experience both Yin and Yang by the time you make one full revolution. When you sense you are pushing or going outward, that is Yang. When you experience more effortlessness and a receiving quality, that is Yin. Uphill, downhill. Waxing, waning. Giving, receiving. Speaking, listening. Nature is a phenomenal teacher of this wisdom.

When we learn to recognize which energy is dominant in our mental experience, we can learn how to rebalance ourselves. This is what it means to live more consciously, and not at the mercy of the mood we find ourselves in, the beliefs we inherit, or the thoughts circulating throughout the collective. We have the ability to recognize Yin and Yang energies within ourselves and to dance our way back into balance without falling into judgment and getting stuck there. We can practice being an embodiment of the wisdom of Yin and Yang.

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Author’s Note:

*A sketch I did in 2015 that unfolded while in my Yin mind*.

The concept of flight is seen throughout the entire history of human kind. It represents transcendence of struggle and suffering, and is an expression of freedom. Interestingly, I once read about how much a butterfly struggles while trying to exit the cocoon. If you try to intervene and help it by tearing some of the cocoon apart more for it, it actually has the opposite effect. The period of struggle is part of the process leading to the butterfly being able to survive and take flight. When a person intervenes to ‘help’ in this way, the butterfly does not exert the strength and force that is necessary for its body to go through and will never be able to spread its wings let alone take flight. This piece of wisdom from Nature teaches us about struggle and pain.

I see us all as butterflies right now, but most of us not yet knowing how to work both wings harmoniously–the Yin mind and Yang mind. One side of our wings is flapping too hard in a great state of effort, not knowing how to work harmoniously with Yin energy and so not experiencing the freedom of conscious flight. This ability to label and break the whole into smaller parts and see differences is what has given each of us the ability to see ourselves as unique individuated entities compared to others. The sense of individual ‘self’ has been born from this big surge of Yang mind activity. However, the pendulum is approaching its threshold. In mental health terms, this translates as uncontrollable anxiety, fear, sense of isolation, inferiority-superiority complexes, and hopelessness to name a few. How do we learn to fly from here?

*Another older sketch. As I was playing with eyes, I began to see something more in the eye.*

I really see that mental turmoil is like the stress that a butterfly coming out of the cocoon faces. It is part of our developmental process. It eventually forces us to go inward and deal with the chaos of thoughts that no longer serve us and perpetuates further this sense of isolation, separation, competition and division among us. We are addicted to labeling–even simply the labels of good and bad; right and wrong. We are trying to shape the flow of life around us into solid and unchanging pieces. Eventually, our Yin mind will rise up from this chaotic way of experiencing ourselves. We are more than the thoughts we have and we do not need to cultivate a sense of self-worth from the thoughts we have. Likewise, the worth or value of others need not rest on them having and expressing certain thoughts that we like. Like the color of our own skin, we can learn not to put so much sense of our identity in the quality or ‘color’ of the thoughts that we have.

This is the kind of flight that we are all preparing for–the transcendence of thought dictating how we perceive reality. We can fly above the vibrational realm of thought-dictated reality and identity, and enter into a new plane where we experience ourselves as something much more vast.

Have a beautiful spring and unique unfolding of your very own~

<3 Mo-Chan

Thoughts as Food for our Vibration

EQ and Energy Series: Part 2 Thoughts as Food for our Vibration

In part 1 of this series on EQ and Energy, the focus was about becoming more aware of how often we feel good in our bodies as a foundation to building our emotional intelligence. Now, with that growing awareness, we can learn to see energy in one of its most obvious yet elusive forms: thought.

Thought and Vibration

Gone unobserved from a neutral place for a large portion of our lives, our thoughts and thought patterns are often inherited and conditioned by the environments and influences we grow up with. Certain thoughts induce or support certain vibrational states. So, if you want to learn to sustain certain “feel good” vibrations for longer amounts of time, your thoughts need to not betray your intentions.

When you make “feeling good” a higher priority in your life, eventually you may butt heads with energy in your space that doesn’t seem to want to let you feel good. This is what I experienced for myself about five years ago when I began to meditate regularly. I practiced sitting in stillness and watching my thoughts. At first, I could not control the quality of my thoughts or even the number of them, there were just too many. On top of that, many of the thoughts I had told me that I wasn’t doing things right in various aspects of my life–including meditation. Some of my thoughts initially seemed to be growth-promoting, but upon closer observation elicited a feeling of not being good enough just as I was in that very moment. From this self-thought examination practice, I learned a lot about how I was or was not nurturing my own vibration.

