Whatever your politics, there is a lot going on in the world right now that is making a lot of people feel uneasy. People are scared and unsure about what to do next. Where do we turn? What are we meant to be doing? How do we protect ourselves? There is a lot of uncertainty and fear right now and especially for a lot of people who are not straight white men, able-bodied and from a class and culture that patriarchy prizes.

There will be a lot of toxicity coming into the ether as this power grab (that we are witnessing on the world stage) rises further, and finally falls, and those among us who are sensitive will feel it especially. Wherever ego has dominated, those systems will soon fall. And in order for us to not fall with it, we MUST finish our personal work, to prevent us getting triggered in the chaos to come. This is our number one goal right now.

We may feel nausea and a sense of foreboding, dread or fear or detachment and numbness. Say no to these feelings, and shake them off. Lift your energy so that it is high resonance and powerful and positive. Sing, dance, laugh. We are not laughing and singing because of war, we are preventing our own energy bodies from becoming sodden with that heavy dense energy that the talk of war brings.

Staying positive means remembering that the world is ultimately changing for the better. But, we must be the people who create that new world that will be uncovered when this one falls away. To create that new world we must focus on the world that we want to see and build that world, that community and way of being, now. What does that look like? What systems do we need to have to ensure equality, community and compassion for all? We will look at these visionary pieces in a future blog, but, first, to see that new world, and to do that work, requires capacity. And capacity requires protection from dense negative energies. This blog will focus upon that.

Incapacity is something Dark Side is hoping for. It wants to divide us, strip us of our power, to play the “strongman” in order to make us lose hope and control us. Avoiding incapacity makes us effective in achieving our essential work.

We have so much to do at this time and incapacity will weaken us and destroy our work. So, let’s prioritise working against its influence. But how? Whatever Dark Side wants us to do at this time, lean into the opposite of it and double down on that. When you are feeling ‘spaced out’, incapacitated, overwhelmed, brain fog, attention-deficit, ‘zoned out’, dopamine overdose, unnaturally sleepy, falling into unnatural (for you) behaviours that you would ordinarily condemn, check and see what influences are impacting you and address them.

There are usually two ways that influences impact our energy system; through the body and the mind. Let’s take them in turn.

Bodily Influences; Personal Wounds or Foreign Energies

If the influences impacting our capacity for doing the work that we are here to do are emotional wounds from the past, know that we store these wounds in our energy bodies, and that also means in our physical bodies. Doing our personal wound work will clear these influences and free our capacity to focus on other work.

Remember, Dark Side uses your wounding against you by pressing into the unhealed emotional wounds and talking with your wounded child/children within and co-opting them or frightening them into freeze/flight/fight, etc. You must heal your wounds now to gain a new sense of immunity from suffering, but also to protect your overall system from invasive attacks from Dark Side gaining access via your weakest areas. This is essential.

If the influences causing your incapacity are foreign energies (including Dark Side), refuse to let them to co-opt you and fight past them and regain your natural higher frequencies; the goal is to stay ‘high-frequency.’ We can fight past the foreign negative influences in many ways; playing loud positive music and dancing (‘Walking on Sunshine’, by Katrina and the Waves is a favourite of mine), singing sublime music that transcends (personally I love high resonance sung versions of Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’), playing with the cat, taking the dog to the park, swimming, working out.

All of these activities, and more, help to shake off negative influence because you’re active and owning your body-space; negative influence finds it easier to penetrate the energy body of people who are passive. Shaking off the ‘stuck’ feeling in your body also means negativity has a much harder time getting into and influencing your system. Conscious movement with the intention of ‘owning your bodily space’ creates great boundaries and we all need these more now than ever, especially empaths.

Mind Influences; When We Lack Mental Discipline

Once your body-space boundaries are in place, the next step is to develop mentally-oriented boundaries, which I call ‘mental discipline’. Mental discipline is the ‘capacity to control your mind, so that it does not control you’. Mental discipline is achieved by using mindfulness techniques to ‘observe the mind’. The act of observing the mind reveals to us how ‘the mind’ operates, and splits what we previously thought of as ‘the mind’ into two separate pieces; the ‘thoughts’ and the ‘person observing the thoughts’. This is key, because once we are aware that there is an ‘observer’ in the mix witnessing the thoughts, we ask ourselves, ‘Well, am I the thoughts, or the observer of the thoughts?’

