Most people think that giving their power away is that something has happened to them something dramatic and big. A controlling boss or a parent figure, a government or a society but we lose power a thousand different ways a day. because we don't know how to hold it.
So today I want to talk about some of the subtle ways that we lose our energy. Like sands through an hourglass, how it just like drips down and filters away from us without us even knowing, noticing. I think one of the biggest problems I see with my clients is that they are looking for external validation or they're looking for permission to be themselves.
I know this is something I struggled with for many, many years It's really hard to actually stay in permission of self, to be ourselves fully without falling into what we [00:01:00] think we should be, what we think others think we should be.
We spend so much time assuming, assuming we know how people see us, assuming we know what people want from us, most of the time nobody cares. They're so busy thinking about themselves that no one's really noticing. Yet we give so much energy to pleasing, invalidation, and getting permission and being recognized, and we forget that we are our own authority.
We don't actually need a pat on the head to know that we are doing a good job. It can be nice, but it's not really necessary to our state of beingness. It's when our personality self wants to be seen and recognized, wants validation, wants permission. We start to get into the murky areas.
The [00:02:00] patterns of the ego to be recognized or to be loved in order to feel valid and worthy can get mixed signals, and we can spend a lot of our energy trying to please in order to get some of those little feedback hits around being loved or accepted. Another way that permission comes up in different clients is asking their friends what to do all the time.
Now I can be as guilty of this as the next person. My girlfriends are a great wealth of knowledge, and we unpack the world's issues and discuss things, and that's part of the joy in my life. But. For some people, they take that into a different area. They move that into a space of I can't do this without my friend's permission.
I need to seek validation in order to be myself. And it's different to bouncing an idea of [00:03:00] someone or, hey, what do you think of this? Or I'm moving into this area. And you discuss that. That's, that's different. To, oh, I can't make a move unless everybody else thinks it's a good idea.
Why do we seek everybody else's permission to do something that we want to do, to go places we want to go to? I realized how much energy that we are losing. And, and when I was witnessing someone in this recently, I was watching the energy drain out of them when they weren't getting the response that they wanted and.
I quietly stepped in and said, what would it take for you to do it anyway? And this person said, oh, no, I couldn't do that on my own. And I understand that to a certain degree. Some things are uncomfortable, like if you're going somewhere new. But it's interesting, isn't it?
How much energy we need from the validation or the support of somebody else to make what [00:04:00] we want. Okay. This person thought about this for weeks and it was still, in their resentment afterwards when the person that they wanted to come with them didn't want to do it. And it just turned into a massive, big event when really it was about stepping away from needing permission
But when you are thinking about it, you're spending so much time on it before and after the event, then you are leaking a massive amount of energy to this And so it's time to step back and go, whose permission am I actually seeking?
The moment we believe that somebody else has more truth than us. Knows better than us. We've lost the power. We've lost the energy to them. If you think of it like a game of tug of war, you know, if somebody has got power and then we are going to give, [00:05:00] but if we hold the power they give, sometimes we just need to put the rope down.
Guidance can be helpful, but it shouldn't replace our own inner guidance, our own knowing. Definitely not our own deeper desire of, oh, I want that. I want to go there. I want to do that thing that's going to bring me joy.
Because if you wait for that joy, because you're dependent on somebody else, you may or may not ever get it. Another way I lose a lot of energy is abandoning myself to keep the peace. I certainly did this when my kids were young, I'm abandoning what I want in order for the house to be calm.
Sometimes I'm over giving my energy to balance everybody's [00:06:00] emotional state. I'm so empathic that I can feel everybody's energy, right? So, I know when somebody's upset and hurt and angry even often before I've walked into a room. And many of us, especially moms, sense that with our families and that hyper vigilance leads me to holding the energy and the space to try to keep it calm.
I think I'm doing it for other people in the moment. I go, oh, if I just hold the space, if I keep the peace, if I keep the energy, still, everyone's going to move through this. But the reality is, most of the time I was trying to control the situation, so I felt better.
I was avoiding the conflict. I didn't want the yelling and the screaming and the carrying on because it made me uncomfortable. So, I spent a lot of time unconsciously controlling the environment to keep the peace. [00:07:00] I learned that at a very young age, how to read a room, how to see what mood everyone was in.
Was it safe here? Did I need to move away or hide myself away? That hypervigilance was a protective mechanism. It cost me a lot of energy, and it wasn't until I was in my early thirties that I started to see how much I was trying to control all of the narrative and all of the dramas around me.
It nothing is ever a one-way street, but when you stop having to control the environment. you have to ask yourself, what is it that I'm afraid of will happen if I don't give my energy to keeping this calm? What's the worst-case scenario? For me, it was always the [00:08:00] possibility of conflict.
I was very avoidant. I didn't want there to be any conflict in my world, and I grew up in a house that had very silent conflict. It was very passive aggressive, and there wasn't always a lot of outward yelling and screaming, but there was a lot of internal yelling and screaming. And as a child, I could hear that.
I could feel that and that continued through my relationships, through my parenting, my children, until I started to put into place what am I actually scared of?
What am I giving my attention to right now that is taking me away from my own peace. My own stability.
I think one of the best books I read last year was Mel Robbins. The Let Them Theory and what I took away from that the most was that yes, it's about letting someone [00:09:00] else get on with their life and detaching from some of the drama, but really what pulled me into my own empowerment is letting myself stay solid and central.
