Happy Scorpio Full Moon, dear friends!
I’m inspired by the cosmic astro-weather, by what I’m hearing from clients and loved ones about the intensity of the times, and my own wild experiences this month to share some thoughts about facing “the negative” in our lives, and practical approaches for energetic protection and attunement that can be implemented anytime.
Let me tell you, my last two weeks have been a rollercoaster. First, I got an acute case of Lyme disease, two days after a tick bite, which left me couch-bound for ten-ish days and delayed a long-planned road trip with my husband across Europe. (I’m still mending, but I’m well cared for with support from both traditional, energy- and herbal medicine).
Plus, said trip wasn’t meant to be just for fun though (but yes, also fun), but because we’re sorting out my deceased dad-in-law’s affairs in Portugal. When I finally was well enough to travel, we set off — and our car broke down in the middle of the Autobahn but an hour away from home.
We got towed to the nearest town, and were lucky enough to find a car repair shop open on a weekend… only to find out our car is essentially un-driveable anymore — unless we pay for a repair so exorbitant that we might as well buy a new vehicle.
(If you’re wondering, from all we knew the car seemed to be in perfect condition and glided through its last inspection just four months ago).
No drive across Europe for us yet!
It’s been surreal. We’re OK, and the whole process has involved confronting a lot of unknowns, fears, and emotions running high. Synchronicity doesn’t always show up in pleasant guises, though at every turn we were also met with the hand of Grace, and higher guidance re-routing us.
Exactly the domain of today’s Scorpio Moon, who amongst other things, deals in those experiences that take us to our emotional edges.
This includes those moments that trigger our trauma reactions quicker than we can blink. It includes the experiences that bring up our so-called “negative emotions”: anger, fear, despair, panic, hatred, envy, jealousy, shame. Of course, these aren’t negative in themselves — these emotions are all important messengers, whose message is best heard with compassion, in a safe context.
The idea of “the negative” comes up a lot in my holistic practice, in connection to emotion but also relationships, situations and subtle energies.
It’s truly deplorable that the concept has been associated with so much spiritual bypassing — with clinging to Love and Light as a way to escape the deep and messy reality of psychological, relational and cultural (shadow) work to be done.
Still, we can think of “negative” in a more neutral sense, less as something to shun and more as a discernment filter: does this (situation, energy, relationship) nourish and fuel Life and the wholeness of all things, or does it negate Life?
If it’s the latter, we might safely call it “negative” with compassionate clarity. In fact, the reason why some spiritual approaches can be so harmful is because they demand that we negate/suppress parts of our legitimate experience.
Yet when we acknowledge the negative, questions arise:
How do we thrive and show up everyday to do and give our best when there’s so much negativity “out there”?
How do we protect ourselves from those who respond to our natural selfhood with veiled or overt aggression?
How do we shine our light in the darkness?
How do we stay in our wisest self, in our integrity, when brutal, earth-shattering emotions run high?
We all need to navigate situations, relationships and environments that bring up these and related questions. Over the years, I’ve collected many tools and approaches to staying in the highest possible vibration without spiritual bypassing (and trust me that I was using them to find my way through these rollercoaster weeks).
Some of them are more effective than others, and when we’re in a pinch, my sense is that the simpler the better. Before we get to the hands-on part, though, a big-picture thought to help aim any tools we choose in the right direction:
From the lens of subtle energy, we’re always co-creating what happens in our energetic environment. We’re not only receivers of the energies of those around us, or of the Cosmos, but we’re actively shaping the vibration we exist in with our presence, which impacts what we experience and don’t experience as a result.
Even at the most material level, our brains filter out what they consider irrelevant based on what we pay attention to.
At an energetic level, we’re constantly “zooming into” the fields of information, vibration and experience that we focus on. We feed the (true) negative with our attention, fear, push-back, and investment. Yet, nuance is needed to tease apart how to bring our attention into a dark place and not breed more of the same.
There are times we need to dive into a painful or tangled situation with the purpose of resolution. At those times, we have to make contact with, and acknowledge, all that is strangling the life and goodness out of the situation. We grieve, we feel, we get real, we do our best to bring the process to its best possible conclusion.
Other times we’re fascinated with the morbid horror, or turning the toxic words that have been said to us in our mind over and over.
It’s not always as simple as just telling ourselves to “let it go”, though, as some deeper work might be needed to help us unhook from the pull of what continues to hurt us senselessly.
But knowing that we’re not spectators, but co-architects of reality, means we have a say in how things play out. Injustice and systemic wrongness may limit our agency, but it can never be taken away.
Our creative heart and boundless imagination are our most valuable assets in what we often call “raising our vibration”, meaning, attuning to the purest frequency of wholeness and thriving, which is sacredness.
They can conjure up doorways where there weren’t any, bridges across impossible chasms, and a path under our feet toward something that makes whatever is haunting us obsolete. If our imagination is captive, however, no amount of tools, methods, approaches or techniques will liberate us.
Creativity and imagination are the forces with which we co-weave the world with our wildest ideas, our most fiercely held values, our visions and most importantly, our unique frequency signal.
Through the medium of our focused intention, we create magic. We forge deeper wholeness and coherence in our world.
With that as our backdrop, let’s explore some energy protection and attunement tools.
Your Homing Thought
This practice is an incredibly simple and effective one. It comes from Dr. John Diamond, a medical doctor and holistic healer who emphasized the importance of cultivating our “Life Energy”, in his words — our essential life force, which I also have written about here.
The Homing Thought is a practice where we focus our mind and heart on an activity or experience that brings the utmost delight, flow-state, and purpose to our lives. The thing that makes us feel This Is Why I’m Alive. It can be something you already do or something you aspire to, and there are no wrong answers.
