To break the spell of our multilayered social conditioning requires that a whole new system of perception is brought into being. It calls for mental, emotional, and energetic reserves of concentration that can replace a person's old conditioning with terms of reference that are more positive and useful. Revitalizing these energetic and creative capacities is about learning how to manage our everyday energies. We thus need to be aware of how we put our personal energies to use, as the rest of this article discusses.
Energy is a force of material quantity and should be considered in terms of its quantitative value. Too many people too much of the time spend energy needlessly on unnecessary and unpleasant emotions, thoughts, and actions. Energy gets used up on expectations, mood swings, nervousness, irritability, wrong imagination, negative thoughts/intentions, self-pity, etc. Desires and misplaced attention, for example, are primary ways of losing this quantitative energy. The fanciful desires that come into us from our exterior social world distract and sap our energies. If we could but form small specific goals within our everyday life, and achieve them, this would create more permanent energy within us. As an exercise, we can try to begin with small aims that are realizable before moving onto larger goals. Allow these aims to be formed not from want but from need.
A helpful formulation is energy retention, energy intention, whereby storing and retaining as much personal energy as possible helps to strengthen other faculties. This personal energy can then be made available for physical aims and achievements through focused intention. A lack of a conscious aim within life goes hand in hand with unfocused and undisciplined interior energy. It is a basic fact of our lives that we give away our energy too easily. It is thus necessary to save, store, and manage one's personal energy, even if for the primary reason that a person needs enough personal energy for self-development. Energy is often lost through unnecessary physical/muscular exertion, unfocused mental distractions, and emotional nervousness or stress.
The picture may become clearer if we consider that one of the functions of the human being is to assist in the movement of energies. Humans are agents of transmission -- for themselves, for people around them, and for their environment. It can be said that humans both individually and collectively operate as transducers of energies. The human body is like a biological battery -- it accumulates, develops, and distributes energies. As such, it is necessary for a person to be in harmonious relations with their interactions: with people, situations, emotions, and physical posturing. These concepts are not new; in fact, they form the basis of our everyday world. People often talk of sensing "bad vibes" between people or even in a place. When something just doesn't "feel right," we need to trust these instinctual signs. It is our responsibility to find and nurture right alignments. For example, when in the presence of some people, we may recognize that we always have a feeling of being drained of energy. It is as if these people were sucking the energy away from us. In these circumstances we can refer to such people as "psychic vampires." Not because they are necessarily evil or dangerous, but because their energy alignments are such that they "pull in" the energy around them. The reasons for this are various, yet the outcome invariably the same. If it is not your function to "feed them," then move away -- just don't entertain their energy.
The quality of a person's energy fields/vibrations is thus relative to their mental and emotional condition. Negative mental states will be accompanied by discordant vibrations. Some of these vibrations will remain within the energy of the person's body, affecting them physically, whilst the remainder will resonate into the exterior environment. Just as in the vibration of musical sounds, a person's vibration affects the people around them by a form of "induction." In simpler terms, everything is in resonance with every other thing. Every thought we have, every act we perform, has its direct and indirect results through the resonance and transference of energies. It is a universal law taught by all the perennial wisdom traditions that like attracts like. A person is liable to attract the positive just as they can attract the negative. One's interior mental state is thus a valve to exterior energies and conditions. Being mindful of one's thoughts and state of mind is primary to a disciplined management of personal energy.
If an external influence impacts upon your mental state, as in feeling stressed or confused, then create a mental "stop." Assess the situation and restart by calling forth and generating intent. By putting deliberate mental intention into a situation or event, a person is creating an energetic force that both fuels and protects them. Similarly, to alter a disagreeable state of mind, we each should seek out those activities that feel harmonious to us. For example, when the mind is confused or frustrated, we can listen to some relaxing music. Or we can go for a favorite walk in the woods or be near to nature. By engaging in activities that create a favorable resonance, we can learn to revitalize and plug our seeping energies. This is a necessary practice when dealing with energy management. After all, if you had a pot of gold, you wouldn't go about throwing out handfuls of gold coins. Why do the same with our individual quantities of personal energy? In this sense, we need to be ever vigilant in how we exercise our attention.
Managing and revitalizing our creative energies is all about placing our attention onto the awareness of our physical, mental, and emotional energies. Once we can learn to place our attention onto these issues, it may surprise us how our perceptions begin to change!
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