Energy: None of that Low-Grade Sh*t
How do you feel right now?
Go ahead, answer me. Close your eyes and feel yourself for a second (without your hands).
That, my friends, is your energy.
And you’re not hiding it. It’s right there in the open. We’re all rubbing up against it and stuff.
So, this energy … what are you doing with it?
Forgive me for admitting that I was never a religious Oprah watcher. But I’ll be damned if I don’t realize the woman is amazing.
Several years ago, she was on as I rifled through my mom’s closet for a scarf to borrow (cool, Megg!). I paused as I heard the show pause. It was essential—we all knew—to hear what Oprah said next.
Brace yourselves, for it was this:
“You are responsible for the energy you bring into a room”
She repeated it—”You are responsible for the energy you bring into a room.”
In the years since, my brain hears the sentence repeated weekly by that matchless voice. There have been lapses—times when I’ve failed to remember for months on end.
But invariably a day will come along where everything’s been shit: I’ve woken up tired, been late to all things all day, felt busy without results.
Then I meet up with friends and feel like a cheap piece of tape—I try to attach myself to someone for conversation and nobody seems to stick.
What’s happened is this: I brought my crappy day with me. These people who generally love me have noticed without consciously noticing that being near me is wearisome. Even though I’m there physically, my engagement is still off somewhere buried under a stack of problems that no longer exist in the present moment.
We’re all guilty of it.
How many people sit down to lunch with a friend or lover and say something along the lines of, “Sorry if I’m in a bad mood, it’s been a crappy day.” And you’re expected to say, “Oh no, what happened?” then listen to a list of negative events that have no real relevance to life anymore.
Is this the “acceptable” behavior?
A bad day does not excuse propagation of negativity.
In fact, it should invite the exact opposite. Why do we bow down to a series of punches instead of taking on the responsibility of the balancing out the negative with our own fists?
Using prior bad luck to explain current bad behavior is lazy.
Yet wallowing in negativity is frustratingly easy. Why do we love it so much?
It’s been proven that when we’re in a bad mood, something as simple as smiling can literally help to pull us out of it. So we know this…yet how many of us actually make a habit of smile-forcing when we’re feeling blue?
It’s mind-boggling.
We decide instead that it’s easier to remain in the mire because we forget how literally attainable it is to feel better. It just takes a little face work.
A New Way Serve
We grow up inundated with the notion that life goals should have something to do with serving others, yet we don’t spend time learning how to serve ourselves.
I have certain friends that are consistent sources of negativity. Nothing ever seems to go right for them. And nothing ever seems to get done as an attempt to change their circumstances.
I’m not writing a guide on how to be a good friend here, but I will say that like it or not, friends will vent. Sometimes it is important to give a shoulder to cry on. We all love and need bitching—sometimes.
But the moment we choose to put ourselves on the receiving end of a friend’s negative energy is the moment we choose to stand across from a charging station.
Do we charge up on negative energy? Or do we plug into the other outlet: joy?
Joy or Negativity: Which is it going to be?photo courtesy of pixaby.com
I want always to be mindful of my energy and how I wield it, and I want to surround myself with people who do the same. In the unexamined life, we don’t pay attention to how we affect others.
So, here’s a reminder:
We will have bad days, and sometimes they will seem insurmountable. But in the badness we can create one act of good: to think twice before enveloping the people we love.
I’m not saying to stuff the feelings down and ignore them. Work instead to escape the unexamined and negative life through journaling, self-improvement, and therapy. Those are just a few of the ways we can air out our demons without fanning them onto someone else.
I am energy, and I am the only one responsible for what I bring into a room.
Do you have energy-sucking friends? Lovers? Family? Is that a rhetorical question? How do you handle them?
Am I too harsh to imply that maybe the friends should be ditched?
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two comments
One
20211116 01:55 You are responsible for the energy you bring into a room.” well of course. Think of it this way. 96 percent of all communication is non-verbal. Just by standing there, or walking into a room, there is a great wall of sound coming from the millions of tiny minute barely visible signals from your body.
How we feel and what we are thinking is instantly transmitted to any person with sufficient intelligence to be able to ‘read’ what is being transmitted. Some respond to this experience with the thought ‘How could they possibly have known that?’ and verbally with “What!? is he psychic!” said with as much sarcasm as is humanly possible. The answer is no. A person can have a highly tuned analytical ability to analyse the information you are (or a person is) displaying. They do it in superfast time and they do not even know they are doing it. To them it is normal . ‘I thought everyone could do it, can’t they?’
Two
Who , in their right mind would choose to be miserable? It is a mental switch. If you recognize a negative thought, you know where it ultimately leads. You have been down that thought trail before. SO, upon recognizing ‘it’ throw the switch! Choose to be happy instead. It really changes the energy in the room, as ‘you’ start to transmit a new message.
Down the rabbit hole! a reference to ‘Alice in Wonderland’. A person that has negativity tends to revert to the same subject, or will link something said to a subject. This in turn is linked to a cascade of thoughts that reinforce and rewrite them into current memory – reinforcing them as if written by a red hot poker, the welts bright red upon the surface of the memory bank. When anyone , a friend or ourself, starts down a train of thought that we recognize will compound the negativity, throw the switch, redirect. “I am not going down that rabbit hole again.” etc. and move the conversation along. It may be that the person feels cheated and tries to bring the conversation back to what they were saying. If they do try, listen to them but do respond- or ignore what they are saying until they say something else – anything but the start of the ‘ride down the rabbit hole’. When they do say something positive, then let them discover that you are all paying close attention to what they are saying ‘ by immediately responding. They will realize that you had not stopped listening. You just will not respond to the negative comments. As soon as they try to redirect the conversation to the negative path, talk to anyone in the group BUT them. Eventually they will learn that mentioning the negative excludes them from the attention of their friends and those around them and they will start to try to find positive subjects to engage attention from the group. It stems from a need for attention, a need to be valued, to be wanted, to know that they can bee seen and have value.
One more comment. Using words in a title that reference the product of excretion is enough to turn readers away. You have the choice of over fifty thousand words in the dictionary. Come on now be more creative! “ENERGY – POSITIVITY NOT NEGATIVITY”… is just one suggestion for an alternate title. There is no need for obscenities – by definition obscenities are associated with negativity. You are indeed responsible for the energy you bring to your writing!