No matter how hard we may try to avoid it, I’ve come to believe we always take up all of the space allotted to us. How we do that makes all the difference.
I did a psychic reading for a client not long ago. As I went to look at her energy field, two things became apparent: one, she naturally had a fiery, highly creative quality to her nature. This showed up on my “viewing screen” (in my mind’s eye) as colorful flames all around her. In fact, this seemed like her spirit’s preferred state — inhabiting a very dynamic and fluid field. But the second thing was curious.
The aura is often described as a multi-layered, fluid structure around our physical body, made up of subtle energy. “At rest” it’s either egg or sphere-shaped, with our physical form as the “yolk”. ‘
(In a psychic reading session, I am able to perceive information about a person’s field as the meeting place of body, mind, heart and spirit, where much of our patterns of thought, behavior and alignment or misalignment are reflected. I do this using a blend of clairvoyance, clairsentience and claircognizance, psychic senses that are available to all of us.)
As I got a snapshot of her current state, my client’s aura looked like a cube! Unlike her more natural, free-flow form, the cube form was dense, edgy and compressed. I mentioned this discrepancy and she said,
“I’ve spent the last two days non-stop working on finishing up the tax report for my business. I hate doing that stuff”.
That explained it! Though very unusual in shape, I want to stress that nothing was inherently off with my client’s aura at that time. In seeing her aura as a cube, I was perceiving the energetic correlates of her doing highly linear, demanding, boring tasks. She had to reconfigure her preferred expression into one that wasn’t optimal for her, yes, but once the tax return was filed, her field would return to its joyful, feisty, creative everyday self.
But what happens when patterns of contraction like the one I just described become a habit?
Remember when well-meaning but annoyed adults told you to stop making faces as a kid “or else your face will get stuck like that”? Something like that can happen in our energy field, though it can be addressed. I feel it’s important to become aware of what habits like these mean for us at both a felt and a conceptual level, so we can bring more wholeness into our ways of doing and being. Today, I want to address a very specific pattern of habitual misalignment.
Taking Up Space
In personal development, the topic of learning to “take up space” is a perennial one, and for good reason.
We’re taught to conform to expectations, edit out parts of ourselves and our expression to make others comfortable.
(Yes, part of the process of learning how to be a contributing adult human entails being trained out of certain spontaneous, wild or self-centered behaviors. But that’s not what’s at stake when the question of taking up space normally comes up.)
Instead, we’re looking at a phenomenon whereby subtle or overt forms of shaming, humiliation, and withholding of love or support — fully normalized ones, very often — were applied on a young person, such that they had to learn to abandon healthy, purposeful and deeply life-giving parts of themselves to cater to the needs of woundedothers who couldn’t or wouldn’t face their pain enough to stop passing it on.
One of the ways we might respond to this insidious relational violence is by shrinking — our body collapses, our voice gets smaller, our emotional range is confined to only a few tones and hues. We don’t develop a rooted feeling of confidence or self-trust. We’ve internalized the message that we should be “less of ourselves” and more of what will keep others content, keep them from looking too closely at our mask for any obvious cracks.
In this context, taking up space is all about reclaiming authenticity, and stepping out of the win-lose dichotomy of “my needs” versus “their needs”. As a result of inhabiting our full selfhood, even the gnarlier parts, we take on the behaviors we typically mean when using the shorthand “taking up space”, for instance:
- Using our voice to express needs, emotional states, to request things of others or to state our limits so that we won’t be inadvertently pushed past them.
- Showing our individuality when we’re in social situations, whether that’s with family, friends, at work, or maybe just in a crowd.
- Being visible with our values and what we stand for.
Can we ever not take up space?
Here comes the twist, and with it, allow me to relate a piece of my healing story.
When I was somewhere toward the beginning of my trauma healing journey, I joined a spiritual business course (unrelated to healing per se). In it, we were invited to practice a guided meditation where we got in contact with our soul, and initiated a dialogue with it. During my meditation, what I connected with practically made me recoil. To my habitual personality at the time, she felt loud, demanding. Attention-seeking. Immature. Too intense. No filter.
Somehow, I knew that this was an essential part of me, but I’d learned to despise this piece of my soul — through countless mirror reflections in the eyes of others who had radically different emotional needs from mine. In the meditation, I could viscerally feel that part of me as having been “cut out” of my middle. I couldn’t imagine how I could allow her to take up any space. She was dangerous! She was going to hurt or alienate the people I cared about!
