Last week’s title was taken from a text message that was sent to me. The intention behind the comment was to cause me harm. Someone did not like that I had set up a boundary with another person and said that to cut me at my core. I chose, last week, to reclaim my power by using that sentiment in a new way.
I wasn’t going to talk about that situation. I was just going to let it stand as an internal knowledge, but then I realized that there is a lesson we can all learn in reclaiming those things about ourselves that others use to cause us harm. For a long time, I thought it was mostly just a me thing that I focused more on the negative things that have been said to me than the positive. I can hear ten positive things, but inevitably, I will only remember that one thing that I consider to be negative. We all do it to some degree apparently. I’m actually not that special. MAJOR SHOCK!
That said, one of the first things we learn as intuitives is to call back our energy every day. We envision a giant gold sun over the top of our heads and allow that beautiful sunshine to draw all of our energy back to ourselves from everywhere it’s gone. From conversations we’ve had with people, from time we’ve spent reminiscing about the past, from dreams we’ve had, from work and social media, and everything that we pour our energy into. We let that sun get large with our energy and we just crack it open like a giant egg and let ourselves pour back into us. We breathe in our essence. That which makes us, us.
It was one of the first meditations I learned when starting the process of learning about intuitive healing. We don’t realize how much of ourselves that we give away over the course of one day. Just in our normal lives our energy scatters all over the place as we accomplish tasks, work on assignments for our jobs, and complete household tasks. We pour pieces of ourselves into each activity. We even give ourselves out to compliments we receive from others. Our appreciation, our embarrassment, and our egos live a little bit in those comments.
The same, and perhaps more so, is true of insults, slights, and injuries we experience. How much time do you spend thinking about that thing that someone said that hurt your feelings? You are giving yourself away to that comment. All the energy you put into stewing on that statement. All the energy you spend nursing hurt feelings, holding grudges (and I am the queen of that one), and lashing out at the people that hurt us. We are giving them pieces of ourselves. Pieces that we could instead be nourishing. We could be nurturing those parts of ourselves that ache and pinch when we are insulted. We could be teaching ourselves to replenish. We could learn that insults are often (barring examples of when we have actively hurt someone and they are expressing that to us) another person’s issues manifesting at us. That the hurt they cause is more about them than it is us.
But we don’t. Instinctively, we latch on to the hurt. We rage internally, or externally, we cry, we yell, we turn it over and over in our minds. We do everything that keeps us pouring our energy into the hurt. If I had a nickel for every hour I spent focused on something someone said or did that hurt my feelings, I’d easily have thousands of dollars. I’m an expert at wasting energy on those kinds of things.
When I became more aware of what all I’m giving my energy to, I became more aware of my propensity to hyperfocus on the bad. Either by beating myself up, or mentally bashing the other person, or venting to anyone who would listen, I gave away pieces of myself that I never even thought I was giving away.
Now the beauty of calling back your energy is that you can bring all those pieces of yourself back home. With intention, you can just say that you want all that back. And tada, like magic, you’re replenished. But what if, instead of having to call ourselves back to ourselves from these things, we didn’t waste our energy in the first place. That’s not to say don’t hold people accountable for being hurtful sometimes. That act can absolutely be self-affirming and healing. But we all know that we have those moments where it’s futile. We’d be better served screaming at a wall for all the good it would do us to hold some people accountable.
So, what if, instead of fixating on the hurt, we spent some time giving to ourselves instead. I was called pathetic in the initial example. I gave so much of myself away in that hurt. I didn’t once stop to take a moment to nurture myself. I kept looking for someone else to do it for me. God bless my wife, she was supportive and kind and loving through this particular incident (as she often is), but I never extended that same kindness to myself. I never once thought to say, “Nikki, you absolutely did not deserve that and I’m sorry that was used to hurt you.”
It was an opportunity to parent myself and I missed it, in my desire to receive it from someone else. So, I kept giving my energy away to people looking for something specific that only I could really give to myself. Every person failed to give me what I was looking for. In the example of my wife, she came the closest to giving me what I needed, but it still wasn’t quite right. BECAUSE she, like me, didn’t know what I actually needed in that moment. I heard her say the right words. “Are you okay? It’s not right to talk to someone like that.”
I never asked it of myself. My wife and I have this beautiful agreement. When we are hurt with one another and arguing, at near the end of the argument, we will ask one another “What do you need from me in order for us to move forward?”
It’s so healthy it’s gross, right? I know. But I never ever think to ask myself that when I’m in these hurt spaces. I never say, “Nikki, what do you need in this moment to be okay? To put this behind you?”
Well, I need an apology. That’s not going to happen. Well, I need someone to tell me that wasn’t okay to say the things that were said to me. Well, I got that from my wife and it wasn’t enough. Well…I don’t know. And I didn’t know for a long time in this specific case. In fairness, I didn’t know what I needed in this case, until I used it as the title of last week’s blog. I needed to take back my power from the words that were thrown my way. I needed to literally sit down, and call my energy back from that hurt place. I needed to shift hurt into something productive and hopefully helpful to someone else.
I needed to find a new way to bandage that wound. And yeah, at the end of the day, have more hurtful things been said to me than that? By miles and even worse things were said in that text message. But that was the sentiment that I latched onto. That was the sentiment that I gave all of my energy away to, and that was the statement that I needed to bring myself back from.
So, I leave you with this. Make it a practice to start calling your energy back at the end of the day. Give yourself permission to be refilled from all the busyness every day demands. And in those moments where something hurts you, ask yourself, “What do I need in this moment?” And be honest with yourself. You may not get what you need from someone else, but you can give yourself that space to say, “I will not give my power away to this. I will be kind to myself where they were not.” Practice some reclamation of your own self.