Energy

Ebbing and flowing... unless it's stuck.

My kids and I are learning about energy in science this year, and I am loving it. I love knowing how things work, and discovering intricacies and connections. It is the most fun. 

Recently we’ve been talking about the first law of energy – that energy doesn’t get created or destroyed, only transferred and transformed. It’s like water: moving, changing, ebbing and flowing, but never disappearing… 

Okay parents, I hear you, reading this like “excuse me, but my energy has absolutely disappeared. Into my children.”
Yes. Yes it has. I mean, it didn’t disappear completely, it just disappeared from you. I know, cold comfort. Sorry. I need several naps, too. 

But now I’m seeing examples of this transference of energy all over the place, and especially in how feelings operate in our bodies. My working definition of energy is the power God gives to all things by which they live, and move, and have their being. I’d say feelings are a form of energy. 

Have you noticed that when feeling energy shows up in your body, it has to be transferred to something else? Think of when you get excellent news and you’re so happy you just need to dance or shout or run or cry or move your body somehow to let it out. Maybe you jump up and down… or maybe you just jump up and down on the inside? The transfer of your happy energy into those activities helps you fully feel that feeling as you let it go. It moves you as it moves through you.

The same is true for our more difficult feelings, like anger, frustration, and grief. If we don’t let that feeling energy out, it will force its way out… like Alien. Maybe not immediately, maybe it’ll stay stuck for a while, but it’ll happen eventually. Bottlers beware of potential explosions. (Yep, yep, I’m being ‘ware.) Giving ourselves appropriate ways to express those hard feelings is so essential to our self-care toolbox.

Something else that can happens if we've made it a habit to not feel our feelings for whatever reason is that we become numb to them. Maybe we haven't had a safe environment in which to express feelings throughout our lives, so we don't experience the difficult emotions very often... but we also seldom feel excited, elated, or truly happy. Sometimes our feeling energy oozes slowly through a cramped, brittle channel. This reality makes the idea of actually feeling any feelings, especially the difficult ones, really scary. We might fear that they're dangerous and will swallow us whole, or that once they start they'll never stop. In the case of such a backlog of feeling, strange things can happen in our physical bodies: chronic pain, sporadic inflammation, tension, all kinds of things... because that energy has to go somewhere. Our feelings aren't an entity separate from our physical bodies, it's allllllll connected. Something we can do for ourselves if we want to start working on feeling is to give ourselves a time limit (can I be present with this feeling for 30 seconds? 3 minutes? 30 minutes?), and/or find a safe person to support us in it. 

This process of feeling and expressing is one of the foundational cycles of energy in our lives – can we free up its flow little bit by little bit? Can we give ourselves and others an environment of safety in which to feel?

A powerful, yet gentle, way to move stuck emotional energy out of our bodies is using the Emotional Freedom Technique, which involves tapping on different acupressure points on the body. This removes emotional energy blockages to allow emotions to flow the way they need to. If you want to try tapping, there are lots of videos on YouTube you can tap along with. If you want support in working through specific topics, ranging from anxiety to trauma to physical pain to grief, you can book EFT appointments with me by hitting the button below. Sessions are over zoom, and you would tap for yourself along with me.