Give some thought and feel into how you typically drain your swamp. What do you habitually do, on a daily basis, that slowly drains your energy?

Bleeding, Percolating, and Explosive – How you drain the swamp.

As your system metabolizes energy, you begin to expand. That expansion can lead to feelings of anxiety or overwhelm, feeling swamped. Your subconscious mind might decide that those swamped feelings are unsafe and begin to look for ways to vent. If you explosively vent your energy, you will purge your system quickly. If you bleed or allow your energy to percolate, your energy drain will be moderated.

The Bleeding Energy Configuration is pretty common. Feel free to review the video from Layer Seven, Week Four. Everyone has things in their life that are slow energy drains. From old habits to friendships that suck your energy, poor food choices, excess alcohol, lack of exercise, jealousies, resentments, fatalistic thought patterns, recurring emotional suffering, etc. Bleeding type energy drains include frustration, demands, expectations, strongly held beliefs, black and white thinking, and any habits, practices, conversations, and relationships.

Physically bleeding energy happens with things like fidgeting, twitching, biting your nails, lingering injuries, recurring pain, chronic tension, etc.

You bleed mental energy when you overthink or get distracted, when you obsess on some past wrong. All resistance has some bleeding qualities. Isometric and Isotonic energy configurations bleed energy. Bleeding energy configurations persist.

I can almost guarantee you that every habit you have bleeds energy.

You bleed emotional energy when you recreate some past set of sensations whether they are joyful or agonizing. You might also bleed emotional energy when you are overtly compassionate. Martyrs bleed a ton of emotional energy worrying about others.

When you concoct a scenario and then get emotional about it, you are bleeding mental and emotional energy. If you include crying or dramatic gestures in your scenario, you are also bleeding physical energy. When you enlist or collude with others, you bleed environmental energy.

Make a list of your subconscious resistance habits. What do you believe without challenge? What feels entrenched in your life?

Generally, anything that you do that slowly burns energy is some aspect of bleeding or percolating energy. Every action, reaction, and response that has a negative return on your investment wastes energy. Even things like spending ten minutes trying to decide what you are going to order off a menu wastes energy. Peacocks strutting, both the avian and human variety, deplete and dissipate energy.

The percolating energy configuration happens when energy starts to move in a hesitant or reluctant way. Review the video from Layer Eight, Week One here. Urges and insecurities percolate. Unformed ideas percolate. Vagueness percolates. Percolation happens in the background like an afterthought or a quick excuse. Persistent dysfunctions that aren’t explosive usually percolate.

Momentary distractions percolate. They bubble up, get your attention, and then fade.

Bleeding and percolating energy configurations are pervasive in humans. Everything you believe without question bleeds or percolates. All your beliefs about right/wrong, good/bad, like/dislike, love/hate, etc. create resistance. Every time your subconscious mind considers them, they percolate up, stop your momentum, and limit your opportunities.

Bleeding and percolating happen when your Essence and Hara are low and in times when you lack conscious awareness. In those times, your subconscious mind takes control. Subconscious percolating and bleeding make it feel hard to change your mind and your views. Beliefs that feel entrenched have a lot of subconscious resistance that comes up as bleeding or percolating energy. As you gradually increase your Essence and Hara, that subconscious resistance will become more apparent. It will feel very different to the enlivened and determined person you are becoming.

Percolating is different from isometric in that there is a shifting, a back and forthing, like moving your weight from one foot to the other. It is not the constant pressure or tension of isometric, it bubbles from should to shouldn’t.

Percolation by subconscious resistance limits possibilities to be playful and fluid because it inhibits spontaneity. You take time to consider, formulate, and modify your response as … opportunities … pass … you … by.

Add to your list from yesterday with your percolated and infused habits. What do you resent? What things in your life are getting gradually worse? Where do you tolerate on-going degradation of situations or relationships?

Resistance sometimes happens like hot water being poured over tea. The tea impedes the flow of water both by percolation and by absorption. What is interesting about tea is that it then flavors the water by giving off some of its properties to the water through infusion.

Most of your truths came about through infusion. Every aspect of your negative self-image percolated and infused. Some percolation and maybe most of your infusion is environmental. If you got a recurring message of negativity from your parents, it probably percolated and infused into your self-image. You heard it, you took on a little bit of it, and eventually, no alternative message could get in.

Percolation usually happens in clusters. You get out of balance and then one thing after another comes up. Let’s say you go into a yoga class dressed in your finest lycra or spandex. When you walk into the room, the smell of sandalwood distracts. You hate scented spaces and you worry about your lungs. You want to appear spiritual, so you keep it to yourself.  Then, you notice that everyone seems more fit and fashionable than you. The belief that you are unworthy percolates up. You infuse it with the critical image you had when you looked in the mirror this morning. As the class starts, you resist the movements because you are assuming they will be beyond your capacity to keep up with the Gucci’s. You resist because your limiting beliefs are impeding your energy flows.