What I did not anticipate happening during these meditation experimentations was the strengthening of a muscle that I did not know I even had. I began to notice a space between my thoughts and the observing aspect of myself. As this space grew I began to disidentify with my thoughts– their ability to elicit an immediate reaction from me weakened. For example, I could see the quality of a thought approaching that was going to tell me I needed to do something because it was urgent. However, because the gap had widened so much between my awareness and the thought, I saw I had a lot of inner space to choose how I wanted to respond. I could choose not to have that thought all the way. With this new development, I would no longer immediately feel my body react or my vibration shift in reaction to the thought. The thought was not me, and there was a lot of space inside of me to “see” that.

In the world of energy, this is probably akin to learning your ABCs, but boy was it a powerful milestone. I learned through experimentation that thoughts are like food we feed our energy body, and depending on what thoughts we feed it, our vibration rises or lowers. In other words: thoughts have the power to both influence how good we feel and, when accumulated, can create momentum in our space which directly can affect our perception of reality.

The Energy on Words

*What words appear often in your thoughts? How would they look tattooed on your body?*

Through deeper and consistent examination of my own thoughts both during and outside of meditation, I came to view my own thoughts as tools that I could use to affect my own vibration at any moment throughout any given day. I began to recognize myself getting sucked into that conceptual game of tag between past, present and future selves. I saw more and more the illusion of self in many forms and realized that going into my body and connecting with it in any given moment could bring me back to the present moment. I play with different questions that help me bring my awareness back to my body and my vibration.

“Is something missing from this moment?” (RESISTANCE to this moment.)

“Is something wrong with myself or someone? (Passing JUDGMENT)

“When is the only time that feeling good happens?” (Right now.)

I love to watch my body release tension too, as these personally customized questions help me to settle further into the present moment. The present moment is the only place I experience myself existing. It’s the only place I actually vibrate and am part of the bigger vibrational universe. This is where I can read energy, and where I have free will. The more deeply I choose to accept everything about this present moment, the more resistance (a very physically heavy and draining energy!) I clear from my space. And the less resistance there is, naturally the more flow we experience.

In addition to feeding ourselves thoughts in the form of questions, Sometimes it’s the energy on words themselves that when we hold it in our space for a little too long, can begin to lower our vibration and throw us into a state of subtle resistance to the present moment. For example this is how I experience the shift in my energy field when I try to encourage myself by saying: “I am becoming successful.” I get thrown into the future when I AM successful and thus, my present moment becomes somehow lacking–I am incomplete, and my future self has all the glory. Feeding myself this thought does not actually raise my vibration and allow me to flow in present time.

*Reframing our thoughts about ourselves and others is a powerful healing tool.*

In this way, as we discover our own blind spots and learn to raise and maintain higher vibrational states, our sensitivity to how others are affected by our words shifts too. The more unique we discover ourselves to really be, the more space we naturally feel inclined to create to allow others to be as they are and at whatever point of their own journey they are on. When we send words in someone’s direction, the vibration of the communication is first held in our own space. Anyone who intends to lower someone else’s vibration actually holds that lower vibration in their own space first. Thus, one of my most favorite side effects of this shift in ability to read energy is experiencing taking things people say to our faces (or not!) less personally.

As one of my teachers in this field puts it so well:

What you think of me is none of my business.

Ignorance as a Uniting Principle

The more emotionally honest I become with myself, the more ignorance I come to notice in my own space and then recognize as naturally occurring in other people’s space. We don’t need to feel shame when we catch a displeasing energy in our space, we can face it, recognize its vibration and not confuse it with who we truly are. Just as our thoughts are not who we are, the energies super active in other people’s spaces need not define them as a human being. At my lowest vibrating point in my life I would not want to be labeled and categorized based on my vibration, so why do that to someone else?

Emotional intelligence includes our ability to see the level of emotional honesty in others. We learn from self-examination that the more emotionally honest we are with ourselves, the more connected we are to our own vibration and ability to feel good in our body. When we see others behaving in ways that show their own lack of emotional honesty with themselves, we see the self-inflicted suffering that comes with it, not because we are “better” than them, but simply because we have seen it in ourselves.

