“Y’know? This stuff feels…REAL!”
This was an interesting note from a student that brings up a number of things to consider:
Kayla’s letter:
Hi, Judi,
Last’s night’s class was so powerful for me that I don’t know where to start. I guess I didn’t realize that this kind of stuff would be so physical, you know? As we started running our energy during class and you guided us to remember—to “light up”—old stuck pictures with our mothers, I started to feel physically sick, like hot and cold all over, and sick to my stomach like I was going to hurl. It got so intense that for a couple of minutes I thought I was going to have to leave the room, but then you guided us to the place of letting go of the old stuff, releasing it, and the sick feelings calmed down a lot. I felt light and a lot more comfortable.
Driving home I realized that what I’d been feeling was the same kind of shame and humiliation I used to feel when my mother would embarrass me in front of my friends. I think I understand now what you meant by saying that energy is “stored” in the body. And today at work I kept feeling waves of it, all day. I kept remembering times that she’d done crap like that in public, and how much I hated it and how angry and ashamed I’d been. I had to go to the lady’s room a couple of times at work today and meditate for a little while until it passed. My question is, is this normal? Is it supposed to be this physical? It’s kind of freaking me out.
Thanks,
Kayla
—
My reply:
Oh, man—fantastic question, and wonderful, wonderful awarenesses!
When I first found this work I was flabbergasted by how visceral it was; how profoundly physical it felt—but I was coming at it from the opposite end of the spectrum. Not having the vaguest clue as to how to go about setting energetic boundaries as I worked with body-centered psychotherapy clients, I’d managed to blow off my seventh chakra during a client session. That’s a long story all on its own about the physical impact of energy on a sensitive body, but the physical result of the encounter felt like going from feeling fairly normal to instantly having a blinding, migraine headache—one that was somewhere around 23 in intensity on a scale from 1 to 10. I literally couldn’t see anything except blurry, crackling prisms or move without vomiting, and I went into mild seizures at a couple of points as a friend was helping me down to his car to get me home. It was excruciating. I’d never felt pain so intense in my life.
Luckily, he knew someone who was doing the kind of energy work I now teach, and he hauled me over to his friend’s office. That guy took one look at me, laughed, and asked, “How the hell did you blow off your seventh chakra?” Without waiting for an answer, he held his hand over the top of my head and noted, “I think we’re going to have to install a new one.”
And before I could even inhale to try to speak, the pain stopped. Instantly and completely. It was like turning off a switch. It just—stopped.
Gasping a little at the abrupt sensation of relief that was flooding through me, I asked, “What did you do?!?” and immediately added, “I have to learn how to do that!” And so began my years of study in this particular discipline.
What it all comes down to is that energy is real, and people who are conscious and/or wearing sensitive bodies are able to sense the fluctuations of energy work very easily. You have a very sensitive body and you’re very enthusiastic about creating change in your space; it doesn’t surprise me that you can feel the shifting tides so powerfully.
I’ve had first-time clients sit down to receive a healing and be completely taken aback by the sensations they can perceive. As I began to run earth energy through his leg channels, one young guy said, “Oh, my God—I can feel that in my legs! It feels pinchy and bubbly, like carbonation!” I just said, “Wow—you’ve got a sensitive body.” But for the rest of the healing, he just kept saying, “Oh, my God—Wow—oh, my God—” over and over. When the healing was done he sputtered out a “Thank you,” and literally ran from the room. He had not expected it to feel so real.
Science has known for a long time that the physical body is energy. Aside from the obvious fact that your body is made up of sunlight and earth energy (slow down and think about that one for a minute; even if you eat meat, the animals you eat built their bodies from plants—incredible little green things that take sunlight and store it as cellulose and sugars. You know what body fat is? Solid sunlight that jiggles when you walk.), your muscles fire on electrical impulses, as do your nerves. ECGs and EEGs have been measuring this kind of output for decades. Little bioelectric impulses stimulated by thought and the firing of energy along neural pathways causes muscle contraction. Chronically tense muscles? You’re firing off too many ‘contraction’ signals, and not allowing the contraction to release. You’re hanging on to an energy signal.
But luckily, you can shift this stuff. Biofeedback has proven that you can learn to control this flow of energy with the power of your mind, using visualization techniques.
Emotions are energy, too. Emotions can move a person to joyful dance or drag them into the deepest despair. Happy emotions can make your heart race, your pupils dilate, your breath quicken, and your cheeks flush with pleasurable warmth. Unhappy emotions can constrict your muscles and make you feel like you’ve got a chunk of cold, suet pudding congealing in your gut. Emotions can cause overt physical reactions, like breaking out in hives or experiencing a panic attack. And if you don’t let go of those emotions, if you were never taught how to ground or release old emotional energy but were instead taught that you have to hang on to every stimulus you’ve ever been handed until you’re given permission to let it go—well, first you feel that chronic tension in your body. Then it shifts into discomfort or outright pain. And eventually it may become illness.
