Your energy store house is like a bank account. Your energy is your capital and it can generate interest—or it can be depleted and not able to provide a return on your investment. “Life itself is energy,” Dr. Gladys reminds us. The ideal for a rich (pun intended) and full life, she says, is to use your energy wildly! If you are moving toward life, you can envision your life force coming into with each breath, filling you up with fresh energy that can spill over into the lives of everyone you meet. If you are moving away from life, you view your energy as limited, so every action uses a portion of your capital and eventually you use yourself up! If you are metaphorically giving from the abundance of who you are, your cup remains full and you give of the interest on your energy investment. You share the proceeds of your joy and life fulfillment with all of life which is an extension of who you are.
Investing your energy can feel risky, but “certain risks are necessary to a well-lived life.” You must evaluate what risks are worth taking. Things that “give you juice” are always worth your energy investment. Where does your energy move, feel vital and flowing? Or is it stuck? Look for the love in your investments of life force energy. Look for the ways your energy builds community. Look for the lessons in each situation. You probably did not receive these guidelines when you were little, nor would you hear them from an investment advisor. These are principles that can improve our lives, enhancing our energy and giving us (with a degree of humor) more bang for the buck!
Scientists tell us energy can neither be created nor destroyed. However, it can change from one form to another. We are the directors of our energy, our life force. “Living well, therefore, is a game of learning how to steer our energy toward life.” A much-loved woman, who has already lived over 100 years, tells us “we have to rethink everything we’ve been taught about what life is.” We can reach into our energy bank account and direct our incoming life force to follow its intrinsic desire to “embrace the wild rhythm in our souls and seek out the reason we are here in each moment.”
From the moment we are conceived, throughout our gestational stages, during our births and especially in our early childhoods, we are being filled with ideas, concepts, experiences, observations, and opinions. We are drawing conclusions from each one based on our knowledge and understanding at the time. This process can be occurring nonverbally on a cellular level or thoughtfully within the neurons and synapses that are just forming in our developing brains. Our beliefs about how the world works, whether we are safe, whether people are honest and kind, and on and on are forming a basis in our bodies and neural networks for how we will think, feel, speak and behave for the rest of our lives.
We do all this unconsciously. As children, we are open and receptive, literally in a hypnogogic brain wave state that makes it impossible to reject some ideas as true and others as false.
So the advice to rethink everything we’ve been taught is some of the best advice we will ever get. Listen to your self-talk and the way that others talk about themselves. Do you hear expressions like I’m not good enough, I don’t deserve to win, I’m afraid I won’t pass the test, I have to work hard, I will probably fail? Are your conversations full of doubt and fear? You learned that somewhere. What if it’s not true? Of course, it’s not true, but, when these ideas fill our database and become our default settings, our choices are made from the perspective of lack and limitation rather than from love and abundance. Anthony DeMello, Indian Jesuit priest and psychotherapist, said, “There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false belief you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held that it never occurs to you to question them.”
To examine your life to find causes and patterns of thought and feeling that aren’t working begins with looking back. How were you greeted when mother and dad discovered you were going to be born? Were their thoughts and feelings happy, worrisome, fearful, conflicted? Were you allowed to birth naturally without interventions that you interpreted as not being able to do things your own way? Were you separated from your birth parent immediately after you were born? Did you feel safe? Were you nurtured, held, breastfed, encouraged each time you fell taking your first steps? Most of us were not; not because anyone was malicious, but because they were operating out of the programs that they learned: life is hard; don’t spoil a child, it will make them selfish; let children cry it out; children must make us proud; children must be punished for mistakes they make; children should be seen and not heard; we don’t have enough; we can’t afford that; and you know many more admonitions that shaped your life. Because we concluded that we are unworthy, damaged, not good enough, helpless and so on, we find that life shows us what we believe about ourselves. If those results are not working for you, it’s time to shift the energy!
Generations of dysfunctional thinking, feeling and acting may be influencing your thoughts, feelings and actions today! Living from the fear of not being enough or not having enough gives those beliefs more juice! Your energy can be used more effectively by knowing that you are enough and you will always have enough. Spend—invest—your energy on what you love. Start with YOU. The more you feel loveable, the more you will find to love. Then the love you expend will be reflected to you in the mirror of life.
When we live without fearful beliefs consuming our vital life force, we can move in harmony with the natural rhythms of life. Do you feel relaxed, refreshed and energized when you arise in the morning? Tension-free sleep helps you recharge your batteries, breathe in new life force energy and direct that energy into new activities when you awaken. This natural cycle follows a rhythm that can be nourishing. During infancy and into adolescence we need more rest for our growing brains and bodies. Birthing women need more rest and relaxation, especially between contractions. Dr. Gladys found that relaxing and resting gave these women the energy they needed to continue with labor and concluded: “rest gives us our juice.”
Did you learn to define rest as laziness? Some of us stay busy, maintaining tension and worry, rather than allowing ourselves to rest. Maybe at the heart of this old program is the infantile fear that if we don’t keep busy, we have no value? If we don’t keep complaining, we will be ignored and left to die? No wonder we keep doing, doing, doing. Yet, resting is a conscious action that increases our juice and allows us get more out of life.
Identifying what we like, what generates happiness, what grabs our attention in the most positive way begins to free us to be more alive and certainly less negative. In Dr. Gladys’ interaction with patients she frequently asked about their childhoods. Some people make choices to conserve their energy in fear of disappointing a parent or in adulthood, a partner. Yet denying our juice keeps us stuck, so we have to ask ourselves, do the choices we are making bring us joy? Do they drain our energy bank account? Do your choices give you a return on your investment—more juice?
While self-reflecting,
- Review your birth. Delivery? C-section? Drugs? Forceps? Separation?
- Ask your parents about their thoughts and feelings at the time of your conception, mom’s pregnancy and birth.
- Did you arrive on time—i.e. someone else’s idea of the right time?
What conclusions might you have drawn from the way they describe that time of your life?
- What did you like to do as a child? Were you adventurous? Did you explore?
- Are there old dreams left unfulfilled?
- Find an activity and play with it for a while. Play as if you were a child, uninhibited by parental concerns now. Fingerpaint. Go to the zoo.
- Dream. If there were no limitations or demands of any kind, no money worries or time constraints, what can you see yourself doing?
- Who might you enroll to help bring a change in your life that gives you more juice?
- Using the power of your conscious and subconscious minds, imagine yourself happy, having fun.
If you are a parent or plan to be a parent, you can talk to the baby before it’s born. Talk to your inner-infant with the same love and attention you would your own child. In fact, this baby is your child! Know that it is not too late to nurture this child, to give it what it didn’t get earlier. When becoming a parent, it’s never too early to begin communicating with the incoming soul. When becoming a conscious adult, it is never too late to begin communicating with the aspects of yourself that have been stuck in the past feeling unwanted, unloved, and unworthy.
Many great scriptures and teacher across the ages have told us that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven we must become as a child (Holy Bible). Don’t worry, be happy (Meyer Baba, Indian mystic). Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying, “Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Milton Erikson, hypnotherapist and a mentor of Dr. Gladys, said, “Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy.”
You are right on time. If your life lessons had been meant to be experienced earlier, they would have come up in a unmistakable way before now. NOW is your time to manifest—or femifest (a term that Dr. Gladys coined)—your best life. Perhaps it’s time to consider a Village of like-minded people with whom to live, work and play. Surround yourself with people who inspire you and who find you inspiring. Put on a happy face, “it’s time to face life!”