*It’s fun to borrow from other cultures. We can see beauty or an aesthetic within their culture where others from that culture might take it for granted.*

How we all Create

This brings me to one of my most recent and liberating epiphanies: how we all create. Many people say they are not creative and usually end up mentioning they can only draw stick figures. Somehow, a lot of people carry around the picture that creating means making something in the physical. However, this is just not true. There is one thing that we all create all the time, and that is permission.

In part 1 of this series, we touched on how increasing our own permission to feel good naturally leads to deeper levels of emotional intelligence and the ability to read energy. Another powerful kind of permission we can create is the permission for ourselves and others to make mistakes and have accidents. Accidents and mistakes are natural occurrences in life and need not be held onto energetically after the fact. The ability to let go of the accidents and mistakes caused by both ourselves and others returns our energy bodies to higher vibrational states.

Another, perhaps more familiar word for this kind of permission is: forgiveness.

Forgiveness as an Energy Body Experience

Forgiveness is one’s ability to return to a healthy vibration after something happens that causes our vibration to lower.

We can rise from the ashes of our former selves; whether from a mistake made 5 minutes ago or 5 years ago. Like the phoenix, we can repeat this cycle of rebirth throughout our lives by giving ourselves permission to let go.

I love my new understanding of forgiveness because it gives me all the power of my own energy body by making forgiveness about no one else but me. Let me elaborate. Forgiveness is entirely our own responsibility. It is a form of energetic hygiene that clears our space of lower vibrating energies. With my new understanding of forgiveness, I don’t even need to say that I need to, “forgive someone else” because all I am doing is clearing the energy in my own space which has nothing to do with anybody else. The sequence of happenings that led to the lower vibrating energies in my space could have very well involved other people, but the moment I fall into thoughts of blame and injustice is the moment that I let lower vibrations STAY in my space–defeating the whole purpose of forgiveness. Every time I have ever let myself believe that someone else MADE ME FEEL a certain way, and that I need them to do or say something in order for me to raise my vibration back up, I give my power away. In the world of energy and vibration, blame is just another word for avoiding responsibility.

Test your own ability to forgive:

-Maybe someone hit you with their car and they apologized over and over.

-Maybe they hit you with their car and apologized but didn’t really mean it.

-Maybe they hit you with their car and blamed the accident on you.

It is easiest to remove energy from our space and return to a higher vibration when others provide a sincere apology. It is much more challenging when others try to blame us for their own mistakes; but it is not impossible. One more test:

-You slept through your alarm and missed your flight.

-You promised your friend you’d pick up their child from daycare, but didn’t set a reminder and forgot.

-You procrastinated doing something for too long and it led to irreparable damage and the loss of a lot of money.

How quickly can you bounce back from honest mistakes? How about from not so honest mistakes? What causes you to hold on to lower vibrating energy in your space after a mistake has been made? These are questions we can ask ourselves to understand our current limitations when it comes to practicing forgiveness.

It is a practice, but it is very possible to stop vicious cycles of self-criticism or blame when we learn to see energies in our space as being our sole responsibility to handle and under no one else’s control. This not only helps us learn how to self soothe (raise our vibration back up by ourselves), but helps us learn to notice what energies often trigger us and linger in our space. And THIS is exactly what emotional intelligence is.

*We’ve all stuck our head in the sand for one reason or another. Self soothing is about learning to raise our vibration back up by ourselves.* *This is a power we all have* *over our own energy system.*

Cultivating Forgiveness with our Thoughts

Creating permission for ourselves to observe our thoughts as food for our vibration and choosing to feel good over and over again is an extremely powerful act of creating. Here is the progression I see:

-In practicing observing one’s thoughts we naturally disidentify with them as we learn to suspend judgments.

-In practicing observing how certain habitual thoughts elicit various shifts in our vibration, we learn what energies those thoughts carry and we can begin to see some of our blind spots.

-As we see more and more of our own blind spots, our understanding of our own true power increases as well as our ability to have compassion for others who have yet to take more of their own power back. We learn to see ourselves in others without judgment; just heightened awareness and discernment.

-This increased fluency in reading the energy in our own space naturally affects our ability to tune into energy around us and beyond. The way we perceive reality greatly shifts and we experience longer sustained periods of higher vibrations in our space–we begin to really be able to distinguish what is our pure essence energy!