And that’s just you dealing with your own emotions. When you take on the energy of someone else’s emotions, it can be even more intense, because you don’t really have the authority to resolve someone else’s emotional issues. You can’t fix them, or change them, and they just hang around in your body like little anchors of discomfort until you figure out how to release them.
Did you ever have someone con you into carrying a package or a piece of bulky luggage for them, while they sauntered along with their hands free? It’s kinda like that. You’re carrying their luggage. The only thing you can do to release the burden is put it down.
What you uncovered in class looked to be a big pocket of old emotional pain that you’d locked into your body, particularly around the third chakra. This included issues with the stomach and your ability to receive nourishment—triggered in this case by your mother’s inability to provide the emotional nurturing you needed as a child—and also your expression of will and places where you’d locked down your energy in order to contain feelings of shame and anger for the way she treated you when you were a kid; an age when it might have been unwise to express your angry feelings openly to a parent.
The funny thing about emotions is that they tend to ‘stick’ at whatever age you buried them. So sometimes when you unearth an old chunk of pain, it roars up in your space with the raw immaturity of a two-year-old. That’s because those emotions were forced down when you were two—long before you had the maturity and social skills to filter them into a more rational expression of anger or frustration. Kids are little savages. Don’t be surprised if you sometimes find some intense little powder kegs hidden in the basement of your psyche.
The good news is that, unlike ‘talk’ therapy, with energy work you don’t have to re-live this stuff. You can simply let it be drawn out of your space into a rose, or a vacuum cleaner, or some other symbol of clearing, and just blow it up. Use your imagination as the interface between yourself as body and yourself as spirit. That’s what the imagination is for.
And in your case, mixed in with a lot of that old junk was a good chunk of your mother’s energy—and her mother’s energy—their ‘old luggage’—places where the unfortunate legacy of toxic, hypercritical parenting had been handed down generationally from her mother to her, and down to you.
One of the cool things to note is that since you’ve become conscious of the dynamic and are working to clear it, there’s a good chance that you won’t pass this kind of negative learned-parenting down to your own kids. Good job on becoming conscious of the crap in your psyche, there, kiddo!
So…is it “normal” to feel an intense level of physical sensation when working with your energy and clearing your space? Is it “supposed” to be this physical? That depends entirely on the individual and how much energy they need to release—but it certainly can be.
It’s one of the dynamics that I find somewhat difficult to maneuver through, as I’m working with students. While I readily admit that I’m not a doctor and while I always try to err on the side of caution when a student suddenly develops an acute pain, counseling them to seek medical care if they feel that they’re in distress, the truth is that, while doing energy work, I’ve experienced severe physical symptoms that doctors have found utterly inexplicable; symptoms for which they could offer no comprehensive treatment. Over the years I’ve found that most of what I experience as I dredge up debris from my body and psyche can only be resolved through focused energy work, with the occasional massage thrown in just ‘cause it feels so good.
For example, when I started learning to control my kundalini, I would spike sudden fevers of 102 or 103 degrees that had nothing to do with pathogens or infection. It was simply my kundalini running too hot for too long. When I turned it down, the fever would dissipate within minutes. (I could use the same techniques to control menopausal ‘hot flashes’—unfortunately, they only stayed controlled while I was actively meditating. As soon as my attention was diverted to something else, the elevated body temps returned. But the energetics of menopause is a topic for whole ‘nother talk.)
Kundalini is tricky stuff, which is why I generally wait until my students have completed at least the Meditation I and II and Healing I and II classes before we start playing with it. And the physical sensations associated with the flow of kundalini energy in the body can be even more disturbing when it pops on spontaneously.
One of my students called me from his college dorm complaining of feeling feverish, headachy and hypersensitive; restless and unable to sleep. A quick look at his energy was enough to have me shaking my head in dismay—with his kundalini bursting out of his head he looked just like a Roman candle—but although it took a little time to accomplish, it was easy enough to talk him through a guided meditation to turn his kundalini off. It continued to pop on and off for the next few weeks as he geared up into his next growth period, but I’m happy to say that with the tools I taught him to control it he was able to manage the experience without spontaneously combusting.
Curtailing the crippling impact of migraine headaches was the most dramatic change in my own life. As an outrageously sensitive, psychic youngster, I had no boundaries between my energy and the rest of the world, and I’d absorb other people’s pain like a sponge. As a result, I used to have hellacious migraines that would last for a week or more, increasing in severity and intensity until at the end I’d go blind and pass out, sleeping for 12 or 14 hours and then waking up to start the pain-absorption cycle all over again.
