Category: Health

On Letting Go of Non-Resonating Energy From Others

I have experienced wonderful healing recently via sessions with an energy and sound healer, Katie Rose of Rose Energetics in Killeen, TX (her link here: https://roseenergetics.com). Regardless of what you may think and feel about the legitimacy and value of such a modality, one generally useful nugget of wisdom I’ve found helpful is Ms. Rose’s well-stated truth that not everyone’s energy resonates with one’s own. This doesn’t mean that all or part of another’s energy is bad, it just means it’s not always right for someone else, such as myself. It is simply non-resonant/non-resonating. And vice versa, of course, is the case with my energy not always resonating well for others. This has been so affirming and releasing.

The implications of this understanding are powerful. No longer do I feel the need, out of guilt or some other negative motivator, to remain engaged with non-resonant energy of someone in my personal life anymore, ever. And I don’t need to pursue trying to make my energy resonate with someone else’s. It has been so freeing to clear away this old habit of tolerating and engaging with non-resonant energy(ies) from others. Letting go of or avoiding non-resonating engagement in the first place can and should be un-coupled with polarizing/demonizing a non-resonant other. That is a more nuanced, newer insight I have been coming to.

I have been integrating all this for a good while now, but Ms. Rose’s wisdom (which is not hers alone) has basically cinched the deal, so to speak, further embedding in me this healthy outlook and way of engaging in the world. And I most certainly help my clients come to all this understanding for themselves as well. Now, I’ve got some additional helpful language and subsequent perspective to offer.

Skinny Men Are Beautiful and So Is Any Body Type

The photo is of actor Timothee Chalamet in BRITISH VOGUE Magazine, 2022. Not only do I think he’s beautiful, I find it so affirming to see a naturally thin, dare I say skinny, young man playfully posing, show-cased as beautiful. I too was once young and very thin and would have loved back then to have seen this kind of male imagery being respectfully, joyfully highlighted everywhere.

Everyone needs to witness affirming imagery of their own unique body type, not just a very select few types (namely skinny women and buffed up men) being glorified everywhere over and over again.

On Dropping Down Inside With Attuned Silence

I am realizing how I have often just scratched the surface as a psychotherapist, the surface of so much talking to and with others. Entering further into a focused, attuned silence with clients has allowed them to drop down into deeper parts of their brains, beyond the verbal, eventually leading towards more lasting calm and clarity, among other states. This goes below the culturally conditioned back-and-forth of talking. Powerful.

On Attunement and Listening

I continue to grow in my capacity to listen. It’s about attunement, attuning my whole body along with my ears. It’s about how and where I listen from, namely from a place of open curiosity and compassion. Often, my busy, agenda-filled mind distracts me away from listening, but I return, constantly, to attuning to the person before me and resuming listening. And any feedback I give to the other comes from a place of accurately attuning to and hearing something(s) they have said. I have not perfected non-stop attunement and listening, and I probably never will, which is ultimately fine. But, I am getting better and better at more readily returning to attunement and listening.

The same applies inward to myself too, attuning and then listening in to what my body– which includes my brain– is saying.

Brief Thoughts on Brainspotting and IFS

Some nine plus months into doing Brainspotting (BSP) with most of my clients and experiencing healing from it for myself, I’ve noticed how BSP allows more space and focus for processing of, well, anything– more than any other treatment approach I’ve learned thus far.

I do find that Internal Family Systems (IFS) continues to be my main framework or lens through which I view my clients and their challenges. However, BSP facilitates faster processing for people with their true Selves and inner parts. This synthesis of approaches has led me to feel more effective as a psychotherapist while many of my clients get faster positive results in their treatment.

On The Mindful Use of Social Media

Ah, the seductiveness and pullulations of social media. Over on Instagram, I selectively follow few public figures, most of them politicians I respect but also a few actors. I follow two “influencers” (though one may not even identify that way) who I happen to actually know. The few actors and actresses I follow don’t use their accounts to heavily promote their own image. This self image promoting gets less interesting the older I get. It is enough that I take peeks at “suggested” profiles of pretty young men, often sleekly gym pumped, who have tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of followers. They don’t need me within their mass audience and I don’t need their pictures filling my feed and brain. The peeks I take of these aggressively promoted strangers are the psychological equivalent of eating candy or ice cream, tasty fun but best done in moderation. It’s like when I used to pick up a tabloid while waiting in the check-out line at the supermarket.

There is a set of choices behind how we each engage in social media. The more conscious and mindful they are made the better. I choose to fill my feed with a good variety, such as photos of nature, useful political and scientific information, updates from my friends, art, humor, and, yes, a beautiful sexy man here and there. It’s been an evolution for me, this what I intend to be a more mindful use of what I follow and post on Facebook and Instagram. We’re all on our own adventure with how to best navigate this interesting jungle called social media. May we each grow from it— including adding to the betterment of the community— along the way.