*“Heavy” thoughts will weigh down the body. When we are used to heavy thoughts, it may be a great challenge to reset our thought “diet” to include more lighter vibrating ones.*

One final food for thought.. (Or thought to feed your vibration =P)

Postulate just for this moment, that happiness and access to your highest vibration is not found outside of yourself, but is already a reality inside of you.. That access is just blocked by a lot of energy in your space that isn’t your essence energy and so lowers your vibration.. That it is possible to call your energy back from the past and the future, back to this present moment.. And that it is possible to learn to tell the difference between your own energy and energy that isn’t you.. So you can let go of all that is not you. What could it possibly feel like to grow energetic boundaries that allow you to keep yourself separated from energy that isn’t you that tries to enter your space? What could it possibly feel like to experience your own energy field and body with only your energy in it.. To be you minus all the blind spots, limiting beliefs, and illusions you’ve inherited from the world, your conditioning and life experiences?

What could it possibly feel like to be just you?

Permission to Feel Good

EQ and Energy Series: Part 1 Permission to Feel Good

In honor of the many lessons I have learned and continue to learn from the birds here in Hawaii, I am featuring their awe-inspiring behaviors as captured by my husband and gifted photographer, Norman, in this post.

This past year as Nature guided us inward by limiting our ability to go outward, Norman and I discovered our own way to still find wonder and beauty in our corner of the world through birding. Watching birds just be themselves oddly gave me a lot of permission to do the same in my own life. I noticed that every time I watch birds, I simply start to feel good.

Emotion is described as energy in motion. In order to have emotions and understand them, this requires us to have an energy system through which the energy flows. More and more we are hearing about energy these days and perhaps still feeling somewhat separate from it (because we don’t see it with our physical eyes). Yet, more and more the understanding of ourselves through the lense of energy and having an energy body is resonating with many people.

I see that this is happening because the average person is becoming more aware of their own emotions and, therefore, on a collective scale we are becoming more emotionally intelligent. We do this by not repressing our emotions as much or making excuses for why we should not listen to or allow them. We hear the words “self-care” more and more, and especially since the outbreak of the pandemic, we have been bombarded with questions like, “What is healthy and safe for me?” “Am I allowing others to make their own safety choices?” Our understanding of both compassion and free will have been tested. Regardless of any conclusions each of us have come to, over this past year we have all been studying emotional intelligence.

*Red cardinal. When it rains, it takes the opportunity to bathe itself*

Feeling Good

I see the foundation of emotional intelligence as beginning on the individual level: being able to recognize emotions when they arise inside of us, having realistic expectations of the behavior of emotions (including the ability to accept their presence), and being able to discern for ourselves what feels good in our body and what does not.

When I look at Nature I always feel a little bit of envy at how everything just flows. I’ve never seen a bird sit around being depressed, bathing in self-loathe, or seeming to be on some endless quest to figure something out. I am the most moved when I see a bird just sit and rest on a branch–not singing or looking for something to eat– but resting. Wow. Birds don’t have the same minds as humans, but they listen to their inner rhythm and they even know that feeling good matters. Resting is an act of self-care that allows the body to rejuvenate and helps the mind calm as well which creates a wonderful balance that naturally invites good feelings back into the body.

Up until the pandemic hit, much of the world was fixated on things like progress, productivity, and efficiency. I’ve heard voices out there that say, “I’m going to juice every drop out of life and live it up to the max, yolo! I’ll rest when I die.” The enthusiasm is REAL, but the idea that rest and self-care is not part of the equation is where the idea of living a great life and actually feeling good during our everyday experience of life becomes incongruent.

Also, our idea of resting does not always yield its intended results. Maybe we sit down, pour ourselves a cup of coffee, check our phones and browse the internet. Only half of us (the body) is actually somewhat resting. What is behind this inability to settle the mind? I see that it is often some seductive idea we carry that tells us that doing something is better than doing nothing. We are in many ways addicted to the idea that we need to be productive. In such a society, being productive becomes a primary way for us to feel self-worth. Therefore, no good feelings will come (that are worth our time) by stilling the mind.

*Mina bird. This bird is very territorial and has a hard time relaxing when other birds are around*

This is where experimentation yields us our own answers. Is it just me or do others out there find it difficult to feel gratitude without stilling the mind? I have never observed myself fill up with gratitude and maintain that high vibration WHILE multitasking. A part of me feels it is possible, but when I am honest and observant of my own capabilities I see that I’m not able to do so at present. I can feel a gratitude ‘ping’ that comes and goes like a text message, but is that all I am capable of? Actually, to fill my energetic body with gratitude and just sit in it is still not an easy state for me to achieve despite having kept a regular meditation practice for several years now. This is because I’m still detoxing my belief system of these addictive patterns of multitasking and of continuing to associate being productive with the highest form of feeling good.