As you increase your Essence and Hara, the yoga class will be a place of opportunity to deeply connect and your appearance and fitness won’t be an issue.

Bad relationships usually have significant amounts of resistance. Incompatibilities and resentment are usually the cause. Sally and John have very different values when it comes to washing dishes. John is comfortable putting the dishes into the dishwasher once a day and running it when it is full. Sally is comfortable when she cleans up before eating her meals. She likes to sit down knowing that there isn’t a mess waiting for her. She sees the dishwasher as the root of all evil.

If Sally thinks about how John not doing the dishes before eating as she is doing the dishes, the doing of the dishes will burn more energy because her resentment of John bleeds or percolates through. The same thing happens for John. If he sits down to eat his meal without doing the dishes, his resentment for Sally’s demands will inhibit his ability to metabolize the energy of his meal.

If Sally shifts back and forth between her resentment of John’s habits and her own self-judgment that she is too rigid about her rules, the energy drain is doubled. Same thing for John. If he resents Sally and then wishes he was neater, he percolates his energy.

You can replace dishes with sex, money, communication, intimacy, or any other typical low energy conflicts in relationship. Resentments, demands, and the contrasting personal judgments lead to bleeding or percolating energy configurations when you have differing values than someone or something else and a demand that the other conform.

Anything which is non-beneficial and doesn’t get progressively worse is probably percolating or bleeding energy.

Couples who are able to stay married for 50 years while generally hating each other have percolating and bleeding resistance.

What do you adsorb? What aspects of your life take on a little more non-beneficial weight every day?

You have things in your life that are going to inevitably change. When you stifle those changes by resisting them, you are popping the bubbles as they percolate up. Usually, most of the percolation is done in the background or it becomes so habitual that you don’t realize you are doing it.

Percolation and bleeding energies get entrenched. They dig trenches into the pattern of your life and personality. Each time something bleeds or percolates up and you choose to complete the cycle, you are confirming, validating, and solidifying its existence while increasing your resistance to change.

Depending on the source, somewhere between half and 93% of people who pay for monthly gym memberships never actually go to the gym. They write a check or see the charge every month on their credit card. They know it is a waste of money, but they don’t start utilizing the membership or cancel it. That energy percolates up when they see the bill and remember the membership … and then convince themselves to do nothing. Bubble Up / Pop / Repeat.

The above pattern percolates because the energy shifts between keeping the membership and making the effort to cancel it. Between the desire to get in shape and the acceptance of failure. Between wanting to be more social and not wanting to get out of the house. Bubble Up / Pop / Repeat.

We use a Brita water filter in our house. We pour water into the catch basin in the top and it slowly makes its way through the filter and out the bottom into the reservoir. A huge percentage of what goes in the top comes out the bottom. Some microscopic particles and chlorine are trapped in the filter. The water makes its way through the filter by percolation. It seeps slowly past the obstruction caused by the filtering mechanisms and activated carbon adsorbs contaminants by the chemical process of bonding.

Adsorbing happens. It gets progressively harder to go to the gym each time you convince yourself not to go. Each negative confirmation bonds to all the previous negative confirmations and the resistance increases. As we use our water filter, the bonded contaminants increase the resistance the water has to navigate through to make it into the container.

Stagnation is one of the by-products of percolation. You do the same thing over and over until no other way seems possible. You create beliefs through stagnating percolation. Most of your truths came about through percolation. Every aspect of your negative self-image percolated. Some percolation is environmental. If you got a recurring message of negativity from your parents, it probably percolated into your self-image. You heard it, you took on a little bit of it, and eventually, no other messages could get in.

What are the gym memberships in your life? What seems like it is getting progressively harder. Where are you adsorbing?

I won’t spend too many words on the Explosive energy configuration. You can review the video here. You know what explosive looks like and feels like. The key to explosive is that it expels large amounts of energy without any return. It flushes your system.

Let’s consider how it manifests for each of your bodies (see Friday’s Focus). Physically, you can flush large amounts of energy out of your system with primal screams, vomiting, diarrhea, and to a lesser degree, sneezing and coughing. When your thoughts or emotions get overwhelming and you choose to explosively react, you physically explode. Your environmental, emotional, and mental bodies collude with your physical body. Explosive emotions are expressed physically.

Picture a toddler at the grocery store. He or she wants what they want and when they don’t get it sometimes they react explosively. They have a mental idea with an emotional attachment and then they express it physically by yelling, hysterically crying, or falling to the ground and flailing their little arms and legs.

