Being able to know what is yours and what belongs to others is a curious and often frustrating experience related to awakening.  Being able to differentiate between them for those who are affected can be an important step in overcoming this often troubling effect of kundalini.  You can be affected by this phenomenon or you can gain control over it in order to utilize this skill or ability and not have it….utilize you.

I am going to convey to you an experience that helped me at a time when I was having very strong energy at a time when, looking back, kundalini was ready to go into a kind of overdrive.  At this stage, I had already experienced a full awakening with the typical “rising” of the energy with six months of scattered phenomenon during what I call my period of “high strangeness” where I wasn’t sure WHAT was going on!  It was after a year that I began to question some of the things that have been said about kundalini and other aspects of the awakening experience that everything went into overdrive for me.  This force, the force of my own consciousness, my soul, I feel was seeking to crack me open even more.  There was a period where I would feel others’ energy very strongly, which meant that I felt fully sometimes what someone else was feeling as I passed them on the street.  I could feel others’ energy which had imprinted on a place when no person was present (this leads into parts of what we call ghost phenomenon, I feel).  I felt all of this as though it was my own, and it was often a source of some dismay.  For me, it always seemed I was aware what it was I was feeling, but for at least a few seconds, I would not always catch in immediately and there was a moment of reeling pain in my energy body and felt in my physical body sometimes until I stopped, observed, and reflected long enough to determine the source.  However, this did not stop this from happening and I was not entirely sure what was at work.  Was I destined to be such a complete and total empath?  If so, this was not such a good thing because of how filled the world is of hurt and pain.

It happened when I was at a gathering at a family member’s house where I noticed I was seized with a sense of intense anxiety.  As I sat there, I took an inventory.  I asked myself “Why am I feeling this all of a sudden?”  As I asked this, I realized that there was no triggers at all that would have been obvious to me that would have caused this.  I considered this was subconscious material bubbling up, but in situations like this, I don’t settle on any one thing right away.  I let intuition guide me as best as it could  in that moment.

As soon as I settled on there being no reason for this to have happened, I suspected this was not mine.  Once I did this, my next question for this intelligent force in me was to show me who it belonged to.  I felt it pull my attention to a man who was sitting over in a corner talking with someone.  I looked at him and asked him rather abruptly, “DO you have problems with anxiety by any chance?”  The man, who I did not know, seemed to sink back into his chair a little.  He had a look almost as though he had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.  It was that kind of look that moved across his face.  Following this, he seemed to loosen up a lot and his face relaxed and he brightened up and said, “Well, yes, actually….I have had problems with anxiety my whole life.  It was so bad that I went to therapists and was on medication for it. ” The man paused for a moment and then said, “I was even feeling a sudden rush of anxiety just before you asked me about it just now.”  I apologized for being so forward with him and explained that sometimes I seemed to pick up on things and I thought perhaps he had been feeling this.

Doing this had the interesting effect of lessening the result of feeling people in a way that threw me for a loop or tangled me up.  By being able to bring awareness into the moment and not merely being swept away by someone elses feelings, I was able to differentiate between what was theirs and what was mine.  It is true that were it not for ego, we would be feeling all of this stuff.  If our neighbor stubbed her toe, we would feel it.  And for all that is said bad about ego, it serves as an important and even vital filter for identifying what is us and what are others.  As in life, everything is a balance, so just as we can have too much ego, we can also have too little.  In either direction we can become unbalanced.  It isn’t that ego is some nasty weed in our soul-self, but that it may need to be transplanted so it is less front and center in our consciousness.  Ego does a very good job of sitting looking out of the window of the self from a back kitchen window instead of standing at the front door.  We need some filtering just to stay sane, but we also don’t need ego as control agent for everything that comes along.  Being able to do these kinds of things is a sound way, to my mind, of navigating through the world of awakening.  By simply bringing awareness into the moment, you can help to shift things in a significant way.

