begone!: 3 ways to rid yourself of an energy vampire

An energy vampire is someone who feeds off other people's energy because they are feeling low and don't know how to bring themselves back up. In my experience, an energy vampire will not be able to drain you when you are at your highest, most happy, confident, and strong state. They will wait until you are weakened slightly by some negative event, or if you are just feeling a bit tired or lower than usual. 

You will know you've encountered an energy vampire when you find yourself left in a funk by someone who appears to have latched on to you and won't leave you alone until they've dumped all of their negativity and drama onto you.

You should never encourage this kind of conversation, but sometimes the energy vampire doesn't need to be encouraged to continue their tirade.

I should be clear here. I am not talking about a friend who has had a bad day and is coming to you for support. The energy vampire doesn't really have a purpose or particular problem in mind. They are just interested in spreading negativity.

I've been working with this quite a lot lately and have found a couple of things that really work to stop the drain of my own personal energy and restore it to it's higher level.

1. Sage. Sage burning has been used in many cultures as a method for purifying a space or a person. 

I was amazed just how completely this technique works in a space where the energy might be dark, negative or low, or where an energy vampire might have been hanging out. 

Simply light the sage and waft the smoke around the area in question. You can even do this to purify yourself after an attack. 

If you don't have sage, you can use incense also. It may not be as powerful, but the intention that you bring to the practice is the most important thing.

2. Water. Stand under a shower, dive into the ocean, make yourself a mineral bath. Close your eyes as you do and imagine the pure water glowing with healing light as it pours over you. 

Decide that when you emerge from the water you will be reborn, your energy restored.

3. Breath. This one you can do during the attack to protect yourself and even deter further attack. 

As you continue to look in the direction of the energy vampire, bring your awareness to your breathing. Feel the inhale and feel the exhale. Hear the breath and feel the breath and let the sound of the voice fade into the background. 

Let your vision turn inward and see the energy vampire as a child, crying out for help and attention. Continue to give no importance to what they are saying. 

Continue to feel the breath for as long as it takes for the energy vampire to go away. They may look at you for a response. Make sure you do not buy in. Smile lovingly or say something general like "is that so". Continue feeling the breath until you relax back into your own body.

These are just a few things that I have found work best for me. I hope you find them useful too and would love to hear your tips for things that you have found helpful.

The book that knew me: Reflections on Baron Baptiste’s 40 Days to Personal Revolution

As she looked into my eyes, a rush of memories came through my mind spontaneously. All of the lessons, the challenges, the failures and losses, and the happiness and peace of the past two years rose up within me in that one moment.

It was the last meeting for our ’40 Days’ group and we had been given an odd (and somewhat uncomfortable) group exercise. We were told to stand facing another person and to look into their eyes. As we did so we were instructed to tell them about our experiences of the last 40 days, in silence, using only our eyes.

As I passed through all the stages of awkwardness and discomfort that you can imagine an exercise like this would entail, I began to really look. What I saw, as I peered deep into the eyes of my fellow 40-dayer, surprised me. All of the struggle, the growth, and the joy that had often left me feeling alone in the world – I saw these in her also. What I saw in her eyes was, in fact, myself.

This is what the 40 Days program does. It brings people together to grow.

My first time participating in the program was two years ago. Everything involved with the program felt foreign then. The daily yoga practices and meditation, the concepts in the book, the suggestions about diet – everything was a new and challenging experience.

I remember some very significant “aha!” moments during that first time around.

One, for example, was when the group leader asked the question, “how much of what you are eating is food and how much is actually a food product?”

Until that point I hadn’t put much thought into what I ate, but that single question changed everything. From that moment of clarity I changed my eating patterns entirely and haven’t looked back.

Another moment of realisation came during one of my daily meditation sessions.

I had never meditated before and often found my mind racing uncontrollably, but on that day, out of nowhere, I asked the question, “who would I be without thoughts?”

As I asked the question, a space seemed to open up somewhere inside me. For the most blissful moment I became separate from thought and just existed in being.

That experience taught me that the world won’t fall apart if I don’t constantly hold it together with thought. I realised that my identity doesn’t have to be defined by my thoughts and that I can choose whether or not I want to buy into them.

So much change took place during that first 40 Days and, looking back, I see it as the definitive point at which I started to steer my life in the right direction. It was the bridge between doing yoga and being yoga.