Rage is a physical expression of fear brought on by the explosive energy configuration in the mental and/or emotional bodies. Try to picture any explosive reaction without a physical component. Is it possible to rage without co-opting your physical body? Can you be explosively emotional without physical manifestations? Probably not.

Find examples of the explosive energy configuration in each of your bodies.

You will spend the last couple of days this week learning ways to combat your bleeding, percolating, and explosive energy configurations using Hara and Essence. Party on.

You bleed, percolate, and explode because your system, primarily your subconscious mind, cannot tolerate current energy levels. The potential in the moment is deemed unsafe and your subconscious mind starts looking for habitual ways to lower your potential to a range that feels familiar.

Your subconscious mind uses your personality, your habitual reactions, as a guide or template. It finds the ways you have bled, perc’d, and exploded in the past and chooses one. Your subconscious mind reacts to what it believes is excess energy by finding ways to get rid of it. The insidious part comes in when your subconscious mind reacts preemptively. When identifiable scenarios begin to emerge, your subconscious mind assumes they will lead to overwhelm, and it reacts before the scenarios have even begun.

Let’s say you are headed to your mother-in-law’s for dinner and let’s disparage all mothers-in-law by assuming she is over-bearing, loud, and intolerant. Your subconscious mind knows what is going to happen, so it begins bleeding and percolating on your drive over. It that doesn’t work, it might elevate to exploding, usually at your spouse for choosing poorly in the parental gene pool.

The assumption of future pain and suffering is a projection that may or may not come to fruition. The mother-in-law might not be home, your car could break down, she could have accidentally doubled up on her psych meds and be a hilarious re-imagining of a scene from Wayne’s World.

One of the things the bleed, percolate, and explosive configurations have in common is that they lack presence, awareness, and intentionality. If you are expanding your Essence, you will be able to tolerate increases in your energy field without allowing your subconscious mind to react. Hara will allow you to identify the subconscious directive and disregard it.

Use the solution in Saturday’s Concepts on one of your more egregious bleeding or percolating patterns and let me know how it goes.

Specifically, when you bleed energy, you are subconsciously choosing to revisit some old pattern or familiar habit and allow the script to run. You do what you typically do without interruption.

The solution:

• Begin to identify where, how, and when you bleed.
• Acknowledge that the bleeding is in reaction or preemption of some current or future fear potential.
• Make a conscious decision to stop the bleeding.
• Identify a beneficial alternative with equal or greater energy expenditure.
• Engage your Hara and elevate your Essence to help you tolerate or even embrace your increases in energy.

To quell your tendency to percolate, follow the same protocols as bleeding. The difference is that you are going to identify the bubbling up of energy. Most bleeding patterns are fairly consistent. You open the tap and the energy flow out. Percolation happens intermittently or sporadically. So, your identification of it will require more awareness.

Prejudices percolate energy. You percolate if every time you see a plush, purple penguin, you stop what you are doing and start to mentally rant about your dislike of plush, purple penguins. Rant over, you go about your day. If you universally dislike people who wear professional sports memorabilia, you will percolate energy with every New York Knicks, San Francisco 49ers, or Plymouth Pilgrims sighting.

If your prejudices are triggered forty-nine times a day, you are wasting a ton of energy percolating. Follow the solution above and find an alternative to your dislike. When you see someone sporting a Raiders balaclava, try to notice something you admire about them, their energy, or something else in your environment. The energy of appreciation is beneficial. It fills your system instead of depleting it.

Exhaustion is a cure for explosive reactions. Have you ever seen some raging at the end of a marathon? If so, they didn’t run fast enough. Explosive reactions require a significant amount of physical energy. To keep them from happening, move your body vigorously and regularly. Feel your energy building in each of your bodies and be proactive. Remember, to subvert your subconscious desire to explode, you will need to do something that requires more energy than would have been lost in the explosion. If you add Hara and Essence to your explosive alternative, you will be teaching your system a new way of being.

If you habitually do something that habitually results in explosions; examine your pattern. Where is the energy building and how is it triggered? If you actually use your gym membership but you explode in road rage on the drive home, you are unbalanced. You have generated a ton of energy without expanding your mental and emotional bodies. When you stop working out and get in the car, your energy body continues to produce energy … which no longer has an outlet. Since your physical body is saturated, it begins to fill and then overfill your mental and emotional bodies … which triggers your subconscious mind to look for ways to vent … like being a complete ass because someone forgot to use their blinker or had the audacity to change lanes in front of you.

Next week, you will delve into how you fill the swamp with the accumulating and expansive energy configurations. Same bat time, same bat channel.