Whenever we have a symptom of unknown origin, our brains tend to try to supply possible answers. If it’s the Left brain giving us answers, it will tend to offer up one-cause possibilities.
For example, let’s say we wake up feeling stiff and sore, we will typically ask ourselves “Is it my pillow? Is it my mattress? Is it from when I lifted that box yesterday?”
So when Karen came in the other day saying that she feels unusually tired, with low energy, I could hear her trying to understand her experience.
In an effort to find a possible reason for her lack of energy, she was saying that she had recently changed her diet to try to help smooth out her energy highs and lows throughout the day. Other than that she really couldn’t say why she might be feeling so low.
I noticed that she looked tired, almost as if she could barely keep her eyes open, her posture looked slumped, and she spoke more quietly than usual.
Before jumping to a diagnosis, my process led me to think about what kind of energy that she was low in. For example, if she had been low in emotional energy, then she would be feeling quite flat, unmotivated, with no creative juices flowing. If she had been low in mental energy, then it probably would have been hard for her to come up with words to describe how she’s feeling never mind getting the words out in a coherent fashion.
It turns out that it was her life force energy that she was describing to me. I am not referring to the Star Wars Force here. Life force energy is the energy of the cell, it’s what our bodies run on. Life force energy is the energy that is liberated when we combine ATP or adenosine triphosphate, along with oxygen inside the mitochondria of our cells.
Very cool side fact: The mitochondria is now believed to be an evolutionary miracle where our human cells enveloped or took on a bacteria to give our cells the ability to extract energy from ATP.
Rather than just listen to my left brain for possible reasons for this lack of life force energy, I asked a key question:
What else is going on here? Another way to think about this question is “the truth will be revealed”. Rather than forming a quick conclusion and if you keep asking questions, you’ll get more information that will help you find THE answer.
I asked Karen “what else has been going on lately?” She then remembered a situation that she’s in where she feels super frustrated, and she wants to change another person’s behaviour. What caught my attention as she was sharing with me was that she became quite loud and animated, no longer expressing a low energy state.
This was the clue that I was waiting for.
A common way to deal with or adapt to stress, especially emotional stress, is for us to “turn down” our life force energy so that we don’t feel the emotional upset as much. It’s a way of numbing ourselves.
Dr. Joe Dispenza says that given enough time, an adaptation can become a habit, which if practiced long enough becomes a mood, which can eventually become part of our personality. This adaptation of turning down our life force in order that we don’t feel emotional upset is how we make ourselves sick if we do it long enough.
So I decided to take Karen through an exercise that was going to help take her abundant emotional energy and fuel her life force energy with it. Through doing this exercise Karen was able to not only experience the transition of energy from emotional to physical, but she was able to find resolution in terms of how she’s thinking about her situation with this other person.
So for the rest of the day she felt energized, she was no longer perseverating about this other person. Hopefully this can become a new pathway for her, through practice:).