The observer is the ‘container’ holding the thoughts as they occur, and the two ‘personalities’ of observer and thoughts, at first, can be nearly opposite to each other. The observer is usually calm and quiet unless asked to intervene, and the thoughts can be rambling, racing and sometimes incoherent.

The function of the ‘mind’ itself is not at fault for this rambling incoherency. Originally, the ‘mind’ was a function of energetic human interaction that operated a lot like a radio that was tuned into the ‘radio station of collective (mostly human) consciousness’ constantly. We would ‘pick up’ in the ether the energies in our milieu and, unless we had strict boundaries around these influences and were clear about our personal beliefs and our true identity, we could get ‘swept up’ into these energies and believe them to be our values and identity too. If this phenomenon was allowed to persist over time, this ‘radio’ faculty became unable to differentiate between different levels of awareness within the collective, and even into that radio owner’s own awareness and they all typically blended together! There was no distinction between what was true and originated ‘in here’ and what originated and was belonging ‘out there’. Some were able to discern their own identity from that of the collective masses, but most could not. However, now it is more common to be more and more aware that the mind is not necessarily a reflection of what we believe and these distinctions are easier to observe.

So, who or what are our thoughts? The thoughts come from a variety of sources, but to say that our thoughts are our identity is simply incorrect. In fact, it is true to say that not only are our thoughts not our identity, but, often, they aren’t even our friend!

Once we have made a distinction between the inner observer of the thoughts and the thoughts themselves, we can then invite the observer to ‘dis-engage’ from the thoughts and allow them to be there but not to pay them any attention. Attention gives thoughts oxygen and keeps them alive. Removing attention from them starves them of this oxygen and eventually this ill-disciplined aspect of the mind/faculty shuts down; it ‘tunes out’ the morass of incoming ‘blended information’ from ‘out there’ that we experience as thoughts.

The shutting down of this faculty of our mental ‘radio equipment’, gives our true consciousness much needed relief from exhausting, relentless thought-scrambles. Helpfully, it also protects us from an invasive thought-pattern that passes itself off as our own identity that actually serves to exhaust, confuse and mislead us. This is mental discipline.

And once we achieve mental discipline? A wonderful transformation happens. Instead of being plagued by relentless thoughts that can consume our waking hours, a quiet calm descends. We can have the observer actively listen for thoughts and hear none. It’s truly a wonderful, freeing, feeling. We have ‘cleared out’ the machine that in many cases controlled us and we have now found a new liberty.

For more information on Mental Discipline, see here.

What If We are Just Sad at The State of The World?

What if the feelings that we are having are nothing to do with wounds or mental ill-discipline, but instead, they are to do with overwhelm, grief or even panic?

We aren’t immune to suffering. We see the suffering of a grieving mother and hold our own children that bit tighter. Empathy means that we see the suffering of others and are moved by that. It’s a human response. While good boundaries will help in these very difficult times, sometimes we need to stop reading the news, do self-regulating exercises, treat ourselves, or simply just unplug and self-soothe.

My read is that the duration of this difficult time will be longer than just the official four years of the Trump administration and it will reach around the world, wherever ‘power over’ and ‘might makes right’ has been dominant. The ‘old guard’ of patriarchy will rise stronger than before and ‘strongman fascism’ is moving more front and centre as this old epoch flails in its dying thrashes.

We need to ‘get safe’, meaning, to make sure that we aren’t in danger where we are living, and to make sure that we can provide for our children and loved ones. A lot of people are losing their jobs at the same time in the United States and this will have a knock-on effect for the property market and the economy generally. Many people have moved away from the United States in the last few years because of what has been going on and I can understand that. This obviously isn’t an option for many people and there is a lot of uncertainty. What do we do?

Gandalf the Grey gave wise and comforting counsel to Frodo Baggins in the Mines of Moria, when Frodo said he wished that none of this had happened, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s, The Fellowship of the Ring.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Tolkien wrote the Fellowship of the Ring, the first of his famous ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, starting in 1937 and during the years of the Second World War.

In the next blog we will address what practical options we have in order to build the world we want to see when this one falls, as it is surely doing now. Stay strong, stay safe and clear whatever will trigger you. It will help in the months and years ahead.

Blessings to all who are on the path.