Of course, she didn’t just disappear: she wasn’t hiding in a closet at home when I went out in the world. She came with me wherever I went, and continued to inform and influence my vibration without me realizing it. And, I should add, without me owning and claiming the strengths and the beauty and the gifts she offered, nor being able to fully curb her unbalanced expression, when it was called for. Over time, I’ve learned to do these things better and better, although to be honest, it’s an ongoing, spiraling journey.
At the time though, I was caught up in the trap of “not taking up space”, specifically by unconsciously, but powerfully, aiming to erase a part of me that had been deemed too much by others.
What I’m about to share is exactly what I would like to say to my younger self, at that moment of recoiling, flinching in the face of an exiled part of her soul:
From my humble perspective, we can never not occupy all of the energetic space allotted to us. It’s futile to keep struggling to try, so you’d better learn to own all of who and what you are.
What I’d been trying to do to keep myself under the radar was never actually going to work out.
This was before I became a psychic by trade, but since then, I’ve gotten to witness many iterations of this archetypal struggle in my clients, and see what effect it has on our energy fields.
Picture your aura as a house that you live in. Now say there’s something you’ve deemed undesirable about one or two rooms in the house, so much so you decide never to go in those rooms. Now let a year, two years, ten years go by… who knows what the state of those rooms is now? Musty and full of cobwebs, probably. If there was a leak in the ceiling, or mold on a wall, you might never know. Not ideal.
But the dimensions of the house never changed!
Just because we’ve needed to edit some part of ourselves, erase external evidence of it for our safety or to maintain a fragile but necessary sense of connection, doesn’t mean it disappears in reality — not from a soul-level view.
Energetically, the basic container and all of its component parts have stayed the same. But now, some of them are being filtered through the repressive influence of shame. This filtering leads to unwellness in its many forms. It limits our soul’s ability to inhabit the world and do what it came here to do. But in the end, it doesn’t do what it says on the tin. In the long term, it’s not a worthwhile sacrifice.
Here, I feel, is the biggest betrayal in how we’re led to adopt the coping mechanism of taking up less space — the betrayal of cultural structures, ways of childrearing, of relating to one another, and of punishing “ways that things are” that encourage us abandoning ourselves for our emotional and/or material survival.
Once we come into safer or more stable life situations, unless we take on an active journey of re-integrating all of who we are — into the fold and the warmth of our presence and awareness — we’ll likely continue with the same pattern of showing up as less than our full self. But the lie is imagining that we are, in fact, making ourselves smaller, and that others are truly made more comfortable with our seeming unoccupied space.
Just like my client, whose aura appeared cubical, we can temporarily shape our energy into a denser, contracted or contorted form. But the soul, and the auric field it inhabits, cannot be made into less than what it is. We are still taking up the same amount of space, which is no more and no less than all of us. Even if our life force retracts its presence, vibrancy, and awareness out of certain areas of our vibrational container.
The uncared-for, uninhabited, denied or exiled parts of our selfhood and experience, then, remain as derelict patches in our aura. We bring those cordoned off “chunks” of ourselves into every interaction, with all of the unforeseen, subterranean impacts of their being abandoned.
Like with the shuttered rooms in a house, all kinds of trouble can come from us closing the door and never setting foot in them. Energetically, spiritually and psychologically, these become habituated blind spots, numb spots, and even potential openings for less-than-optimal, external influences to make contact with us. Other people will still unconsciously perceive these parts of our field, and may even sense that something’s not quite right with our vibration, as we try to have less of a footprint or impact in our relationship with the world.
When in relational peril, we can’t know or apply this understanding: I want to make clear that recognizing and healing the impact of coping by trying — and failing — to reduce ourselves should be a compassionate process. Basic safety is a prerequisite to applying what I’m sharing here. We can’t know all of this when we’re young and others haven’t taken the time to teach us the skill of inhabiting our space with fullness. But in the end, we can’t help but show up to every place, every connection, every moment, with all of who we are — with our complete energetic field right there with us. The difference is whether we are owning, and claiming every part of it, or not.
This is very similar to how, in astrology, we can never “get rid of” a planet in the natal chart. The energies will be expressed in our identities and our lives whether we, or others, like them or not.