Does this mean that I no longer feel energy?  No, actually, I am quite sensitive, but the difference is I now know whose is whose.  I can be more like a slick pipe through which the water of life flows.  I am less like velcro where things can get caught or stuck on.  One other thing that I will mention in connection to all of this is that while you may feel others’ energy, the energy you are responding to is a result of what you are and where you are karma-wise.  Sure, I felt the guy with horrible heart pain, but that was because I related to it.  I had been dealing with a lot of heart-oriented issues at that time.  The man with anxiety was feeling something I had felt a lot and struggled with, so there were things that matched me.  I also noted, why didn’t I feel the person who just passed me on the way to the grocery store while I was feeling another person only a few moments prior.  If you observe yourself, you can learn a LOT that you did not know before this.  The fact is, we feel what matches us most.  And in this way, we also are drawn to people in relationships based on this, too.  For as hard as it may be to admit to, this happens a LOT.  Karma binds us in more ways than we could imagine.  But what has been useful for me is to look at these draws or these mirrorings less as a stumbling block or noxious weed as it is a very reliable way to look at yourself and the people you attract and let who they are beginning to guide you towards greater insight into what YOU are.  It’s not a curse to have this happen.  Look at those around you and you will have a portrait of yourself.  Even people you do not like most often represent some aspect within you that is unresolved.  Resolve that, and you do several things; you drop karma and you free yourself from being mastered by what this karma does to you emotionally.  In the Gospel of Philip in the Nag Hammadi (lost scriptures discovered in 1945 in Egypt) he describes karma this way (which he calls ‘the evil”).  It makes you do what you do not want to do and keeps you from doing what you want to do.  As long as we have its roots in us, it masters it and we are its slave. Now those sound like pretty strong words, right?  Well, that is how karma is.  And this karma is US.  You, me and everybody else.  When you grow slick inside, when you no longer have a reason to have your feathers ruffled, all of this moves right past you like water under a bridge, or a breeze in the air.

So consider observing yourself next time you feel a stab of something in your heart or in your head or elsewhere.   Reflect on what it is you are feeling and ask if how you are feeling makes any sense to you at all.  Then, let your insides guide you as it surely can.  I think that when we seize the moment and raise awareness for ourselves, it can help to break the cycle of associating too closely with things that only cause us trouble.  We do not need to take on the trouble of the world.  We need to clear out our own backyards, and when we do, others will be inspired and even moved to do something similar. Then, one by one, we all edge closer to awakening instead of doing this as some giant Crusade.  Crusades, like wars, can have uncertain outcomes.

Doing this also has an added benefit of actually giving you the best of psychic protection, which is what I have found to be true protection; allowing it to flow through you.  If you don[t have an issue with something, it slips right through you as so much energy.  Its only in having some issue that it catches on those frayed edges of your awareness and then pulls a string, causing a cosmic stocking to run or snag.  Creating an armored psychic mote around yourself may keep some things out for a time, but they will have a tendency to creep right back in as long as you have something unresolved within yourself that is causing the problem to begin with.  Carl Jung and Freud both spoke of the phenomenon of projection and how until we face our shadow, we see it in others.  That has been true in my experience, and we are blinded and mastered by it so that we are unable to see things as they are but rather as we are (thanks Anais Nin for that quote!).

Imagine that in your energy body that instead of feeling pain or hurt, you imagine that the area that hurts or is affected, you feel it loosening up.  Just feel into that and practice it each day.  See a given chakra letting go and loosening.  I have observed that all problems karmicaly are mirrored by a corresponding tightening within the chakra and also body.  This results in our not flowing in a more natural way.  Its funny because one more obvious energy, sexual energy, is often described as being sexual tension, hit it on the nail;  so many of us feel it as tension and we naturally want to release it.  This then serves to fuel most of our experiences with energy that is sexual.  But what would you feel if you just opened up and let yourself flow instead of holding so tight down there?  Indeed, this goes for every other center in the body.  It is so for every corner of your body as your body corresponds with the light body, which go hand in hand while you are in flesh.  So watch yourself and see how you feel.  Bring awareness into it.  Do you find you feel the energy differently?  Did what you took to be sexual energy, say, become more obviously this tension (or tension in ANY part of the body for that matter)?  And in identifying it this way, in feeling your insides loosening, does the energy change its character after some time with it?  I would be curious to know because this certainly has had some corresponding effects in my own life experience.  In the beginning of awakening, this tension is so severe that it can be experienced as a physical malady that doctors can find no known cause for.  As you drop more and more material, this also has a corresponding lightening and loosening of the hardness that can be a part of certain stages of awakening or kundalini.

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