Trust me, I enjoy feeling productive, but gratitude feels WAY better both in the body and mind. Enjoying productiveness yields a positive state of mind while the body is in movement or the mind is creatively engaged in something. However, clinging to the feeling of being productive does not go with Nature’s flow, because we ignore our own need for rest and create more permission to work hard often at the expense of our health.

When we are addicted to the energy of being productive, duality sets in and naturally the idea of resting becomes synonymous with being lazy. We create rules for ourselves: “No indulging in rest until you achieve xyz.” “Complete this checklist and then you are allowed to feel good.” Life becomes a waiting game to allow ourselves to feel good and this pushes us further away from the present moment which is the only time we ever actually feel good. These rules make up our own personal equation for allowing ourselves some amount of self worth, but the moment something in life interferes with our ability to be productive (like a pandemic), those feelings of self worth can dwindle away and feeling good can feel far from possible.

*Rose-Ringed Parakeet*. *Eating something tasty is a quick way to feel good*

There is the conceptual idea of feeling good, and then there is the actual physical and emotional experience of feeling good. When you dive deeper into the study of energy, you eventually are forced to become more emotionally honest with yourself and this means monitoring yourself throughout the day, not just summarizing your idea of how good you think you feel over coffee with a friend on the weekend. This daily self monitoring is a practice that grows one’s inner awareness and its byproduct is more emotional intelligence–more awareness of energy.

Growing Inner Awareness of Feeling Good

Reflecting on just one or two of these kinds of questions daily can deepen our awareness of our own emotions and help us discover our own blind spots.

-What percentage of your day do you feel good in your body?

-What is your idea of feeling good? Is it simply the absence of pain or discomfort?

-How much permission do you have to feel good? Is it something you have to earn?

-How much of the energy that keeps you from feeling good in your body is self-generated?

-Do your thoughts determine your ability to feel good? If so, do you feel like you are a slave to your thoughts? Do you have tools to help you separate from your thoughts?

-Do you believe you have much control over your ability to feel good?

-When you catch yourself feeling good, how long does it usually last? How could it last longer next time?

-Some forms of feeling good come in a big intense rush, do you expect feeling good to always feel THAT good? What expectations do you have about your body’s ability to feel good?

*Rooster. The rooster’s crow is a signal to awaken*

Even as I compose this blog post, I am practicing my awareness of and ability to feel good. As much as I feel in flow and deeply moved by what comes through me and out on paper, I am not WHAT I write. I am not the final written product that I will share. I do not have to buy into those equations of self worth that create imbalance and the inability to find congruent stillness between mind and body. I can practice a higher level of self-care–a truer restful state that isn’t grasping outwardly as if permission to feel good exists only outside myself.

*House Sparrow. We cannot always rely on external stimuli to always be uplifting*

Perhaps it isn’t what we see that matters, but with what mind and heart we see.

The sunset we see the evening we celebrate an anniversary, and the sunset we see the day after a loved one has passed.

Perhaps it isn’t where we go that matters, but with what mind and heart we go.

We go somewhere new to get away from our problems, or we go somewhere new because we feel an inner calling to go there.

Perhaps it isn’t what we create that matters, but with what mind and heart we create.

We might create a product because we believe it will be helpful to others, or we might create a product to prove to others that we have talent.

Perhaps it isn’t what we say that matters, but with what mind and heart we speak.

Telling someone we are happy for them and truly feeling happy for them, or telling someone we are happy for them when inside we want them to fail.

*Orange-Fronted Yellow Finch.* *How aware are you of the energy behind what you do? Can you observe the energy behind what others are doing?*

In the dimension of energy, there is the healthy vibration of a truth and the warped vibration of a lie. As humans, we depend a lot on our ability to communicate with words and, therefore, give a lot of our power away to words that come out sounding “good.” However, trusting in words alone is the reason why we experience being lied to. If we could all read the energy behind words, we would always know the quality of the vibration being directed our way. We would never look outside of ourselves for the truth, because we would see it for ourselves. This is the power of energy–emotional intelligence.

Increasing our permission to feel good is a great first step to deepening our emotional intelligence. It takes inner work and practice, but as we further understand our own mind and heart connection, we learn how to manage our emotions rather than ‘become’ them. I am excited to share more insight into this wonderful journey that I’ve embarked on, including how I stumbled into this practice of not only learning about energy in motion, but learning to see it with my inner sight.