In our natal chart, we all have “soft planets” like Venus and the Moon, and “hard planets” like Pluto and Uranus. Depending on where you grew up and how you were socialized, you may have had to hide away one side or the other, your “softness” or your “hardness” — or parts of both. But they didn’t disappear, and unless we learn to integrate them back into full acceptance and honoring of their energies, they will express themselves in terms of their lowest common denominator, or perhaps more precisely, in whatever ways we can manage while on autopilot, with no conscious control or intention.
The process of (re) learning to both feel and allow the full weight of our impact on life, expanding to inhabit our whole energetic field in every encounter is a tender one, unique to each of us. With the right people and right support on our side, learning to channel those archetypes or soul qualities that are more difficult for us ( as I needed to learn in befriending that one soul-part which seemed too demanding, “too much”), can even be fun, creative, and full of flair.
One thing that’s helped me immensely is taking a soul-level view: that just because the current iteration of human culture I live in doesn’t find a particular archetypal or energetic quality palatable, doesn’t mean anything to the soul. In fact, I believe that each soul chooses the exact configuration of energies they are here to express and explore, precisely because of how those energies will provide the best avenues for growth. For learning what they are wanting to learn, explore and soak up while on Earth. That’s a much bigger agenda than living in service of making other people comfortable with our demeanor and choices in life.
Love, Power and Embodied Peacemaking
“Embodied peacemaking” is a term used by somatic educator Paul Linden. With his background in Aikido, he teaches students, especially those who have experienced trauma (both acute and complex), how to take a step further beyond traditional healing.
He advocates for training ourselves, so that it becomes second nature, to add new responses to our emotional and behavioral repertoire, especially during challenging interactions, conflict and confrontation. These are times where we’d typically go into fight/flight/freeze, but Linden shares how there are other ways we can learn to respond by practicing body-states that reflect both qualities of power and love. In his view, these two qualities are complementary and represent the balance we need to show up in the world fully.
In other words, he teaches people to take up space even when, or especially when that space is contested. But the wisdom I’ve learned from his teachings is that the most effective way, the most empowered way, is ultimately by being in conflict from a body that is relaxed, centered, expanded, and connected.
Can you imagine what the world would look like if we all learned to take up space in this way?
I can picture it as a step in completely breaking the power-over paradigm that causes so much suffering in our world, and which underpins everything I’ve discussed in this post.
Our physical bodies and energetic bodies are intimately intertwined, always informing one another. So if you yourself have struggled with taking up space, as I have, and want to learn new ways of bringing your aliveness and presence to both your field and your body, I can recommend practicing the exercises Linden shares in the following resource (and check out the rest of his work if this interests you!).
A Quick, Simple Way to Fill Your Space
For a simple, fast, in-the-moment reset of how you’re filling up of your energetic container, try the following exercise:
Energy always follows our intention and attention. A very powerful energetic anchor for our own vibration is our name. If you feel yourself struggling to take up space at any given time, or need a boost in that department, take a moment to visualize yourself writing your own name (with as much gusto as you can) all around your auric field, onto your chakras (if you’re familiar with them), and/or on the walls of the space you’re in. I like to picture using a big fat marker, or colorful, dripping paint. Use whatever feeling tone, attitude and imagery feels fun and empowering in the moment! Play and fun raise our vibration, and make it easier to get to the kind of balanced power-and-love state I touch on above. So give yourself permission to be silly, creative and over the top here.
If visualizing is hard, try doing this exercise by physically writing in the air, as though you were finger painting, around your physical space, or on your body. You can also try a sound-based variation: speak your own name — outloud or in your mind — to your field, into the room you’re in, or to each of your chakras, until you feel your own signature vibration taking up every nook and cranny of your aura. Here, too, making it fun is the way to go!
Sessions with me
For any of you reading who are looking for some extra support and guidance on these themes from an energy healing, psychic or astrological perspective (or all three), I have two session spots still open for October, and a handful in November.
If you’re wanting to take advantage of the current discounted sessions I’m offering (aura healing, and energy work mentoring) , you have until the end of November to do so!
Check out these specials under Autumn Tune Up (and my regular services) here, or email me at hello@karineglinton.com if you have any questions or would like to check out if working together would be helpful for your individual situation. I look forward to working with some of you!