I became much healthier physically. I dropped toxic relationships and toxic patterns. I opened my eyes to what I wanted my life to be.

Doing the 40 Days Program for the second time this past year was like coming home. My thrashed and ink-marked book felt like an old and cherished friend as I pulled it off the shelf and tried to reinsert the first 26 pages in their proper order. The changes that took place this time around were less visible to the outside world but just as palpable within.

There is always something more we can learn about ourselves. We can always get to a deeper level. That is why this program (or any dedicated and continuous practice like this) works, regardless of where you are on your path.

And, like I saw in that woman’s eyes that day, underneath our unique personal struggles we are all seeking the same healing. This healing is equally available to all of us.

So, if anyone asks me about the 40 Days to Personal Revolution program, there is very little I can say about it. You need to experience it to know.

For me it will always have a special place in my heart, like a first love. It is the book that knew me when I didn’t know myself. It reached inside me and pulled the real me out of the shell I was stuck in. I will forever be grateful to the 40 Days and to Baron Baptiste for opening my eyes to love.

Gratitude and love to the beautiful Yoga Loft in Newcastle NSW for sharing my story on their monthly newsletter! Love you guys!

the "not-doing" of the self

From Journey to Ixtlan, this segment of Carlos Castenada's book had me jumping up and down in my seat. To separate the real you from your opinion of you is both difficult and necessary on the journey to an awakened state of being.

From now on and for the period of eight days I want you to lie to yourself. Instead of telling yourself the truth, that you are ugly and rotten and inadequate, you will tell yourself that you are the complete opposite, knowing that you are lying and that you are absolutely beyond hope.

But what would be the point of lying like that, don Juan?

It may hook you to another doing and then you may realise that both doings are lies, unreal, and that to hinge yourself to either one is a waste of time, because the only thing that is real is the being in you that is going to die. To arrive at that being is the not-doing of the self.

what do you do?

Lately this commonly-asked question has been raising other questions for me. 

When someone asks me what I do, I know what they mean. They want to know what profession I'm in, do I have an interest or a marketable skill which makes me unique and that we can use as a talking point to get to know one another. It's a perfectly reasonable question really. 

The issue with this question is that for me, if I answered it the way I know they want me to answer it, I would have very little to say about my job. That is because it does not represent who I am in the least. 

This contradiction has brought up within me a range of interesting, if not a little odd, responses to the question, "so, what do you do?" Some of these include:

"I do lots of things! I love to write, go to the beach, practice yoga, etc etc"

"You mean, what do I do for work? I run the office at a mining company."

"I publish a blog. I spend lots of time reading and studying about issues related to holistic wellness. As far as how I make money? I do administration work."

"My job is administration at a mining company, but my real work is writing about and studying mind-body wellness."

"Ha ha ha....lots of stuff."

Why is it that we feel we need to get to know somebody by finding out about their job? How much does our job actually say about us? 

I love meeting those people who are living the career of their dreams. They can't stop talking about what they 'do' because they love what they do.

However, I know a good number of people who, like me, are off 'doing' other things in their mind when they are at their jobs each day. 

I know it's just a habitual way of striking up conversation, however I think I'm going to make a point to change that question. Instead of 'what do you do', a better question might be, 'how do you like to spend your time?' 

That one would get me talking.................

compassion, basic goodness and psychopaths

I recently read a great article in elephant journal about whether psychopaths also have the "basic goodness" that Buddhist perspective claims we all share.

I was really grateful for this article as it addressed a question I have had in my mind for some time. The whole idea of psychopathology seemed to challenge the spiritual tenets that I have been learning and adopting over the recent years. The idea that a person can be “hard-wired to be evil,” as some of the comments on this article alluded to, doesn't fit within the spiritual framework of a world where everything changes and everyone has equal access to enlightenment.

I struggled with this one for years but have had no opportunity to voice the question (or perhaps no desire to bring up such an uncomfortable topic), but when I read this article the pieces seemed to come together to show me the picture of how we might come to know a psychopath from the perspective of love.

As Rinzler’s article states, when we decide to practice compassion there is no half way. Compassion is absolute, just as love is. When we have true compassion for one, we must feel true compassion for all. Or as Rinzler puts it, “We cannot choose who we invite to our compassion party…We have to offer them all the guacamole dip and invite them to take a seat.”

