People often ask me what they can do to protect themselves from other people’s negative energy.

While there are many different methods to clean and clear up our energy fields, I find the best way of clearing is to understand ourselves better.

We suffer when we’re overly influenced by others and have the experience of being defined by their projections or perceptions. We can work with this by continuously refining the boundaries and borders of our own perception, recognizing our own experience is just our own and not another’s.

Coming to know and define our own boundaries is a continuous process of awakening, awareness and recognizing.

The more we access and can define and reference our own internal limits and structures, the more clarity we have to recognize what’s not ours. Unperturbed by the projections of others, we can maintain our own freedom to project our own unique identity in the world.

So in this way we can understand how a great musician can keep pace and play the melody no matter what the accompanying musicians are doing. A musician’s interaction and experiential knowledge of her own instrument connects her to her own experience and expression so much so that others do not perturb her. She is not competing to express herself with the other. Her recognition of her own experience helps her to recognize and appreciate the expression and experience of the other musicians.

Ultimately, she plays for herself because she has pleasure in expressing herself. She is not against the other, and she is not attached to complementing the other to please them.

She simply enjoys playing, as she can express herself uniquely through her instrument.

If we project to counter another’s “energy,” then we are in a state of attachment or aversion to the other. If we try to compel another to change his/her projected reality, then we are trying to take power over the other either directly or indirectly.

Countering another’s reality with our own projected reality is a direct maneuver to limit the other’s reality.

Aversion to another’s projection is still an opposition, and this aversion indirectly impacts the other. If we stop recognizing the other, then we take power by refusing to recognize them until they change their projection. When power is taken, the two become enmeshed together, and both forfeit their freedom.

A prison guard is not entirely free. She may not be contained within the prison cell, but she must give up her freedom to stand guard over the prisoner in order to make sure the prisoner doesn’t escape. How can any of our minds be free when our focus moves away from freely living and expressing our life and our own experiences and instead becomes focused on keeping others contained and imprisoned so that they don’t disturb us?

By imprisoning another, our focus moves from the enjoyment of self-expression to containing the other’s expression.

Freedom is still lost.

It is true in life that not everyone respects the freedom of others, and there are many people who try to take others’ freedom energetically—consciously or unconsciously. Ultimately this is not our problem; our problem is how to remain free for ourselves.

We are free to cut ties with those who don’t respect our freedom. This is not aversion as long as you are respecting the other’s right to continue to project their own reality the way they like.

To be free, we must return to the enjoyment of our own expression of ourselves, and maintain that as the focus. We can continue to recognize the other as free to express themselves in their reality separate from ours.

If we feel bothered by another, it’s best to start to focus on connecting to ourselves.

We do this by chanting our own individual name. Our name is our connection to the entirety of our embodied experience. The more we can connect to our senses and gain awareness of the information in the present reality, the more the static projected reality of another will fade.

As you begin to recognize yourself and regain your own reality, the more you can recognize others as separate. Protection becomes less important when we can begin to feel and see that there is a boundary to all things, including our body, our reality, our expression and our existence.

There is not one single person that is the absolute holder of Truth. Everyone is limited to their own expression of reality.

Little by little, through connecting to ourselves and acting and projecting ourselves, we can begin to take responsibility for ourselves, and we can begin to recognize others’ responsibility for themselves.

As we continue to deepen our awareness and experience in this way, we begin to have more experience of this truth.

Little by little we gain wisdom and experience—which is ultimately the best protection from people with “bad energy.”

 

 

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Apprentice Editor: Lauren Savory / Editor: Travis May

Photo: Wiki Commons