Welcome to Spiritual Psychology.
My name is Renée LaValley McKenna and I bring my 30-plus years as a recovering addict and ex-crazy person turned therapist and shamanic healer to bring you snackable teachings on spirituality,
Psychology,
And all things personal growth.
And today I want to talk about energy matching.
Energy matching is something that we all participate in and experience whether we're aware of it or not.
And the more conscious we can become of it,
Then the more power we have to manage our own internal experience and the circumstances that determine our external experience.
Some simple examples of energy matching are you see a friend you haven't seen in a while and they're thrilled to see you,
They put a big smile on their face,
They give you a big hug,
Say hey it's great to see you,
And you immediately feel love,
Friendship,
And happiness connection.
Your body,
Your mind,
And your emotions will automatically match the joyful energy of your friend.
Conversely,
You're driving in traffic,
Someone pulls up next to you,
Honks the horn,
Gives you the middle,
And speeds past.
You have no idea what happened and you either flip them off back and swear or overcome with fear and feel attacked,
Or you can God bless them and wish them a good day.
What's happening in these interactions of friendship and road rage could be seen as a transfer of energy.
Energy,
As I'm talking about it in energy matching,
Is primarily experienced as emotional feelings,
But it absolutely has a body-felt component and all kinds of thoughts that go with it.
And in each of these situations,
Someone giving you a hug or someone flipping you off,
They're putting their energy onto or into you,
And we automatically receive it,
And if we're not aware of what's happening,
We naturally match the energy or just take it into our body,
And then that becomes our resonance as well.
Which may be all fine and good if you're only with nice,
Happy,
Loving people.
If you don't watch the news or engage in social media and spend most of your time in nature,
Then your natural energy matching state doesn't need to be conscious.
In fact,
I think that's what a lot of people aspire to,
Seeking peace,
Connection,
Joy,
And inspiration.
And those things can be kind of naturally available to us by being in the sun,
The ocean,
In the forest or desert.
Naturally,
Energy matching with the rhythms of the earth is incredibly centering,
Grounding,
And balancing.
In fact,
Beyond that,
It's quite inspiring and elevating because the life force that flows through nature is very creative and dynamic,
And we're a part of it.
The same is true for hanging out with positive,
Upbeat,
Interesting people,
Being aware of the media we consume.
My teenage daughter has been binge-watching some violent TV on Netflix and now has existential anxiety about getting kidnapped.
I told her,
I'm in my sixth decade of life,
I don't know anyone who's ever been kidnapped.
I don't even know anyone who knows anyone who's ever been kidnapped.
And I know a lot of people.
But she's taken that information,
That fearful resonance into her body,
And it's created a fear within herself.
She's energy matching criminal minds.
And the same is true if we spend time with people who are bitter or cynical,
Angry or depressed.
That there's a natural phenomenon of energy matching in the idea that water seeks its own level.
It's one of the reasons that people naturally are drawn to others who have similar viewpoints in the world,
Politically,
Religiously,
Sexually,
Socially,
Morally,
Intellectually.
Life just tends to be easier when we're hanging out with people that we resonate with.
And I like the word resonate because we are kind of beings made of energy and we could understand this kind of complex configuration of our mental,
Emotional and physical,
Spiritual being.
Each of us has a unique vibration level.
And there's been a lot of interesting study and mapping of consciousness and human energy by people like Rudolf Steiner,
The leader of Anthroposophy in the early 1900s.
And more recently there's this very grounded organization called Clear Vision.
I'll leave links to both of those types of work in the show notes.
They're much more detailed than what we're going to talk about here.
So from a spiritual psychology standpoint,
It's important to recognize that we actually each have a resonance.
It changes all the time.
It's deeply affected by our external experience and circumstances.
But when we become conscious about this phenomenon of energy matching that happens almost automatically,
Then we can start to hold the resonance we want to hold regardless of what's happening around us.
And that's incredibly empowering and depending on your intention it can be also incredibly helpful to the people and situations that we're engaged in.
I've been fascinated by the work of David Hawkins who was a psychologist and spiritual teacher who dedicated his life to this kind of map of consciousness.
He was a science-minded guy so he put these resonances of humanity on a number scale from zero to a thousand.
So for example the resonance of 20 is misery,
Shame and humiliation.
50 is despair and apathy,
Hopelessness,
Anger and hate come up the scale at 150.
Courage and empowerment at 200.
He considers 200 to be the cusp of integrity where we start to move from selfishness into selflessness.
Mercy and forgiveness and acceptance are at 350.
Wisdom and reason 400.
500 is the emanation of love and joy.
Peace and bliss coming at 600 and over 700 is enlightenment.
So it's interesting to do a check-in at any given moment in the day.
What's my resonance right now?
The easiest way to check in is to ask how am I feeling?
And feeling in this way can be a little different than emotions.
I work with emotions a lot and have plenty of my own.
Emotions tend to be generated from the narratives or stories I tell myself about the past and the future.
They absolutely are part of this complex kaleidoscope that makes each unique person.
But when we check in with how we're feeling it's much more about being down in our body.
It can include my emotions but it's deeper and more comprehensive than that.
In fact when I drop into how I'm feeling a lot of times emotions will come up that I may have been suppressing and it's really good to let them do that because emotions are also energy and they like to flow.
And when we let them flow part of their purpose is to help us grow and evolve and find equilibrium again.
I have a very dear friend who's going through some huge life transition.
