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  What was going on? I realized that the clearing wasn’t actually dependent on the complex ceremony I performed or the special objects I placed to change the energy. What had happened was that in the process of learning to clear, I’d changed. My system had been trained to respond to energy in a new way. Now, when I encountered stress held in a space, it would transform just through my conscious connection, as a result of the level of heart-based awareness I’d learned to hold.

  The truth is, it’s actually not about what you do; it’s really about who you are. The power is not in the “doing”; it’s in the “being”—and I had learned how to “be” in a whole new way. (As you read this book, you’re also on that same journey, one that can change your life in ways you may not yet even be imagining.)

  So it wasn’t just my clients who were benefiting; the more clearings I did, the more peaceful I became in my own life. The clearings were like an even more advanced training for me in how to relate to all the energy I encountered, even within my daily experience. I no longer needed hours alone to recover from spending time in crowded places. I found that I was now recognizing the moment I started to take on other people’s stress and automatically clearing it before it could take hold in my system.

  The things I used to hold a personal charge around, big or little, started to melt away. That old experience in the past that had continued to cause me pain for years? Now, it was like: Huh. What was all the fuss about? The memory of the event was still there, of course, but my difficult feelings about it had disappeared. Through the process of learning how to ease stress for other people, I’d learned to do it for myself as well.

  As I went on to develop this work, what evolved was more than a way to teach how to bring the energy of both people and places into balance; it was an elegant training for how to walk through your own life, centered and at peace, with your heart able to dance with whatever or whomever you encountered. This aspect led a prominent meditation teacher who came to one of my workshops to call clearing “accelerated meditation.” She didn’t mean it in terms of “get enlightenment quick!” She believed that clearing brought people to a place of calm and joyful open-heartedness within weeks or months instead of the years that a meditation practice would need to achieve the same result.

  Entrainment: You Synchronize to the Energy around You

  We’re all affected by the subtle energy around us, though it often happens below the level of our consciousness. Real estate agents talk about people who walk onto the porch of a house with great curb appeal but turn around and walk away before they even reach the front door. On some level they sense the energy isn’t right. You may have had the experience of thinking of a friend moments before they e-mailed you, or hearing a text message arrive and knowing who had sent it before even looking. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s book The Sense of Being Stared At shares fascinating studies proving that we often can feel it if someone is staring at us, even when they’re standing behind us.

  We all are amazingly sensitive receivers of the invisible information around us. With my hypersensitivity, I was like the canary in the coal mine, experiencing symptoms and feeling the energy in ways other people wouldn’t. (But remember, if the canary goes into the coal mine and keels over—that means it’s not okay for anyone to be there!) Some people are highly aware and struggle to manage that experience. Others keep themselves so distracted that they don’t notice that they’re being affected. And for all of us, it’s natural to assume that the thoughts or feelings we’re having are ours, rather than coming from the person sitting next to us in Starbucks!

  Research has shown that in restaurants, people tend to chew their food to the speed of the music playing in the background. That’s not about sensing energy, you might be thinking. It’s just about hearing, one of our regular five senses. It’s probably that they’re listening to the beat of the music and unconsciously aligning to it. Well, scientists also found that if there’s no music playing, and even if someone’s sitting at the table eating alone, they will tend to chew to the same speed of those eating around them. Now, we can be pretty sure people aren’t looking around to see how fast others are chewing and trying to match their rhythm!

  Researchers have even found that people react to the subtle background hum of the electrical current in their environment. In the U.S. and Canada, electricity operates at a current of 60 cycles per second. The resonant frequency of that kind of electrical current relates to the B natural tone on a musical scale. In Europe, the electrical current is 50 cycles per second, which relates to G sharp on a musical scale. In one study, a group of students from the U.S., Canada, and Germany were asked to spontaneously hum whatever tone came to mind. For the North Americans, B natural was the most frequent one hummed. As for the Germans? They hummed G sharp.

  What’s going on? We’re not just affected by the invisible world around us; we actually synchronize with it. In science, the concept is called “entrainment,” which is when separate systems come into a coherent rhythm with one another. This principle can be demonstrated if you put a bunch of grandfather clocks in a room together, each with their pendulum swinging at a different rate from the others. After some time, you’d come back to find that all the pendulums were now swinging in unison, their rhythms entrained. This is the same reason many people report that studying in person with a guru is so powerful for their spiritual development—just sitting in the presence of the guru entrains their system to hold a different vibration.

  The unfortunate fact is that most of us aren’t hanging out with gurus in our everyday lives. Instead, we’re surrounded by co-workers—some who may have just had a fight with their husband, or who got only three hours of sleep last night, or who are freaking out about that big deadline—all broadcasting their feelings out into their environment! Your system can entrain to that stress, and it can stay with you, affecting how you think and feel throughout the day. It can be held in your energy field, so when you come home in the evening, you’re walking in the door not only with your own stress but also what you took on from others as well.