Drugs didn’t touch them; anything strong enough to control the pain just knocked me out cold, so I’d learned to endure the pain and function as long as I could before I’d go blind. Then I found the kind of body-centered meditation that you’re learning now, and I’m delighted to report that I haven’t had a migraine since.
Yup. I went from weekly migraines to NO migraines within two weeks of learning to clear my energy. For me, this work was a Godsend.
And other kinds of authentic pain and discomfort can readily surface while doing energy work, too. While releasing old third- and fourth-chakra garbage I once experienced such intense pressure and such a squeezing, agonizing pain in my upper chest that I was convinced that I was having a heart attack—but a trip to the emergency room showed nothing of the sort. The ER team had been able to see that I was in distress when I arrived, but, finding no tangible evidence of a cardiac episode, they just shrugged and diagnosed me with ‘acute indigestion.’ (I didn’t think it was ‘cute’ at all since the pointless visit set me back five hundred bucks.) I’d continued to work my energy the entire time they were testing me, of course; and yeah…the pain and pressure of the energy I‘d stirred up had just resolved as I’d cleared my space.
Energy is real. One of my teachers found, quite by accident, that he was messing up his ECG because anytime he ‘blew up a rose’—the technique you learned in Med I that’s used to consciously dissipate energy—he would cause the readout to jump, spiking a little blip in the tracing. They were ready to admit him for a full cardiac evaluation when the technician noticed that each little ‘blip’ was accompanied by my teacher making a slight, finger-snapping gesture. When asked, my teacher obligingly explained what he was doing, and on a whim, the technician asked him to stop ‘blowing roses’ until the procedure was completed. The next ECG they ran was normal.
Fibromyalgia—a syndrome characterized by chronic muscle and soft tissues pain (particularly in the joints), fatigue, and an aching tenderness at specific points in the body—is a disorder that I see an awful lot in sensitive people. It seems to respond very well to the type of clearing meditation I teach; I’ve had fibromyalgia patients who have come in for a healing and a reading and by the time they walk out the door they’ve cleared enough energy that they’re virtually pain-free.
Of course, just like other issues of body maintenance, like eating or showering every day, or, more graphically, emptying one’s bowels or bladder, it’s a maintenance dynamic, not a magic bullet. Just like the toxin in the physical body that are released through elimination, folks who absorb so much energy that they’re aching and in constant pain need to put in regular time on the cushion, training themselves to consciously release old energy, for this kind of work to be effective. Unfortunately, most folks don’t want to spend an hour or two every day in meditation. They want a magic pill that they can take in the morning that will deal with their pain and let them remain unconscious to their habitual responses to the energy of the world around them.
And, by the way, that’s a perfectly legitimate way to function in the world. It’s an option. It’s just not one that I personally could live with.
Another reason that I’m always telling folks to err on the side of caution is that sometimes pain CAN be an indicator that the stuck energy had gone too far for simple release. I’m thinking of the woman in my pottery class who came in for several weeks in a row complaining of headaches. Being an out-of-control healer at the time, I offered to rub her neck for her, but as soon as I touched her neck my own arms went numb to the elbows! I was shocked—I had no idea what was happening, but I instinctively grabbed ahold of a cast-iron radiator in the corner and ‘breathed’ the energy out of my arms and into the iron. I then called a cab, put her in it, and sent her to the hospital. My reaction had scared her enough that she went without demure.
She had a brain tumor; luckily, operable. I was glad that they’d caught it in time—and gladder still that I hadn’t sucked the energy of that thing into my own body.
So does this answer your question, Kayla? Yeah—this stuff can be very physical. One of my most memorable moments during the time that I was studying with a group was the day that I got so intensely lit up clearing pictures that I was laughing, crying, and heaving my guts out, all at the same time, clinging to the bathroom wall of the Institute where I studied. The funny part was that as soon as I ran for the bathroom and gave in to the need to toss my cookies, the energy in my third chakra cleared within seconds, and I felt light and amused and bubbly as I rejoined the class—physically much, much better than when class had started. (My teacher just shook his head and laughed, muttering, “Overachiever,” as I sat down and got my space.)
And I guess if I had to give guidelines, I’d say that if you can feel pain ‘lighting up’ in your body as you access old, stuck information and pictures, you should also be able to feel it moving and clearing, even if the process is gradual. Focus on that—on the sensation of movement and clearing—not on the pain itself. Focusing on the pain will anchor the pain; focusing on the movement will help it release more gracefully.
The good news in the experience is that if you stimulate an old pain or a stuck energy so that it’s moving and at the surface; if you can feel it as potently as you did the day you locked it down; it means that you’re ready to release it. And once it’s gone, you have all of that open real estate in your energy system to fill with more of your own creativity and joy.
It’s kind of like cleaning closets. Very few people enjoy the process, but when it’s done, everything is just a little bit easier to manage.
Does that help?
All blessings,
Judi