Moving Beyond Releasing “Negative” Energy: It’s Time to Embrace All That We Are
A More Inclusive Relationship With Energy
There’s a phenomenon that I notice that exists in the healing world where some are hyper-focused on releasing negative energy.
Now it’s true that during the beginning of the healing journey, learning to connect with and clear energy is a useful strategy, indeed.
And during the beginning stages, while we’re connecting with energy, differentiating the qualities of energy we come into contact with, and clearing energy that has built up, there’s no harm in calling it negative energy.
However, that beginning stage of the process quickly gives way to a more advanced stage of the healing journey where we’re being asked to recognize the built up energy as parts of ourselves that we’ve been habitually pushing away, so that eventually we can integrate those parts and their energy.
In this case, continuing to focus on releasing energy and judging energy as negative, just creates more of the body-mind separation that those doing healing work are trying to alleviate.
If you’ve been doing healing work for a while and you’re unsatisfyingingly stuck in some way in your body and life, there’s a good chance that it’s because life is inviting you to embody a more inclusive perspective regarding the energy you encounter internally and externally.
The Truth About Our Relationship With Energy
A video I made about the negative energy myth and the benefits of embracing “negative” energy:
Or if you prefer, here it is in podcast form:
Seeing Energy Through A Warped Lense
There are a lot of concepts and ideas about energy that have gotten propagated through new age and alternative healing circles over the years that, in my opinion and experience, are distortions of how things actually work when it comes to energy.
These then lead to distortions in how people think they need to interact with energy when it comes to healing.
They’re worried about needing to protect themselves from other’s energy or they’re worried about taking on other people’s negative energy.
In reality there’s nothing we need to protect ourselves against and no such thing as negative energy.
Life Has Our Best Interest At Heart
Life always has our best interest in mind and is constantly nudging us toward our evolution through the energy exchange that happens when we interact with the people and situations that life sends our way.
I like to call this way in which life is constantly sweeping us forward toward growth as “life force” and the energy we exchange in the process as life force energy.
Click the link to check out an in-depth blog post on life force energy, and how it’s nudging us toward our healing.
The energy we exchange with others and through the situations we encounter in life are not random occurrences but rather carefully designed interactions intended to support our highest good, even if we cannot see that purpose clearly in the moment.
Every person and situation we encounter, from those that bring us joy to those that cause friction, plays a role in helping us learn and move closer to our full potential.
Nothing that transpires is a mistake, as each energy exchange has been put in our path deliberately to facilitate our growth.
Negativity is a label that gets applied to our experience when it is filtered through the warped lens of the unconscious survival patterns in our nervous system.
How Do We Acquire This Warped Lens?
When in the womb and as infants, the part of our nervous system that is mainly running the show is a part that is focused on intuitively sensing on the level of the energetic back office of the people and environment around us.
At this point in our lives we don’t think like you and I think right now.
We gather information from our world through direct, sense experience.
As we feel into those around us, our caretakers and the larger culture, certainly we absorb some of their finer points.
But we also come into contact with the patterns they absorbed that carried the message, “The world becomes unsafe if I experss my fullest self,” which is a message that they innocently picked up from their parents, and they from theirs, and so on.
In this way, we learn to separate ourselves from fully experiencing and expressing important parts of ourselves.
Projecting Negative Energy Onto The External World
When parts of ourselves have been pushed way and made unconscious, we often project those disowned aspects onto the external world.
As a result, we may perceive “negative energy” in people and situations we encounter and want to push those people or situations away.
What’s happening is that the offending person or situation is lighting up the contentious relationship we have with parts of ourselves.
In other words, when we’re judging negative energy in a person or situation, it’s just a reflection of how we’ve judged parts of ourselves as unacceptable.
With work, we begin to recognize those disowned parts of us and become more apt to give ourselves permission to experience them and to meet them with compassion.
With awareness and self-acceptance of those disowned parts, compassion could grow where judgment once stood.
By facing and integrating what has been separated within us , we gain more connection to ourselves, others, nature, God… the whole world.
