Sunday’s Focus

Read Sunday’s Concepts and spend the day contemplating the six steps in a very general way. Feel how they relate to you in different situations.

Sunday Concepts

In Layer 21, Week Three, you explored your biases, the places your subconscious mind wants you to put your energy and attention. In Layer 21, Week Four, you studied reaction cycles and their effect on energy distribution and rejuvenation.

Over the next few weeks, you will have the opportunity to revisit the fundamentals of this program from a new perspective and with all the additional knowledge and tools you have learned.

First, you will begin to identify your primary biases, the ones that take the biggest slice of your energetic pie. What are you most afraid of and how do you configure yourself to limit your exposure to that fear? For most people, the primary or underlying bias will be the fear too much energy flowing or not enough energy flowing.

1. Figure out where most of your energy goes.

As you make your way through your day, track your fear sensations, biases, and reaction cycles. Do you generally feel insufficient or overwhelmed? Does it feel like more is needed than you have available or like you are inundated beyond your ability to manage? 

2. Does your subconscious mind tell you that you are too much or not enough?

What happens before you get the too much or not enough signal? How is your energy compounding? What transitions happen in each of your bodies? What influences those feelings? Where do you feel them and how does that change when they change?

3. How are your successes leading to insecurities?

Once you have a sense of your fear and its cycle, begin to become aware of what you do to limit your exposure to those fears. Those limiting actions, reaction cycles, will be oppositional, distancing, restrictive, manipulative, and/or repetitive (fight, flight, freeze, fix, or familiar). They will be habitual and to varying degrees subconscious.

4. What is the nature of your ingrained and persistent resistance?

After you get to know your fears and the accompanying cycles and start to interrupt the sequence. Take conscious action to override the subconscious patterns. Create new patterns that are more in line with your foundational values.

5. Shift from being reactive to responsive.

Gradually and incrementally become more of the person you desire to be.

6. Change the world from the inside out.

You will have an opportunity to explore these six steps over the next few weeks. This week, you will get to know Step One.

Monday’s Focus

Sit in meditation for a few minutes in the evening and catalog your major energy expenditures of the day. Your biggest energy outflows may not be activities, they may be persistent thoughts or emotions, physical pain, or defensive configurations.

Monday’s Concepts

Let’s look at each of the above in a little more detail.

1. Figure out where most of your energy goes.

First, you will begin to identify your primary biases, the ones that take the biggest slice of your energetic pie. What are you most afraid of and how do you configure yourself to limit your exposure to that fear? For most people, the primary or underlying bias will be the fear too much energy flowing to one body and not enough energy flowing to the others.

Determining where your energy goes may be the most powerful diagnostic tool you have to help you align yourself with your intentions. Who you are being, what you are doing, what is important to you, and how you interact with the world are all energy expenditures. Where/what/how do you resist?

Knowing how you spend your vitality requires presence. One of the first practices you learned here was the Current30. Revisit the practice using the tools you have gained. It may require much longer than 30 seconds to go through your bodies, chakras, components, and configurations but the results will be worth your time.

One way to discover where your energy goes is to figure out where your major imbalance lies. We discussed this in Layer 21, Week Four, but a simple way is to look at your major strengths.

Tuesday’s Focus

Spend the day tracking how much of your energy is spent thinking about things so that you don’t have to address them with one of your other bodies.

Tuesday’s Concepts

Let’s start with the body that is most likely to be over-energized, the Mental.

If you have a strong mind and place a high value on your thoughts and reasoning ability, that is where you spend most of your energy. Explore if what you are thinking about is worth the amount of energy you are giving it … or if you are just looking to confirm your current configurations and limit uncomfortable opportunities.

Margorie is a successful businessperson. She created the first on-line Thought Train. As its Baroness, she spends her entire day envisioning the nature of the world and how everything can be viewed as either a train engine, train car, caboose, train track, or some other aspect of the rail system. She places people into categories from employee to passenger. She labels people as conductors, brakemen, porters, cooks, engineers, signalmen, etc. She categorizes passengers by where she thinks they would ride; first-class, private car, second-class, all the way down to freighthoppers. She even has categories for people who don’t like trains.

Margorie classifies. It is all mental. Her entire world exists between her ears. There is no direct emotional, physical, or energetic connection to her environment or the people in it. She is great at what she does … and completely unbalanced. Her life seems full because her head is full of thoughts. She values her thoughts above everyone and everything.

Margorie probably needs to get a life, to take a trip … on a train or a plane, or even an automobile. She could move her caboose and let loose. Get up some steam and wade in a stream. Roll out of town and off the beaten track.

Where are you like Margorie? Which of your bodies is out of balance because you are giving it more energy than is healthy? Find out! Start by looking at your mental body, it is the most likely to be over-energized.

Wednesday’s Focus

Today is the day to explore how much energy you use to manage people, things, and situations. Your relationships will enliven or fatigue to varying degrees. Your projections for future interactions will also charge or deplete you. Figure out the energetic cost to navigate your life.

Wednesday’s Concepts

The next body to look at is the Environmental.

Jean-Claude is in very good looking and incredibly vane. He spends several hours a day manscaping, primping, and preening. He is constantly comparing himself to others and is hypersensitive to criticism. He endlessly seeks approval. He poses, prances, and positions himself to be seen. Jean-Claude is a peacock. His world revolves around getting attention and keeping it. He doesn’t have any internal reflection; he only sees himself through other’s eyes.

Environmentally dominant people spend an overwhelming amount of their energy monitoring, manipulating, and measuring the potential threats and benefits in the world around them.

