Discovering Energy

I spent a long time withdrawn from the World in a self-imposed prison of the mind due to my PTSD. I convinced myself that I was forsaken and that bad things happened because of me. I constantly picked up on the bad vibrations in the World and the negative energy people carried with them without even knowing. I had known for a very long time that I felt other peoples pain, sorrow, anger, fear and grief as well as their joy, happiness, elation and love. Because of my own negative mindset induced by various trauma and muliple episodes of re-victimization I failed to see the good right before my eyes and was caught in a cycle of blame, guilt, and self-pity.

I did not know about energy and how it flows all around us. This was not in my traditional upbringing or covered in any of my tradtional education, including my Bachelor of Science in Nursing. I always knew there was an outside force I did not comprehend and it affected me but without being able to put a name to it I could not understand it and I am the type of person that totally needs to know what I am dealing with so I can combat it or work with it.

I had a deep connection with nature when I was young and I loved it. I felt like Snow White and I could communicate with the forest and all of the animals. I saw things in the water that were not fish and because of my conditioning I was scared. No one understood what I was feeling or even believed me. When I was in Grade 3 I began to write stories. Every week I wrote a chapter about my friend Spooky the Ghost and our adventures. There was someone in my family home that I could feel but could not see. I knew he walked with me and did things with me and no one else could see him but I had no other words that Spooky the Ghost. Looking back now I find it ironic I called my friend Spooky but was not one bit afraid of him. There were certain places in my home that I could feel Spooky more than others. The basement was one of them. I should add that my Grandfather Dutch passed away in the driveway of my family home on 16 December 1970. I was born on 23 October 1972. My grandmother and parents would call me silly and shut me down quickly if i started to speak of him. I stopped feeling him but knew he was there, he didn`t make a real reappearance until I was 19 and got wrongfully punished in the Canadian Armed Forces. I knew he was in my room with me on my confinement to barracks but I could not put words to it until I was much older. I believe that is when I wrote my first letter to him, and when I began to put my thoughts to paper and process my feelings through a form of poetry. I was not educated in the art of poetry, only being taught things like Haiku in elementary school, and I do not recall having to write much of it in high school. I could put thoughts to paper like nothing else. My passion for writing that began in Grade 3 was reignited but sometimes I lost my passion because of my depression and anxiety and lack of belief in myself.

I wrote on and off over the years trying to process what was going on around me. I started a book that reached 660 pages before I quit writing in 2013 complete with documentation and pictures so it would be believed. For some reason I felt that I had to prove my life. When I moved out to Curve Lake First Nation Reserve #35 my connection with nature was re-established and I began to awaken again. My feelings began to flow on paper again. Good and bad and it all started to come out. Repressed pain and fear and love and all of the things I had bottled up for so long. Because I was living on a Reserve among Indigenous People I felt that I should take a course at school in Indigenous Studies and it was very eye opening for me. I actually went back to University after a 10 year abscence and sat in a class with a large group of individuals. A whole new perspective and take on life, through the eyes of a different Culture. I started to have a paradigm shift and see the World with different eyes. In my 2nd year I decided to take An Introduction to Indigenous Environmental Sciences and was introduced to Professor Dan Longboat, Director of the Indigenous Environmental Sciences program at Trent University and my life changed forever.

https://www.trentu.ca/indigenous/faculty-research/full-time/dan-longboat

I had never had a teacher thank me for attending class and make me feel what he was teaching. At the beginning of the course Professor Longboat made a point of talking about energy and how we all have it. He spoke of rhythm of energy in nature and how it is always constant and flows evenly in a gentle balance of up and down curves when it is actually measured as generally people cannot see this. Some have been known to feel it but if you were not taught of this concept it can be rather frightening. He spoke of how monks in meditation produce this same energy rhythm but the majority of the populations energy was extremely chaotic and illustrated it with a very jagged up and down line with no ebb and flow. There were no curvy flows, no rhyme or reason. This concerned me greatly as Professor Longboat said this was the reason behind much sickness and stress and heart disease. However suddenly my mind blew wind open because i could put a name to what i felt from people. Energy. We all had it, everything that was living possessed it and it could be felt on personal objects. I now knew why I picked up on things that others did not because I could feel the energy that surrounded everything and I have to be honest it was scary. It was frightening yet exhilirating to finally after all of these years have a validation that it was real. I was not crazy, I now had answers to the questions I had had for so long.

When I began to be able to put to words what I could feel all around me because I finally understood it my writing changed as well and I could tune into emotions in others. It was the start of my awakening. I knew I was an Empath and I could claim it but I needed to learn how to harness it so I was not a conduit for others emotions. I needed to find a balance between when to subject myself to this and when not to because i was starting to also realize that isolating was wrong. I was not really living and I had to create a new mindset. I needed to create boundaries, wear my invisible shield and prepare for battle when leaving my home and face the World head on. I finally began to be me. I finally started to use to tools in my toolbox that had been there for so long and grow. I also realized that if i could feel the energy I could project it and if your happy, even if your faking it a little everyone else is happy and then all of a sudden you really are happy. Happiness is contagious and no one really likes a person who is down all of the time. An amazing thing started to happen to me thought because the more positive I was about things, when I started to see that all my mistakes were not really mistakes but lessons I needed to learn and I tried to find the light in situations that should be very dark my whole mind, body and spirit shifted. The black hole inside of me that fed off of the negative emotions and mindset of others started to question the realness of the situation. If i could feed off of negative emotions and stay negative because the energy was bad I would stay that way but when I shifted into positive I started to see the good in even horrible situations and I became grateful for every experience I have had no matter how it played out. I was now able to integrate what was positive energy and what was negative and as I am a slow processor it took me a while. I met many along the way that are teaching me new tools to use when I am getting into my negative mindset because I truly want to believe my dreams are possible, just like anybody else. My favourite tool lately came from a friend Chris Power from Power Transition Services

https://www.powertransitions.ca

and https://www.facebook.com/powertransitions/

It was a meme that said to add the phrase -and it is okay- after everything so if I have a list of things to do and I only get one done, it is okay. This led me to start working on the fact that being so immersed in my negativity and trauma I had failed to see my successes and had not acknowledged them as I had become so hard on myself and used to what I thought was failure.

My discovery of energy and the way it changes everything as it is all around us was one of the most amazing realizations I have ever had. So if you do not like the negative vibes around you then change them up. Raise the vibrations in the room, put on a happy song, do a little dance, colour a picture, be happy. It ultimately is up to you, your choice. Stay stuck in the negative energy or evolve and raise your vibrations and live a little….