When we can meet the disowned parts of ourselves with acceptance and compassion we will naturally have gifts to give to others are are struggling with their disowned parts.
This keeps us seperated from ourselves and the the world and not able to connect with our gifts or give them.
Sharing Negative Energy With Others
The interactions that occur in my office represent a microcosm of those in the wider world.
Through the connections between people, situations, and their shared energy, life aims to gently guide us towards reconciling parts of ourselves we’ve deemed unsafe to feel.
Sometimes one person at a table may express anger or other strong emotions.
The individual at the next table could become triggered by this display of feeling.
Where divisions exist within them, the waves of life force energy serve to illuminate those separations—so that integration may occur.
Yet in those moments, the separated mind can view the experience through a lens of negativity.
We may think we need to protect ourselves from “other people’s energy,” as if we weren’t all sharing the same essence.
I coach people in such cases to set aside their thoughts and allow themselves to feel the experience’s impact.
What emotions does it stir up – fear, anger, something else?
When given permission to feel fully, a profound shift always happens: the system realizes no harm will come from feeling.
A reorganization occurs in one’s relationship to that energy.
The heart opens, guiding one to a place of deep inner peace and compassion as separations within are reconciled.
How To Release Negative Energy
The First Level Of Spiritual Embodiment: Clear
In a previous in-depth blog post, I discussed the different stages of the healing journey.
In the early stages, we begin to discover how we have disconnected from ourselves.
We start to recognize parts of ourselves that we have pushed away, and let them be heard.
We begin to experience the energy of these disowned parts in our bodies and lives.
Our system learns that there is a way to address energy that builds up within our system if we can connect with it.
We start to learn strategies for dissipating bound up energy.
When we actually connect with those parts they feel heard and the energy is cleared or dissipated.
The Second Level Of Spiritual Embodiment: Include
However, for our healing to continue evolving and growing, this part of the process must eventually transition to another stage.
In this new stage, we include all the parts we have come into contact with and their energy.
No longer are we just connecting with built up energy and releasing it.
We integrate them and the energies they hold.
In this process we get to extract the wisdom of those disowned parts and integrate them into our lives.
The journey continues as we embrace all aspects of what it means to be human.
We put our arm around that disowned part and say “You and I are in this together.”
By accepting instead of demanding change, integration paradoxically transforms issues stemming from separation.
Rather than pushing away or trying to clear our perceived flaws, we include and transcend them.
That energy once seen as “bad” now fuels our healing as we become whole.
Healing means wholeness – integrating all aspects of the self.
There is wisdom to be found in what was cast aside.
No longer fueling separation, that energy can now influence us constructively.
We gain empowerment to enact changes that separation once prevented.
Shadow work provides the power and perspective to welcome all of who we are.
In doing so, we reconcile ourselves to ourselves and unlock our fullest potential.
The Next Step…
My book, If It Didn’t Hurt: How To Resolve Your Pain And Discover Your Life Purpose, is the ultimate group healing handbook.
Throughout my twenty years of working with thousands of clients, I’ve gained valuable insights into the concepts mentioned in this article.
Click the link to buy it and/or read the first chapter of my book for FREE!
I’m confident that once you start reading, you’ll be hooked.
I look forward to helping you express more life,
Jay
About the Author Dr. Jay Uecker
Dr. Jay Uecker is the founder of the BioSoul Integration Center near Boulder, Colorado where he's been practicing for over 20 years. He’s an author, chiropractor, healer, and online soul integration coach who weaves Network Spinal Analysis, intuitive Parts Work, Brainspotting, SomatoRespiratory Integration, and body-centered awareness practices into his own technique, which he calls BioSoul Integration. His work helps people release unconscious resistance stored in the nervous system so they can embody their soul’s gifts and express their purpose more fully. Dr. Jay offers group healing sessions and one-on-one care, both in-person and online. He also offers a self-paced online course and a growing collection of transformational books. For a limited time, claim your FREE copy of If It Didn't Hurt: How to Resolve Your Pain and Discover Your Life Purpose.