Today, Tom asks a question about energy.

Dear Jeanne,
My question is in regards to difficulty I have with my awareness of energy. I seem to not be able to differentiate external energy from the background of my own energy or experiences. At first I expected to sense it almost as an electric charge, almost experienced with my normal senses. In time I came to believe that it is something that is and has always been there, but that I perhaps was just not recognizing it as such. I have found myself feeling discouraged and annoyed with my lack of awareness of energy when it is mentioned in your messages. I end up wondering, “Where was I?” when this happened! Is my awareness just so undeveloped at this point that I am not aware of the energy around me, or is it perhaps that I’m just having a hard time sorting it out with all the other changes that I’ve been going through in the last year?
Thank you for your love and guidance,
Tom

My Dear Tom, awareness of energy is not an immediate or blatantly obvious awareness, but a cultivated, learned awareness. However, it does involve learning to feel it by remaining as often as possible in a state of calm and balance in order to have knowledge that you are actually feeling it and not something else. I think most of you Students of Awareness are feeling and experiencing energy all the time, but this problem of recognizing it is pretty universal.

In order to become more aware of the energy outside of you, and how it impacts you, is it best to first understand your own resident energy. Who are you when you are calm, centered, and balanced, with outside interferences at a great distance? Who are you when you are closest to your truthful, honest self, and alert to the fallibilities of the self? What do you feel like when you allow your most vulnerable self to go calm, and relaxed, and feel safe in your mature presence? What does utter peaceful self-awareness feel like?

Allow your self to go into a place of calm heart-centered breathing in order to achieve this feeling of self as energy. Allow your thoughts to empty out of your mind as you center your attention on your heart chakra, and allow your simple breaths to guide you to who you are and what your own energy feels like.

Once you find what your own energy feels like, allow that energy to be recalled throughout your day as a gauge against all other energy. As you reassert your self in your own place of energy awareness, so will it become more apparent that outside energy is totally different from your own.

Do not get angry or upset with the self as you learn about energy. This is not a good method, not is forcing calm, or pursuing this practice too vigorously. The time must be right, the circumstances must be appropriate, and you must be in a place of physical comfort and quiet in order to gain the most from this practice. Once you have achieved this state of inner calm, and you are happy that it is your recognizable individual place of energy, then will it be easier to recall it at a moment’s notice.

This is your grounding energy; your place of calm, of inner resonance, and knowing of self. Without achieving this, even if only momentarily in order to be able to recognize it as the true self, will you have difficulties in recognizing all other energies, whether good or bad, intrusive or helpful, positive or negative. Ground your self, as an electrical grounding is securely attached to calmness and safety, and then can you securely go off into other experiences of energy without fear.

And, My Dear Tom, when you do achieve feelings of your own vibratory energy an electrical charge is a very good description of what it can feel like. A vibratory experience of energy is similar to electrical current as it hums and pulses through electrical wiring. If you could feel it, so would you feel vibration and humming. You Tom are energy, vibratory energy. Even in your dense human form are you but molecules vibrating as an electrical charge does vibrate.

So in order to experience outside energy, must you attain this inner knowing of self and your own brand of energetic charge. Then will outside energy be noticeable. You may feel that it does not suit your resonance, or you may feel slightly off, slightly uncomfortable, irritable, vulnerable, physically unwell, tired, annoyed, or even exhilarated or enticed by outside energy.

If it is distant from you, either not interested in you or you have advanced too far to be approached by it, so may you not notice it, or be drawn to it. If it is outside energy that has a lesson to teach, then will you notice it. Often such teaching energy comes in forms that are personal, forms that are recognizable, and forms that you are automatically drawn to.

For instance, one of the most easily approachable means is through people close to you. Suddenly you are approached by someone with a crisis, or someone with a dire need, or command, or other means by which you can be sucked in to giving your energy.

Or you may be enticed to join in some activity that is perhaps not truly resonant with you. Or you may be drawn by old habits better left untouched, for they open too many doors that you closed a long time ago. Or you may be drawn outward, in a projective manner, with your inner issues ready to attach to outside energy when it is most appropriate to stay in your inner calm and do the work of the self, rather than attach to distractions as a means of avoidance. Or it may be all of these things at once, or in combination!

Energy is very tricky! So then, what do you do? How do you handle it when someone close to you has a dire need of your energy? Do you give it? If necessary, of course you do! But you must ascertain whether or not such need is just coming from the big baby seeking to shirk responsibility, or is it truly a genuinely needy situation. This is a practice of detachment, which is pretty much what everything is about and is leading you to learn. For as you learn about detachment, so will you also be learning about attachment of energy, and of acquiescence to it at the proper time. And your balanced state of being will be greatly enhanced as a result.

As outside energy approaches so does it offer many lessons. Evaluate your state of self, your place in life that you have achieved now after so much hard work on the inner you. You have learned a lot about your self. Have you not changed? Have you not discovered that you are fully capable of focusing your attention on the issues of the self, going innerly, rather than outward looking for answers?

Once the turning point comes, when you realize that you alone are responsible for every choice, decision, experience, and event in your life, then are you ready to truly advance further to taking on the power of your own energy. Once you turn that energy inward; where before it was spent outward searching, asking for help, for attention, for pleasure, for pain, safety and for a resting spot; can you find your grounding and your stability now in your place of inner knowing.

If you can allow your self to remain in that place of inner inward focus, so will the outside energy become more clearly outside energy. It will be noticeably different from your own. It will perhaps not be so enticing any more. Even if you are attracted to it ever so briefly, so will it no longer have such lasting power as it did in the past. And you may wish to return to your place of calm more quickly than usual.

Energy awareness and detachment will lead you further to that awareness of universal love and compassion that has been another one of my topics lately. These things are all, in combination, the necessary tools in order to begin turning outward again once you have completed the major aspects of your inner work. When you have wholly accepted the truths of the self, taken responsibility for the total self, recapitulated, and learned to love the self for the journey thus far taken, so then are you well prepared to turn outward again. And this time, without projection, will you re-enter the world as an energy being. A being who is alert, aware, learning still how to navigate life as it unfolds, but with a new awareness of your place in life, the meaning of your life, your new job becoming apparent, your relationships becoming known, your communication skills centered in truth, and an understanding of your fellow travelers as journeyers equally needing to take their own outer journeys and their own inner journeys to wholeness of self.

As wholeness of self is achieved and constantly attended to (for it never ends) so is life in the greater world different. With change of the self does everything else change too. The outside world becomes totally acceptable, viable, and necessary, no matter what is taking place in it. There is no stopping another from taking the journey they have chosen, and this goes beyond the individual to the other aspects of the world, the individual countries, the direction of political, religious, and social progress, the dissonance around you as you perceive it happening, so is all of this necessary for true change to occur.

So, do not, My Dear Tom, become discouraged if you feel unaware. I think you are quite aware of what is happening around you, you just don’t fully know it. You are totally aware, by your questions, that even the idea that you may be missing out on something has gotten your energy in quite a tizzy. And that, My Dear, is exactly what I am talking about!

Turn that tizzy inward, and see what is stirring up inside you that has you so frustrated. All of you Seekers and Journeyers, this is good advice for all. Turn your frustration inward, and ask your self, “What am I missing?” That is where the focus should be placed, inside you, as you do the work on the self. Not outside of you where your valuable energy will simply be spent in frantic looking and nothing accomplished as a result. Don’t waste energy!