These days I live alone with my husband, the only person in the world that I feel completely safe to be myself (lucky me). This week my empty nest has refilled with children and significant others to celebrate our lovely American holiday in homage to gratitude. There was a noticeable juxtaposition in my internal world between the comfort and relaxation I feel being fully myself in my own quiet world and the reality of having multiple personalities - known and unknown - in my house. Nature added the cauldron by simultaneously pouring buckets of rain on us and keeping us house bound. My thoughts converged around a person’s sense of energetic right to exist and energetic overtake.
The sense of self (body, impulses, emotions, reactions, expressions, heart, soul life pulse) as a safehome in which to land seems like it should be a birthright. I wish it were true in the energetic sense. The only time so many of us actually felt permission to be ourselves completely and even knew what that meant happened before we learned how to talk. Our preverbal self has more patterning into its own safety than our verbal not so somatic self is ever going to understand.
What happens, then, to the self if the self is not innately at home with itself?
Right To Exist
This seems pretty obvious, right? Don’t we all have a right to exist? Well, considering how many of us don’t eat meat or animal products (no judgement, just observation), choose not to have children (same, same), or feel like we have to be less human to have permission to survive (resonate with this one myself); I’m thinking this is a much greater unconscious dilemma than simply a thought problem. The thoughts we think around being less human to minimize our impact (rather than being more connected to minimize our impact) as well as any rationalizations we make to not simply be true to self are all a result of a limiting belief (or three!) around a right to exist.
Where thoughts arise, energy lies. AND…That energy is often lying dormant or unconscious.
Feel, for just a second, into how instinctual it is to cut yourself off from impulses, not feel impulses, or make your impulses smaller. When I talk about impulses I mean reactions, emotions, instinctual leanings. The place you go when you are stimulated into yourself.
All of our issues around being at home with our own impulses point to an unconscious patterning around the lack of a right to exist as you are. They show that you are shifting your energy to accommodate others. You are making yourself different than an internal sense of being at home with yourself would have you be. How damaging this is to a sense of grounding inside yourself (aka that pesky right to exist)!
I invite you to consider your limiting beliefs around your right to exist.
I invite you to feel the body sensations of tension around people as an invitation to question that right.
Tension around others may simply be your body communicating with you that you are letting others push against you energetically in a way that causes you to doubt your right to be present as you are.
Losing who you are points to an inability to be at home with yourself.
All issues around a right to exist reflect a pulling up of the first chakra and a clouding of the third and fourth chakras. These issues affect our ability to ground into our body, our lives, and our community. The lack of a home in the body shrouds ourselves from our own self. We miss who we are or, even worse, don’t know who we are enough to be able to track anything I’m writing about.
Any tension, lack of flow, or inability to follow the impulse of the self is, in its purest form, related to having a right to your own existence. When you notice yourself pulling up and out, or away and in it’s time to consider what choices you can make into your own embodiment. Try the flow breath or simply try to the stage of breath you are not connecting with. These simple exercises can shift you into FEELING (instead of thinking) your energy so you can make a different choice into your body instead of outside your body.
Energtic Overtake
Whenever you think about another person or feel into another person and change who you are, you are being victimized by your own choice of energetic overtake. I can’t stress how important it is to track this. Most of us allow energetic overtake instinctually as a simple way of being with others in life.
It is important to note that there absolutely has to be room for self compromise in a healthy relationship. Consistently choosing not to be yourself or consistently choosing the same compromise is not, however, healthy. It is up to you to notice. Constant compromise points towards energetic overtake.
As humans that are energetic beings (too often in denial), we are actually supposed to take other people into our energetic fields and assimilate them. This can be done in a constructive way or a completely destructive way. As usual with our human reality, the choice is yours in how you want to engage with metabolizing others.
I remember when I first personally started working on this concept of overtake. It was too reflexive for me to even notice that I was being overtaken. I was overtaken energetically the moment I saw a man, walked into a room full of people, or was near an authority figure. My body literally contracted inward and I lost my ability to feel myself.
It took a few years to learn how to charge myself up enough (see charging breath here) before I entered into authoritative, predominantly male, or group situations. The choice to charge my energetic field made it so that I could consciously avoid the cellular trigger of overtake.
Energetic overtake is more common than most people realize. I wish I could say it only happens to people who’ve been abused but I’ve been around the block enough now to see that a lot of us who have connection issues also have trouble around merging, shrinking, caretaking and holding back. The fact is we are all susceptible to energetic overtake in some form or other.
The problem with energetic overtake is the loss our sense of self. In energetic overtake, our self gets too quiet and the other person’s self gets too loud. This can be obvious (think abuse, gaslighting, strong opinions, intolerance, or caretaking) and it can also be quieter (aka reflexive defenses around having to change who you are to be loved).
In all of our issues around permission to be ourselves, there is an internal soft spot full of our own light that has its own responses, expressions, impulses. This internal soft spot doesn’t have to be, in fact it shouldn’t be, pushy. (Pushiness is a sign that we are masking the internal self and still allowing overtake to be present.) Gentle expression of self feels like flow, it’s relaxing, it gives itself space. The question to ponder is how often you have a sense of this internal soft spot, if ever, in relationship to others.
In any case of overtake, we start to metabolize another person’s energy as our own. We may think the same thoughts as another person, allow only "safe” emotions that match with another person, or tell ourselves we like to do the same exact things other people like to do. We give up our power (WAY too often without realizing it) due to our images around our right to exist and our unconscious collusion with energetic overtake.
There is a catch…
There’s no way to know you are being overtaken if you do not know who you really are.
In a world that moves so fast, idealizes too many people, and lacks the depth of connection so many of us crave; I would propose that the simple concept of people energetically being overtake has a more deeply embedded red flag of energetic social overtake as well. It’s really hard to watch all these perfect idealizations of “normal” people on social media and remember that every single one of these people has a side they aren’t telling you about. This makes it more important than ever to breathe into your own space and take time feeling into you (try elevator breathing!).
With everything moving so fast, when can you take time to truly know how you are being overtaken unless you make the time?
Now I do believe that a faster world makes for an ability to speed up our own consciousness. I don’t think we need to take hours every day to meditate or engage in radical self care. I believe that there is a natural internal response to our external reality. We can trust ourselves to dive deep much more quickly if we simply develop consistent short practices that bridge us into our selves.
The first step is to get interested in who you really are.
The second is to start to notice when you lose yourself.
After that, you can make choices to express your soft self, consciously build a sense of home within yourself, and explore your right to exist.
I, of course, suggest trying out my simple breath practices. Your own sovereignty and interests might flow you into something else. Since I have zero interest in anyone metabolizing me as themselves, feel free to be you in the way that feels most true to yourself!
The world needs more individuals who engage in permission to take up space without pushing themselves on others. Wouldn’t it be so relaxing to walk into groups of people and just feel the right to be? I have felt this. I know it’s possible. It comes from people having a sense of home within the self.