Concentrating on our Homing Thought deflects all forms of negativity, and strengthens our Soul’s signal.
To find yours, create a list of those things in life that bring you the most meaning, purpose and joy, and/or the dreams you most aspire to. Then, imagine yourself in each scenario as vividly as possible. While holding on to your imagining, call up a situation that would stress you out into your awareness, perhaps a fight with your partner or conflict with a boss; money troubles or the news cycle. (It goes without saying, don’t push yourself into a painful spiral here!)
Test the items on your list one by one, and see which one helps you feel the most centered and alive in the face of negative or destabilizing circumstances.
Congratulations, you’ve found your Homing Thought.
Focus on it — especially how it feels, it really should be called the Homing Feeling — as often as you are able, especially when you feel challenged. In my experience, it behaves not only as a shield but as a way to unhook our attention from those things that aren’t ours to do/take care of/solve/worry about.
Feel free to report back on your findings!
Unconditional Love
Dr. Julia Mossbridge is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies psychic abilities and the non-linear nature of time — especially the ways we can connect with ourselves and each other through past and future, which she calls practical time travel. Her research shows the importance of accessing the field of unconditional love — for everything, really. For personal and collective healing, for increased connection, to align with the flow of the Universe, to tap into the miraculous in the everyday. Her article on the IONS blog will give you some of her definitions and a deeper exploration if you want to check it out.
The curious link she’s made is that unconditional love also enhances our psychic abilities, particularly precognition, making it more possible for us to create a positive future for ourselves and others.
In this framework, we understand unconditional love not as an emotion, but as: a) A motivation, a guiding principle, which allows us to simultaneously feel any emotion and still be driven by this compassionate impulse toward ourselves and others.
b) A field or force, like electricity, which we can “plug into”. It is always there and always available, and all we need to do is tap into it.
There’s very little we need to do to link ourselves up with the field of unconditional love, and each of us, like with the Homing Thought above, will have our unique ways to do so. However, she has a guided meditation online here if you’d like some inspiration to get started.
I imagine many of you will read the above and go, “well, duh!!”
For many spiritually-inclined people, the understanding that we’re held and carried by unconditional love is self-evident. Yet as a culture we’re not living that reality, so we need to amplify it until it becomes our shared normal.
Before encountering Dr.Mossbridge’s work, this concept was familiar to me through the practice of Reiki, in which we become conduits for the intelligent Universal Life/Love Force without effort, purely through our intention to be of service with integrity.
In Reiki, we can bring this healing force not just to someone who’s ill or in pain, but to any situation, place or problem.
Ultimately, whether we’re coming at the same phenomenon from a spiritual lineage or tradition, or from a secular perspective, unconditional love is our home and birthright, and the substrate on which all other right relationship with ourselves, human and non-human others, and with the Cosmos itself, can grow.
An (Energy) Separation Object
Another one of my go-to energy tools, from the clairvoyant lineage originating with Lewis Bostwick, is called a “separation object”. This is an energy object you create with your imagination, feeling and intention, and then set to orbit around you at the edge of your field.
This energetic construct is meant to create a buffer space between you and the energies of your environment, intercepting energies that would create chaos in our field or cause us to lose coherence.
When we work with energy intentionally, it’s less recommended to create energetic shields for ourselves, as they can block the healthy input and output of lifeforce from our energy system.
We can choose to shield or cloak ourselves in specific situations, such as when we know we’ll be around people who don’t respect our wellbeing or don’t have our best interests at heart. Then, when we’re in a more neutral environment again, we can purposefully put our shield away, and go back to shining openly!
The thing is though, that whether we know it or not, we’re always creating energetic forms with our thoughts and emotions. So if we feel habitually unsafe or overwhelmed, we’ll tend to carry some dense energies around our energy field or particular energetic centers — effectively shielding, shrouding or masking our intrinsic light.
“Wearing” a separation object around our energy field becomes a more mindful, intentional replacement for our unconscious shields. Rather than obscuring us, it carves out some extra room for us to be in our own vibration in the presence of others, giving us that extra breathing space to respond from our wisest self.
To create your own separation object, here’s a template you can try:
Visualize, or “craft” — using any of your inner senses — the object inside your imagination: ideally it’s something beautiful, uplifting or funny, or all three. It can be a being too: an animal, a plant, a magical being, a symbolic item. You decide.
Note that what you choose can also determine how approachable you feel to others, so dial in what you need according to what you’ll be doing. I recommend keeping the feel positive/uplifting regardless, as this is one of those “the energy you put out is the energy you get back” situations.
Add a grounding cord: this is an energy device you use to connect your separation object with the core of the planet. You can imagine a strong cable, a rope or vine made out of light, a tree trunk, or anything you wish.
Give your item/being some instructions:
My basic set of instructions is “intercept any energies that would lower my vibration when coming into contact with my field. Send those energies down the grounding cord to be recycled at the center of the Earth. Only allow that which will raise my vibration to enter my field”. You can add any other instructions you feel will be helpful, for instance, if you know you’ll be meeting a person who’s difficult, violent or hurtful to be with, you can make a separation object specifically to intercept that person’s energy before it moves into your field, and give the instruction to return their energy to them.
Set your separation object to circle at a fast speed around you, at the edge of your aura. You can check in with it once in a while and re-affirm the intention, or let it eventually fade and make a new one as needed. Let yourself be playful and experimental.
This handy tool is intended to be a complement to the two above, as feeling enveloped in this additional layer of protection can give us the necessary ground to stay focused on both unconditional love, and on our Homing Thought.
If you’d like further, tailored support to develop your own practice of energetic self-protection, consider booking one or more sessions with me. Check out the menu of options here, or email me at hello@karineglinton.com to see if working together is a good match for your situation.