I think of all the times that I've stayed quiet to avoid conflict. All the times I haven't spoken up in order to appease all the times that I've struggled with that silent, passive, aggressive story inside of myself when I've wanted to scream and be heard and change the narrative. I was too afraid to let my anger out. I was too afraid to have tough conversations and what that cost me over the [00:10:00] years.
What would it feel like if I just didn't do that anymore?
It's taken me a long time to get to that space, let me stand in my own power. Let me fill my own cup up. Let me take responsibility for myself, my actions. Because the truth is we can't control anything outside of ourselves except for the choices that we make.
Another new little nuance in the family drama. how you say this is like believing our worth comes from being needed. If I just take the mom role, for example, as our children age and don't need us anymore, our place can be subtly or quite dramatically removed from their life. Their independence can sometimes feel like a [00:11:00] de-identifying of us.
And then we hit menopause…
We've got another change in chemicals and hormones, and we're opening ourselves up to, oh, who am I now? Without being needed in the same way, without this role that I've had, usually for the last, you know, 20 odd years, see so many women struggling at this time with their children are getting older and moving out of the home.
The energy that they've been placing outside of themselves to feel needed, has nowhere to go. What am I going to place that energy into now? where am I going to displace this abundance of giving and over giving and loving and over loving? And what am I going to do with that now? I'll give you an example.
When we lost our beautiful dog basil a few years ago, I just felt like I had so much love and I didn't know where to put it [00:12:00] anymore. And so, I filled the whole house with pot plants, because I just needed something to put my love and attention into because I didn't know what else to do with it.
And the plants taught me that there's a balance, right? Because when I over loved them, I sometimes drowned them. And then I would abandon them and they'd get all dried and screwed up, and I wasn't consistent with my care of them.
And it showed me that I wasn't consistent with the care of myself.
We had quite a few, passings in a short period of time and a lot of grief in our life. It was like this inward spiral and the amount of energy that I used in overthinking and wondering what I could have done differently or where I went wrong, or how could I have prevented this pain? It was consuming.
It took up so much of my time and so much of my energy. [00:13:00] And really where I needed to pour that energy into was into my own grief and sadness and allowing myself the time to process the emotions. It's so easy to give that emotional support to friends who are going through that. but it was so hard to let anybody come near me.
It was even more difficult to give myself any energy,
Any energy that I could accept or receive, dissipated so fast. That wasn't the pattern. I wasn't used to the energy being given to me, and I almost wanted to reject it. And in fact, I did reject it from lots of people. I could only take in snippets of kindness or snippets of support because I didn't know how to hold that.
I didn't know how to hold that energy coming to me when I was the one who was always supporting and [00:14:00] giving, as some of you may know, I've struggled with fibromyalgia for most of my life and I know how much the emotional triggers affect fibro.
Years ago, it was an obvious correlation. Every time there was an upset, I would have pain flare up, and it was the unpacking of that, like detaching the pain and the emotions
If you've had chronic pain, you'll understand how much energy it takes to do simple tasks because you're overcoming setback. It's like trying to move forward with a rubber band, pulling you backwards at the same time.
And even if that pain's not physical, but it's emotional or mental pain or trauma that you're stuck in, it feels like walking through mud and we are losing so much energy to this story, to the pushing, to the resisting, to the [00:15:00] fighting.
And so, I encourage you to think about where you are giving energy that's just slipping away, like through, through the sieve. Where is the stuff that you haven't been paying attention to? What depletes you, what lifts you up, the turning point and reclaiming your power. doesn't mean you have to make massive life changes and cut people out of your life or do anything dramatic.
It starts with tuning back into you because as you tune back into yourself. You can hear what you need and when you tune into source universal energy, to tap into that higher consciousness of wisdom that you know is inside of you, that's going to give you the clues as to how to reclaim your energy and [00:16:00] your power, and it's often quiet.
It's in the stillness and in the moments of reflection and the pause, the breath,
We're creating space just for a moment, something else, something other to come into our awareness. We can reconnect to our energy; we can reconnect to our soul. Self doesn't have to be big. It starts with small moments of honesty.
Small moments of stillness. Doesn't have to be big, doesn't have to be dramatic. But little things over time can create big shifts. If you are noticing places where you've been giving your energy away, try not to judge it. [00:17:00] Don't judge it as good or bad. Don't justify it, and please don't criticize yourself over it.
It's a natural place to have been, and sometimes it just needs a small tweak to be more in alignment and more loving to yourself. These patterns have usually come out of a need for safety or to protect yourself in some way.
They've often been born of the kindest thing you can do.
Recreate this pattern of either energy out or withdraw or whatever is that's taking your energy from your life's force and your sense of beingness, your internal power, and the moment you see these patterns, the moment you [00:18:00] notice your mind goes, ah, there it is, and I can choose again.
It doesn't really matter, but you're doing it with consciousness. You're taking responsibility of your energy and where it's going You are going to make clearer and easier decisions moving forward. If this conversation has resonated with you, I would love to hear from you.
This idea of coming back into alignment over and over again starts with a quick shift, and you can join me on Thursday nights every week to help bring yourself into alignment to really centre your energy into your body, moving the dial towards your desire and what you want and releasing in these little micro adjustments every week, releasing the stuff that's got you blocked and get you moving where you want to be.
[00:19:00] Reclaiming our power is the first step to freeing yourself to live the life that you truly, truly want to be living.