It's a really positive transition but is really stuck with some old toxic belief structures about what it means to be a man and what it looks like to be successful that actually doesn't match up with his own developing worldview and outlook.
And the clash of the old and the new which is actually a death-rebirth process was bringing up some suicidal thoughts.
And so he checked himself in for a couple days which was an excellent idea and it was a really good experience for him and he came out he's been crying a lot.
All this old stuck grief.
Emotions really move stuff around and through just like digestion.
Crying can be like pooping.
Let that shit out.
Take the nutrients.
Excrete the rest.
So even in the midst of all these really difficult and turbulent emotions when I ask him how he's feeling in that deeper way he's actually hopeful and grounded.
I think a lot of times people are afraid to share their difficult feelings because they're aware of this energy matching phenomenon and they don't want to put their depression or sadness their anger or hopelessness on another person.
But there is a way to share our experience with others in fact I think it's imperative to do this and still remain in a grounded place.
The easiest way for me to do that is to think about the lower part of my body like my belly below my belly button and the base of my spine and really feel some heaviness that like what's going on down there.
Come out of my head into my heart and my belly and when I can really stay centered in my own resonance I'm much less easily taken off when the guy flips me off or I'm otherwise surprised or bombarded by somebody's negative stuff that I don't want to take on.
I actually ended a long-term friendship a few years ago because every time I talked to this person I felt just icky after.
I would see her name come up on the phone and I wouldn't want to answer it but I felt obligated to.
I'm doing a lot of positive constructive stuff in my life and she was kind of devolving a lot of drama and trauma and I could actually feel jealousy from her because she wanted me to energy match her.
We did a lot of drinking and drugging together early in our life and we were running buddies.
We also both had a lot of trouble with food we were fat girls together and I found myself over and over in the conversations mostly being involved in listening to the tragedies of her life and very little time spent on the successes in mine.
That's one of the real dangers of energy matching is it can make us want to dim our own light.
As Marianne Williamson says in her poem Our Greatest Fear she says,
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
Playing small does not serve the world.
As we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear our presence automatically liberates others.
That's energy matching and we can energy match up or we can energy match down or we can hold our own resonance and call others to resonate with us.
This is the principle behind Jesus' suggestion to love your enemies and to turn the other cheek.
Biblical energy matching and it can be quite a challenge to hold the energy of wisdom,
Hope and love in the face of rage and despair and apathy but as we become conscious about our own participation in energy matching it is important to consider what we want to put out into the world and to take responsibility for that.
And I think it's also important to know that perhaps the best place to start is with what's actually true.
Trying to pretend like I'm loving when I'm actually in resentment is deception.
That's actually a very low resonance.
We don't need to fake it.
We don't need to be anything other than who we really are.
And when we're with the truth of who we really are at any given moment that actually resonates us up because the energy of truth is incredibly powerful even if that truth is about addiction,
Suicide or mental illness.
I work with ridiculous suffering all the time.
When we approach it from a place of compassion,
Presence and love we can hold both simultaneously the energy of this infinitely creative emergent life force that allows us to process,
Negotiate and even benefit from anything that might happen in our life.
Energy matching is quite a sophisticated process and certainly con men and those who are manipulative or controlling can use it to their benefit.
And I like to tell people I use this myself.
I taught it to my kids.
Trust your gut first.
Our brains for all kind of lies,
Stories,
Social proprieties.
But our belly generally tells the truth.
The dysfunction that I grew up in taught me not to trust myself and I made it a point to give the opposite message to my own children.
We live in the city and particularly my daughter I wanted to trust herself.
One day when she was about four we went downtown and we walked around and we played a little game and I would point at different people on the sidewalk and I would say,
How does your belly feel about that person?
She'd say,
I don't like him.
That lady seems nice.
That one's scary.
And I told her,
That's your compass.
You can always trust that first.
We had a very teaching moment.
We were crossing the street to go to a coffee shop.
My daughter loved Starbucks even as a tiny child and a man joined us on the crosswalk and he said,
Oh you know I lost my car and I lost my job and I need money to get back to Minnesota and you look like a nice lady.
Can you give me ten bucks?
And I said no.
Because I knew he was lying was a story and I told my daughter that.
I didn't give that man money because he was lying to me and I don't like that.
And we sat down at the coffee shop and she got her vanilla milk and I got my tea and another homeless man came up and he had his hair was the most amazing dreadlock I ever saw.
It was like one huge dreadlock that ran all the way down his back.
He was filthy.
He literally had like one shoe and one no shoe.
He was skinny and these big kind of bulging eyes but he was very sweet and he came up and he said,
Mam I'm hungry and I gave him two bucks.
And I said to my daughter,
Why do you think I gave him money?
And she said,
Because he told the truth.
And I said,
How did your belly feel about him?
Did he seem scary?
She said no.
We left the coffee shop walking back to the Muni to take the train home and there was a crazy homeless person standing on the corner yelling all kinds of profanities and throwing things around.
And I said,
How do you feel about them?
She said,
Oh very scary.
And I said,
What should we do?
She said,
I want to cross the street.
I don't want to be near them.
And I said,
It's always okay to move away from people.
Trust your own gut first.
So we crossed the street and we walked around the crazy person.
Who do you energy match in your life?
Do you know when to cross the street?
Do you know who you want to give love and compassion to?
And who's giving it back to you?
Can you hold your own resonance in the face of the dissonance of another?
It's quite a practice.
Blessings on your path until we meet again.
This is Renee LaValley McKenna for Spiritual Psychology.
