“How do you keep yourself from getting drained?” Hands down, this is the #1 question I get asked when people hear what I do for a living. And I used to give really elaborate answers. Answers that would make the person asking the question about getting drained, look pretty dang drained themselves.
I just really wanted people to understand that it doesn’t work that way.
No, I don’t really “get drained”.
I don’t feel icky or bad when I’m driving away.
I don’t say to myself, “Wow, that place was EFFED UP!” and then pat myself on the back for being such an energetic superstar and handling that crap.
I don’t have to go “take care of myself” afterwards or jump in an Epsom salt bath or walk in nature or sage myself.
I mean, I can if I want to but the point is, I don’t have to.
Because, 99% of the time, when I leave a client’s home, I feel great!
I feel like myself.
I feel tingling energy coursing through my body.
I feel grateful.
I feel curious and wondrous.
But people, it seems, want me to feel DRAINED. And, if I am and if I’ve just had a real doozy of a session, with lots of juicy, crazy energy – is it more validating if I’m a wiped out mess when the session is done? Does that mean that I’ve done a good job? Or just plain done the job?
Uhhh, no. And here’s why.
I don’t blame the weights.
What I mean by that is this: Say I wake up one day and decide, “Today is the day! I am GOING to the gym and I’m GOING TO start exercising like a mofo and I’m not going to stop until I look in the mirror and could pass for Beyonce! I am! I’m gonna!!!” Off I go. I lift a bunch of weights. I run on the treadmill. I jump rope. I sweat. It’s hard but I’m pumped! I feel good!
But then – the next morning. Ohhhhh, the next morning. The next morning I do not feel good.
I can barely move.
I walk and it hurts and it’s not the kind of “hurt that feels good”.
It hurts in a way where I genuinely wonder what I was what thinking followed by, “I’m never ever doing that again.”
I’m grumpy, achy and in pain.
But with all my grumbling and moaning and groaning, here’s the one thing I don’t do; I don’t think about the weights I lifted, the treadmill I ran on and the rope I jumped and blame them. I don’t make them responsible for the hurt. I don’t scorn the stupid weights for being heavy or the treadmill for being too hard or the rope for being a rope.
Because the truth is, I’m out of shape and I had no business doing that amount of exercise. I had no business taking all that on.
Twenty years ago, when I first starting clearing work, I used to get pretty beat up. I remember the time I cleared a very heavy, very intense home in Bellingham, WA. I wanted to impress the owners and I overdid it. I achieved impressing the owners but after the session, I drove straight from Bellingham to Seattle (1.5 hours) to my wine bar job and when I walked in, my two co-workers looked at me like they’d just seen a ghost. “What?” I asked, self-consciously.
“Uh…..umm, go look at yourself, Nic.” I teetered off to the restroom and when I saw my reflection, a hot rush of fear pin-balled through my body. One of my eyeballs looked like it had a chunk of yellow chicken fat stuck to it. It was gross. It was mysterious. It was scary. And it wouldn’t come off. I went home, crawled into bed fully clothed, and woke up about 12 hours later. The chicken fat eye was back to normal. “What the heck!” I thought. I called my teacher. He kindly reprimanded me for…
lifting too much weight.
Okay, so I over did it but still—what had happened? It’s pretty simple really.
My body couldn’t process the information I had voluntarily tuned into.
What really really happened was – it was too much (energetic) weight.
I wasn’t buff enough.
And that means something very different in the world of energy.
What it means is that my body hadn’t lifted enough of the “shame” energy or “intense fear” energy or “guilt” energy to feel it and not, on some level, react to it.
When working with energy, to really allow a shift to occur, you have to be 100% present to what shows up and then feel it without reacting from the level of personality. So, on the contrary, you have to love that crap that comes up! You have to love what doesn’t feel good.
It takes a little bit to build up that level of presence. And it doesn’t happen overnight. I’ve been working on my energetic muscular system for 20 years and I’m still learning. Because, when it comes to energy work – it’s not about the head. There is no learning how to do this by thinking about it or studying it. You have to go to the energetic gym and experience what it feels like to feel STUFF. Uncomfortable stuff. Stuff you don’t understand. Stuff that feels weird. Stuff that reminds you of your mother. Or the kid that picked on you in the fourth grade. And you have to stand in it and just BE with it. Breathe, name it, say what it feels like, say where it’s riveting through your body and then let it pass. And that’s it. I know, it sounds so easy, right?
By doing this, little by little, you build up the capacity to hold for people what they thought was un-holdable. You step into information that people have been resisting and fearing, because we forget that what we resist, truly does persist. And shooing stuff that feels bad away with sage and candles and clanking bells—it doesn’t work people.
And, what we need to remember in all of this is to not go to so many energetic gym classes that it makes us so sore that we never want to go back.
You gotta go in, do your reps, let your body process that and then go back for more when you’re ready.
And you’ll get so strong.
You’ll feel stuff and know its not going to kill you (or leave chicken fat goop on your eye). You’ll feel energy and you’ll feel it moving through you and not sticking to you. You’ll step into a space and be so curious and wondrous. And you’ll leave and guess what? You won’t feel drained at all.
But you still might go on that luscious walk in the park anyway.