How can this be? 

We can easily fathom “love thy neighbour”. In our better moments we can even fathom “love thy enemy”. But a deranged mass-murderer (or some other manifestation of psychopath)? Surely they don’t deserve it. They will never change and they are beyond help. Well…

Doesn't that just make you feel sorry for their suffering, right then and there?

To intellectualize this just a little bit, here is how my mind seems to have broken it down.

If when we practice compassion we have compassion for everyone, what is the trait or the hook in them that can call us to the feeling of compassion in our hearts? In order to have compassion we must be able to see a part of ourselves in them, relate, feel for their struggle and therefore wish them real peace.

In a psychopath we can find no empathy, no willingness to change and, some may say, no goodness. Yet we can still have a very real and meaningful compassion for them. (We have to find this compassion in order to work out our own salvation). How can we have compassion for someone seemingly so utterly removed from the "basic goodness" within all humans? 

The answer is that compassion doesn't look at a personality or a physical body. It doesn't say, “I don’t like this about you, but I do like this and this and therefore I find I can have compassion for you” (that would be judgement, not compassion). Compassion doesn't need to find ‘goodness’ in anybody for them to be worthy of our love. We don't need to be reassured that goodness is there or attempt to see it (whether evident or buried deeply under some layers of animosity, pain, psychological hardwiring, etc). That is because compassion isn't about a personality or a person's actions or even a person.

Compassion operates on the level of the soul. When, somehow, you can look into another's eyes and see that there is a soul ‘in there’ THAT is the hook. That is the part which is the same as you. 

When you see or sense the soul in another then you can understand that the suffering of this person, and the suffering of the people that this person has victimized by their actions, is not even as great as the suffering of the soul.

The soul knows. The soul remembers. But the soul cannot come through this body. In its physical expression something has occurred that has created a separation.

As it drops one incarnation and becomes one with all that is, the soul unites again with its higher purpose (which is to shatter illusion in this physical dimension) and it vows to do better next time.

And then, I guess, depending on your beliefs about the after-life and reincarnation, karma, sankharas, etc., the soul re-enters the physical dimension to grow again this awareness of reality through the birth canal of illusion.

You might say that someone who was a psychopath in one lifetime has some very deep sankharas as a result of very negative karma (doing ‘bad things’) in that lifetime. You could say that their next incarnation will provide them with circumstances that are particularly conducive to working off this karma. Like every other soul, it is moving through the process of purification towards enlightenment. In that way, we are the same.

You could interpret the process in many ways, but personally, I don’t think it matters much to this discussion. The reality is that the person in their physical manifestation as a psychopath is doing something their soul does not agree with. In their body and their mind they might not feel remorse or regret or empathy, but the soul always yearns for unity and it suffers as it exits the body, knowing it was fooled by separation once again.

The suffering of a psychopath may or may not be on a body-level, but it is certainly on a soul-level. And that is the place where we feel compassion.

This soul. My brother soul. It is so separate it has forgotten entirely. I wish this soul freedom. I wish this soul peace. May some part of this soul experience my peace, my happiness, my love. May it come to know itself again. May it break the cycle of suffering so that we can all come to know an even greater peace in the oneness that we are.

So yes, I think compassion is for everyone, even if “Basic Goodness” is only comprehensible on the level of the soul.

As one of the greatest Buddhas said, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

ripples of words

Sometimes there is too much to say. The words rise up all at once and suffocate the message. Or there are too many messages and the words can’t come quick enough and there is fear that you will never get it said (what you need to say).

Sometimes there are no words. There is only the purity of experience, maybe an emotion. But no words come and you don’t try to summon them because they don’t matter.

In this moment the words are ripe with potential. There are hundreds of stories to sing and the words are flowing as the ripples in a pool that catches a waterfall. From all points where the waterfall contacts the pool outwards and outwards and outwards. Complex pattern of ripples; waves with many possible destinations.

I could start anywhere and get somewhere. I could start nowhere and bask in the hum of the infinite web of ripples.

I could pan out and see the whole pattern of interconnected waves. See them at their origin and at their destination simultaneously. Or I could hone in on one fragment and watch it flick in and out of existence, playing its predestined role in chaos.

I could and yet there's laundry to hang and dishes to wash and enemies to invent. So many possibilities for distraction.