  My client Stephanie discovered how this was happening in her own life. Her husband worked in a busy urban hospital emergency room, and when his shift ended in the middle of the night, he’d crawl into bed while she was already fast asleep. No matter how quietly he eased himself onto the mattress, she’d immediately wake up. Stephanie said, “I just get this awful feeling. It’s not from him, but more like it’s from a big cloud around him. It makes me so uncomfortable, I can’t relax and go back to sleep.” What this highly sensitive woman was experiencing was not just how her husband felt after finishing his work that night. It was also all the anxiety and panic of the patients, the stress of the medical staff, and probably even the intense effects of all the electromagnetic fields from the equipment in the hospital that had infiltrated her husband’s energy field and followed him home to bed.

  You may already be able to identify experiences in your own life where you feel as though you were affected by other people’s energy or by the environment you were living in. We are always receiving “information” from the world around us that impacts us in different ways. But it’s important to understand that’s not the whole picture. We’re receivers of energy—but we’re transmitters too! And that’s what we need to discuss next.

  chapter 2

  And Then There’s You

  * * *

  the part you play in creating your stress

  An important concept in understanding this work is the part you play in creating stress and imbalance for yourself. Scientists say that as much as 93 percent of our thoughts are the same from one day to the next! Who we are is very much based on a story we keep telling ourselves over and over.

  When you first arrive here as a baby, your energy is clear and your mind hasn’t yet become stuck in some repetitive story. You may bring with you some issues you’ve inherited in your DNA, but for the most part, your body, mind, and spirit are relatively balanced. Bu
t then you start to have experiences. Some of them are pleasant and positive, and so you process them easily. Some, however, are intense or uncomfortable, and you’re not able to integrate them so well. Instead, they can be held in your energy field as unloved parts of yourself, what psychiatrist Carl Jung called your shadow. These memories and feelings can become like a thick filter through which you view the world, subtly influencing your reactions in every moment.

  Another way to understand how we can get locked into certain ways of being was expressed by scientist John Dove Isaacs in his book with Daniel Behrman, John Isaacs and His Oceans: “There is no tyranny so profound as the tyranny of the first successful solution.” When you are a vulnerable child and encounter your first real challenge, you will eventually come up with some solution that does work, which helps you survive that stressful event. Thank goodness, you found a life preserver in a situation where you didn’t know how to cope. The problem is when that successful solution becomes an ongoing strategy, one that you keep relying on even when it’s not valid or useful for new problems. When you use this strategy inappropriately and ineffectively, it can even cause additional suffering and more opportunities for adding to your shadow.

  These accumulated “unloved” experiences from your past are held in your energy: what your mother said to you in anger when you were two, the unkind treatment by a teacher in third grade, your big romantic breakup in adolescence, the critical boss you had last year, the aggressive driver who cut you off on the freeway this morning. Do you remember the character Pig-Pen from the Peanuts cartoons, the one who always walked around immersed in a cloud of dirt and dust? That’s actually what most people look like to me because they’re carrying the stress they’ve taken on from the world around them as well as the negativity they continue to create and project from their inner world.

  We’re often told to imagine ourselves as “beings of light”; instead, to one degree or other, we’re all actually walking around surrounded by a fog of stuff stuck in our energy fields that blocks our radiance from shining through. If we were covered in grime and dust, we wouldn’t think of skipping a shower before leaving the house. Yet we go out each day covered in the energetic gunk of yesterday—well, really, the last 20, 30, 40, or however many years!

  So we’ve learned that the stress from your life experiences can linger in your energy and affect you from that point forward. And the more tension you hold around those feelings, the more they can weigh you down or create blocks in your system. This can eventually form an energetic vibration that attracts more of the same. The result can be that you keep dating the same kind of person even though you think you’re making different choices each time, or moving to get away from a noisy apartment only to end up with loud neighbors yet again! You can end up feeling stuck in life, dealing with an ongoing fatigue that never seems to resolve, or being too limited in how you view yourself and your choices.

  Jung’s psychotherapeutic techniques are based on the belief that if you can bring your shadow personality into awareness and integrate it, this will eliminate its negative effects and release positive energy that had previously been trapped. Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” His dry humor in that statement always makes me smile. However, as our understanding of consciousness and subtle energy has been refined, many now suggest that it’s not necessary to dredge up and relive past trauma in order to assimilate it.

  This stress wasn’t a part of you when you first arrived, and it doesn’t have to be a part of you any longer. It’s just energy, and it can be cleared. It may happen after only one clearing or it may take several clearings, each one slowly taking the charge out of something you’ve been holding on to, until all of a sudden you realize, poof, it’s gone! What used to stress you no longer has any power over you.