Steve is a pleaser. He believes himself to be kind, caring, and cooperative. He is proud of the fact that he can meet people’s needs before they even realize they have one. Steve has an empty box where his grounded presence should reside. All of Steve’s energy is spent being reactive and pre-reactive. Pre-reactions would be things like assuming his hubby needs another Coors Light before he gets thirsty while he follows his pack of miniature Wolfhounds around with a bag waiting for one of them to poop.

Where in your life do you give too much value to people and things outside of yourself? Where do you fear future eventualities or future situations to the point that you alter your energy to try to control, mitigate, or manipulate things that are happening or might happen?

Thursday’s Focus

Keep track of your emotional labels throughout the day. What labels do you assign and how does that influence the amount of energy you set aside to fuel the label, resist change, and validate your emotional state?

Thursday’s Concepts

The next biggest culprit is likely to be the Emotional Body.

Emotions are energy, energy in motion. The trajectory of that motion is what determines whether the energy expenditure is balancing or unbalancing.

Oliver is a huge fan of Tasmanian Devils. He gets incredibly excited thinking about them, studying them, and writing about their behavior, habitat, and protection. A fan since boyhood of the Warner Bros. cartoon, Oliver used his love to propel him toward his goal. He worked summer jobs as a stone carver to earn enough for a trip to Tasmania when he was 14. He excelled in high school and received a scholarship to a veterinarian college where he earned several degrees, including a doctorate in animal physiology. After graduation, he moved to Tasmania where he currently heads the Save the Devils Foundation.

Harrison also loves Tas. But when he found out that a facial tumor disease was ravishing the remaining populations, he got obsessed and depressed. His obsession led him to read all the information he could about the disease, and he would stare for hours at pictures of the disfiguring illness. He fell behind in school, distanced himself from his family and friends, and decided to martyr himself for the love of devils. He died after getting hit by a Ford on I-95 while trying to eat roadkill, which is how most of his beloved devils perish too.

What aspects of your emotional life are similar to Oliver or Harrison? Do you utilize your emotions as fuel for success or to spin-up your distractions and desire to distance?

Friday’s Focus

Explore your degree of distractibility today. Catch yourself either distracting yourself with something or daydreaming about some other place, time, or situation.

Friday’s Concepts

Your Energy Body and Ethereal Body can both be sources of imbalance.

Your Energy Body can be pulled out of balance by any other body or it can disrupt and destabilize itself.

Agatha is mesmerized by the spirituality of crystals. Unfortunately, she is drawn to radioactive crystals like autunite, soddyite, and coffinite. An internal demand to be spiritual places most of her energy upward and out of her body … where it is fractured by her crystal collection, leaving her spacey, neurotic, and frantic. Her energy is dispersed in thousands of directions at once, leaving little for the other bodies. She is easily distracted, completely disconnected from her environment and others, and finds it impossible to sleep.

Following a day of deep meditation at the Saint Blaise Monastery, she preyed on a box of unleavened wafers accompanied by two bottles of wine. The food and drink sufficiently grounded her enough to decide to make some changes. She donated her crystal collection to the White Sands Museum and went to work as an accountant at a cruelty-free wool farm. Her Energy and Ethereal bodies recovered and now she slumbers soundly after a day of counting sheep.

Signs that you are overusing your Energy and Ethereal bodies include distractability, disassociation, and disengagement. It would also include the feeling of being disconnected from your other bodies, including the Environmental.  

The final body is the Gravity Body. It is probably extremely rare for the Gravity Body to be the major source of energy drain because the more you connect to it, the more energy it absorbs from the Earth. If you are feeling stagnant or rooted in place, it is probably a freeze response in one of your other bodies.

Saturday’s Focus

Which of the components feels out of balance to you generally? Stability, Focus, Speed, Strength, Flexibility, Endurance, and Rejuvenation can all drain more energy than is optimal and healthy. Find your imbalance.

Saturday’s Concepts

After the bodies, the next place you might be expending large amounts of energy is in your components. As a reminder, the components are: Stability, Focus, Speed, Strength, Flexibility, Endurance, and Rejuvenation

If you are overly stable, you might be directing too much energy to stop or limit change.

If you are totally invested in being focused, you might have large defenses up to stop interruptions.

If you have a deep need for speed, you might be resisting be present in the moment and are invested in some projected future moment.

If you are too flexible, you probably lack drive and commitment, are easily distracted, and lack a strong Hara.

If you endure beyond what is healthy, you will tend to surrender to existing circumstances and won’t enlist your Essence to help you vision more fun and fulfilling opportunities. You will also be prone to repeating unhealthy cycles.

If you over-invest in rejuvenation, you will struggle to find the momentum to progress, grow, and succeed.

Strength is by definition a big expenditure of energy. How you utilize strength can really influence your balance. Anaerobic expenditures are the quickest way to deplete your energy reserves. Strength used in moderation is a great way to regain balance.

Strength used strategically is a super-power. Reaching for a box of Oreos? Be strong for a second and grab an orange. Emotionally volatile and about to say something you’ll regret? Use your strength to be tolerant until the instability passes. Fear about to trigger you into reaction? Be strong enough to respond instead.

All the configurations except fluid can be energy drains. Consider the following list for yourself and figure out how you might be draining your vitality by configuring yourself in an inefficient, unhealthy, or unfulfilling way.  Stagnant, Compressive, Expansive, Transitive, Isometric, Isotonic, Fluid, Fluctuating, Percolating, Explosive, Scattered, Bleeding, and Accumulating

Look for things you do, think, and feel that don’t have long-term benefits.

Next week, you will be looking at your subconscious energetic defaults. Are you not enough or too much?