A person’s energy is a signature, as unique as a fingerprint, as recognizable as a face.
I remember one day many years ago, I was sitting in the cube at a job I hated, tethered to a phone, taking endless calls from pissed-off people. My personal life was in crisis, though I cannot recall why (there were so many) and I felt as though I was crumpled at the bottom of a hole so deep and so dark that light couldn’t even get to me.
And then, without any fanfare, I felt my friend Danielle standing beside me, telling me everything was gonna be alright.
My first reaction was gratitude for her compassion, but following very closely there was another feeling: “How the hell did you do that, and can you teach me?”
And she did. I have used that trick many times over the years. It even saved the life of a good friend who was about to wash a handful of pills down with the better part of a fifth of whiskey. Instead, he called 911 and spent a useful few days getting some good help, and now has an amazing life filled with love and music.
The fact that the energy I felt that day in Cubeland was so clearly my friend, and not some unidentifiable angel or spirit, made the moment much more powerful. My friend Danielle came to me, stood beside me, and gave me the strength to keep going. There was no mistaking it. I could feel her vibe so clearly.
Before caller ID and unique ringtones, we often knew who was calling before we picked up, simply because we knew the vibe of a good friend, a lover, a sibling, our kids, our parents. We could feel them projecting their essence to us into our space, sometimes before the phone even began to ring.
I have a single ring tone for all my calls, and frequently leave my phone face-down in order to practice feeling who is calling before I pick up. I’m usually right.
That’s something I encourage you to try for a while. We can all work on beefing up our intuition, and this is an easy way to do that. Of course, if there are people that you must immediately respond to–kid, aging or ill parent–by all means leave their tone unique. But I’ll betcha within a couple weeks you’ll know they’re calling before the phone does.
But even cooler is the notion that we can boost our energy field to a point where we can project our vibe anywhere in order to offer comfort or lend support to a friend, so let’s talk about how to build up our own energy.
Energy Exercises
1. Program yourself to notice a specific thing every day, and then keep track. Start with something easy, like yellow cars. My partner’s kid used to be obsessed with the Banana Game, where you compete with other people in your car to call out “banana” when you see a yellow car. At first I sucked at it, but eventually yellow cars became so big in my awareness that I was seeing multitudes of the damned things everywhere I went. As you get better at noticing things, pick harder stuff. A specific type of bird. A particular color of butterfly. This kind of flower. That kind of tree. Eventually you’ll be able to set your intention to pay attention to the things that matter most to you, or whatever you choose on any given day, or in any given hour. We can’t notice everything, we’d easily slip into overwhelm, so pick what you are going to bring into your awareness sparingly, and carefully.
2. Choose the music you listen to carefully. Catchy songs get stuck in our heads, but sometimes those songs have really negative messages. Co-dependence, self-destruction, disrespect, violence . . . Listen carefully before you simply allow these ear-worms a place to nest. People put all kinds of intentions into their music. Some artists have a high vibe, and want their music to nourish and heal those who listen, but some are careless, greedy, or have a different purpose and set an intention for their music to stir up anger and chaos. I’m not sayin’ don’t listen to the radio; I’m just saying be aware of what they might be broadcasting that you can’t hear.
3. Pick things to become friends with in your home. “Hello, fridge. Good morning, toothbrush.” Talk to objects you use frequently like friends, and express gratitude to them. Evaluate the things you want to bring into your home on whether they will be good company for the long haul. “Would I want to have dinner with this dress?” “Will this teapot quench my thirst for companionship?” “Is this a bookshelf I can make friends with for life?” “Do I want to walk on this rug, or stretch out and engage with it?” Do you see how that changes the relationship to the things in our lives? You cannot possibly be friends with every single item you bring into your home, unless you bring in very few things, and choose those things carefully with an eye for an enduring relationship. If we admit we are Pantheist, we have to admit that every single thing is imbued with energy from Source, even cheap plastic crap and the stuff we buy and never use. Maybe try to make friends with that stair-stepper and see if you can imagine greeting it every morning and then just walking on by. Hmmm.
4. Gratitude Gratitude Gratitude. Make a list of all the things you are grateful for every single day for a week. Even trivial things. Be grateful for good parking spots, when someone smiles at you, finding change on the street, getting free stuff, having a good waitress, anything and everything. Watch even better stuff start to happen as the days go on. The way to bring on the good is to be grateful for it, to be aware of it. Increasing your awareness of the good things in your orbit, the stuff you ordinarily don’t pay any attention to at all, is the surest, fastest way of attracting the major good stuff, the best stuff, whatever that is. Maybe being grateful for the small things will shift your perspective on what “good stuff” is.
Once these exercises are easy and feel natural, it’s time to work on projecting that luscious vibe of yours out into the world at will.
Pick a friend and send your consciousness to them in the morning when they are getting ready for a particularly stressful day at work. Let them know you’re going to be thinking of them all day, and cheering them on. Give them a hug, or a kiss on the cheek. Whatever you feel is right. If you don’t hear from them later in the day, keep trying. One day, soon with regular practice, you will get a call from someone saying, “I swear you were just standing right next to me,” or, “I was thinking about you this morning.”