  Sometimes people ask me where the “bad” energy goes during a clearing. They’re afraid that perhaps it’s going to leap off them and then get stuck on someone else! But this isn’t about “bad” or “good” anything. It’s really about releasing stuck energy so there can be a healthy flow again. An easy way to understand what happens during a clearing is to imagine a garden hose with a kink in it. The kink in the hose prevents the water from flowing out. If you unkink the hose, then the water flows freely. But where did the kink go? There was nothing there to “go” anywhere. Just as with the hose, if there’s a knotted, stressed area in your system, then your energy, your emotions, and your physical qi get blocked. If we release the kink, ahhh, nice flow again.

  Dobermans or Chihuahuas: Your Reactions to Your Experiences

  Several years ago, right before his book Blink came out, I had the joy of sitting across from author Malcolm Gladwell at dinner and listening to him tell stories about his research for the book. One thing he’d done was interview people who train professional bodyguards. He said that as part of the training to become a bodyguard, each person is shown a line drawn on the ground and told, “Walk along this line, and no matter what happens, stay on the line.”

  As the trainee starts to walk along the line, from out of nowhere a snarling attack dog charges right at them! Of course, they shriek and run off the line. Then they realize that the dog is on a leash that restrains the animal just inches away from the line. So the student restarts their walk, and the attack dog comes back again—but this time, the dog is off the leash. At this point in the exercise, when the dog leaps on the trainee, the person basically loses all control in total terror! Then the trainee sees that the dog is muzzled and cannot hurt them. This training goes on and on, with different stress-inducing experiences, until the student can have anything happen and still they stay there, walking the line, in balance and unstressed.

  I think this is an apt analogy—albeit an extreme one, for sure!—for what we do, how we respond to our everyday life experiences. When something happens to us, we have an immediate reaction, mentally, emotionally, and physically.

  When you have an emotion, your body responds, and your system is flooded with all kinds of juicy little messengers that change your physiology. These can be wonderful changes that lift your spirits for the rest of the day if, for instance, you gaze into the face of a little baby. But you can also have daily experiences that aren’t so positive: you make a mistake at work, or your spouse gets upset with you, or some idiot cuts you off in traffic. In these cases, it’s like encountering those attack dogs in Malcolm’s story, and when your system goes into reaction, you can get knocked off-balance on all levels. It can take you mere moments to recover, or it can continue negatively rocking your world for the rest of your day.

  In some cases, there can be bigger upsets that affect you for years. The shock waves in your system from being raised by an emotionally volatile parent or having your heart shattered by an unfaithful lover, for example, can keep you locked into patterns of stress and imbalance in subtle ways you don’t even recognize. It’s when you start to do inner work, devoting time to personal growth and spiritual development, that you come to see how the weight of past experiences, and the charge you hold around old pain or difficulties, affects how you respond to your current life experiences, and you start searching for ways to let all that go.

  You shouldn’t underestimate the small upsets during your day. Even if you recover from them in a few moments, they still matter. Although they may not be attack dogs—they may be little Chihuahuas!—they can have a cumulative effect, creating an ongoing undercurrent of stress so you’re never feeling quite in balance.

  And the deeper upsets? These are the encounters with the Dobermans of stress, the traumas that are severe enough to get stored in your energy fields even after a onetime experience. They can keep you locked into projecting old reactions onto your new experiences, preventing you from moving forward with your life’s purpose and finding true happiness.

  Walk Your Line

  To
one degree or another, we’re all walking around carrying stress from people, places, or events in our past. We’re also in constant reaction to our current experiences. To break this cycle so that you can walk your own personal “line” without falling off and to be a creative force in your life again, there are two abilities you need to learn:

  Release the old stuck energy

  Transform how you react to new stress

  The first ability is what you learn with clearing: releasing the old stuff. In my clearing workshops, what I often see as I look at the group seems like steam rising from each person! It’s all the old energy getting set free as people let go of things they’ve been carrying in their fields for years, even decades.

  Then the second ability comes as you continue to give and receive clearings. You suddenly realize that things have mysteriously changed; you’re responding to your life from an elegant place of harmony and balance no matter what happens. If something stressful occurs, you just clear yourself and the stress moves on! And more and more, you won’t even have to do any clearing for yourself. You’ll maintain a state of consciousness where things rarely stress you, so there’s less and less of a need to clear.

  Transformations will affect every aspect of your life, happening gradually over time—or even instantaneously. Marie, a gregarious community organizer in her 40s, e-mailed after attending a clearing workshop: “I’ve never been able to read a thing without my glasses, and I owned several pairs, keeping them at work, at my bedside, in my car, around the house, because I was helpless without them. Well, two weeks after the clearing retreat, someone at my office asked me when I’d gotten contacts. And that’s when I finally realized I’d taken off my glasses at some point during the workshop and never put them back on again. My eyesight is perfect!”