The Pillar: Building a Strong Foundation for Energy Management
The term "pillar" refers to a state of inner awareness, attentiveness, and intentionality where our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs are aligned and being fulfilled.
It embodies the concept of being centered, with a strong foundation, while also being receptive to growth and insights. This state allows individuals to effectively differentiate their internal feelings from external influences.
Impact of External Shocks on Pillar Stability
External shocks, such as unexpected events or emotional experiences, can disrupt our pillar, limiting our natural energy flux. This disruption affects our ability to create and maintain our balance.
Recognizing when our pillar is affected by external forces is crucial for restoring our composure and flux. Awareness of our emotional state and the external circumstances that lead to a "pillar tilt" is key.
Understanding the difference between being in alignment with our pillar and being out of it helps us identify such tilts quickly. The sooner we notice these shifts, the faster we can work towards regaining our stable state.
Consequences of Unprocessed Shocks
Unresolved emotional responses to stress can trap energy within the body, manifesting as physical symptoms like muscle tension or pain. Over time, these unprocessed emotions can affect our well-being, leading to burnout, emotional imbalances, or severe health issues. Similarly, unaddressed traumatic experiences can create somatic memories, affecting our physical and psychological security.
Understanding the Freeze Response in Trauma
In addition to the well-known fight or flight responses to stress, there's also a freeze response. This occurs when survival seems unlikely through fighting or fleeing. The survival energy, instead of being expended, gets trapped within the body post-threat. This trapped energy can cause traumatic symptoms unless properly addressed.
Seeking Professional Help and Self-Regulation Techniques
For those dealing with significant unprocessed emotions or traumatic experiences, seeking professional help is advisable to restore balance. A plethora of therapeutic support approaches can provide the fitting guidance needed for recovery. For day-to-day management, practicing body regulation techniques, such as breathwork, aids in releasing trapped energy. Our recommended bedtime meditation, “The Manifestors’ Night Routine,” is another starting point for releasing trapped energy.
Disengaging from Autopilot: Bringing Awareness into our Daily Activities
Autopilot is a highly efficient mechanism that our body and mind utilize to conserve energy. It automates certain actions and processes such as breathing and storing information without conscious effort.
Over millennia, beneficial reactions and processes for survival have evolved to become automatic. This allows our bodies to perform these essential actions accurately without conscious control, hence the term “autopilot.”
The Misuse of Autopilot in Daily Activities
However, we frequently rely on the autopilot mechanism in situations that demand our full attention. Consider a routine activity like driving to work; often, we do not remember the details of the drive, such as the songs playing on the radio or our feelings during the journey. This indicates that we were operating on autopilot, engaged in our thoughts or distractions rather than being fully aware of and enjoying the moment.
The Risks of Living on Autopilot
Living on autopilot poses a significant challenge in our fast-paced lives. It leads to a lifestyle dominated by loops and routines we haven’t chosen consciously, creating a false sense of control and safety, but at the cost of truly experiencing and discovering life.
Decisions are made with little awareness, and precious moments pass by unnoticed. This habitual way of living can extend for days, weeks, or even years, consuming our energy and time without purposeful direction.
How to Disengage from Autopilot Mode
The key to disengaging autopilot lies in frequently asking ourselves targeted questions:
“What am I doing right now?
What am I feeling?
What am I sensing?”
These inquiries shift our focus from dispersed internal thoughts to the immediate environment and present moment. By becoming more aware of our current state and surroundings, we gain control over where and how we allocate our energy, moving beyond the automatic responses of the autopilot mechanism.
Autopilot and Daily Habits
Daily habits involve an investment of our energy, whether we gain a return of creative energy from them or feel drained afterwards. Habitual actions include all interactions with thoughts, activities, people, and objects. It's vital to understand that habits encompass not only externally measurable behavior but also our mental and emotional activity.
Research shows that about 90% of our daily thoughts are repetitive. These thoughts are shaped by our environment and the influences we have absorbed over time. Every day, as we process approximately 70,000 thoughts, these repetitive patterns can dominate where we focus our energy and attention.
Directing Energy with Habit Cultivation
We have the ability to steer our energy and focus by cultivating specific habits. By consciously developing new habits, we direct our series of thousands of daily thoughts, leveraging them to shape our daily experiences.
Habits are integral to our autopilot mechanism, consisting of actions performed with little conscious thought. By deliberately establishing habits that align with our goals, we can utilize autopilot effectively. This allows us to automate beneficial actions and thought patterns, aiding our pursuit of meaningful life outcomes.
Developing new habits involves both mental commitment and the physical creation of new neural pathways, necessitating deliberate effort and a deep understanding of our motivations. Initiating change requires clear intentions, proactive obstacle management, consistent reminders, and self-compassion to maintain momentum.
Consistency is crucial when forming new habits. On average, it takes about 21 days to form a new habit and 66 days for a behavior to become automatic. Recognizing the influence of habits on our lifestyle and success is key. By wisely allocating our attention, we cultivate behaviors that support our long-term goals, our desired lifestyle, and do all that in a way that manages our energy respectfully and efficiently.
Masculine and Feminine Energy: Balancing your Creative Energy Use
Whatever the amount of available energy for creation in one’s personal flux, it is expressed at work in accordance to either masculine or feminine principles.
Understanding these principles and being able to use both poles based on what the situation calls for allows for more effective use of our creative energy.
Defining Masculine and Feminine Energy Principles
Masculine principles include determination, clarity, focus, logical thinking, problem-solving, and independence.
Feminine principles are characterized by fluidity, nurturing, understanding, creativity, empathy, and intuition.
The Risks of Exaggerated Principles
However, both principles can become detrimental when exaggerated. Stress or fatigue often triggers individuals to over-rely on their non-dominant principles as a form of self-protection. This can lead to diminished effectiveness and strained workplace relationships, resulting in energy drainers for everyone involved.
Striking the Balance
Individuals with well-balanced masculine and feminine principles effectively manage and harmonize these attributes. They skillfully blend logic with intuition, confidence with receptivity, and decisiveness with acceptance, adjusting their approach to suit various situations and objectives.
Such balance helps them avoid the extremes of both sets of principles, such as being overly dominant or too passive, excessively rigid or chaotic, or too critical versus overly emotional. People who achieve this balance, irrespective of gender, experience enhanced physical and emotional shapes, higher creativity, and overall fulfillment.
