Master Your Energy - Part 6 (Spiritual Energy)

Spiritual energy is also the most subtle and difficult to master. It hides underneath the surface and is best understood through values, purpose, wisdom and intuition inspiring and guiding your thoughts, feelings, decisions, and actions. In this final post of the series on Mastering Your Energy, I will cover the different aspects of your spiritual energy and health, including how to harness and renew this capacity to thrive in and truly enjoy your life.

“The work we must do next is less cerebral and more spiritual. It’s work located in the heart and in the soul, and not in the mind. Because it is our soul that is the key to our happiness (or our unhappiness), contentment (or discontent), moderation (or gluttony), and stillness (or perturbation).” (Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key)

Purpose and meaning: the power of why

“Tapping into spiritual energy means calling on the energy of your best self.” (Tony Schwartz, The Way We Work Isn’t Working)

You tap into your spiritual energy when you align your actions and decisions with what truly matters to you or with a greater purpose. Purpose is defined as “the intention, aim, or function of something; the thing that something is supposed to achieve” or the “meaning that is important and valuable to you” (Oxford Learner’s Dictionary). Maybe you haven’t identified your life purpose yet. Maybe you feel it has evolved and does not resonate with what you feel called to do now. The important is to tap into a deeper sense of meaning, the deeper why you are doing whatever you invest your energy in, why you are living the lifestyle you do.

When you know the deep purpose behind what you do and how you choose to live, you find yourself persevering and believing in your goals and your vision for the future despite challenges and setbacks. Think of situations where you had to do something new and difficult and persevered despite discomfort. Can you recall the why, the driving force behind it? Now, think of another situation where you were asked to do something that you felt was meaningless. Even if that task or activity was not challenging, you may have found yourself lacking motivation and energy to engage with it. You may even have felt drained doing it while in contrast, pursuing something difficult that was meaningful to you probably uplifted you even if it was physically, emotionally, or mentally demanding. Having a purpose or a strong why is very powerful! It increases your energy and resilience.

Knowing your values brings clarity

If purpose gives you a sense of direction, values help you get clear on the things that are important to you in this present moment. A value is “something (such as a principle or quality) intrinsically valuable or desirable.” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). Values are just an aspiration, not necessarily a quality we express through our actions all the time. “Even if we’re not always embodying our deepest values, reconnecting with them can be a source of energy and an inspiration to begin to live them more fully.” (Schwartz)

Your values, whether implicit or explicit, contribute to defining who you are and what you stand for. They influence your actions and decisions whether you are aware of them or not. When you take time to identify your core values, they can help you prioritize, focus, and make decisions. They help direct your overall energy where it matters to you. When you act in alignment with your values, you live with integrity, are authentic and feel coherent. Alignment allows energy to flow with ease within and through you. When there is a gap, you may feel drained due to the internal conflict and disconnected from who we truly are.

When you have a strong sense of purpose and you know your core values, you gain clarity and a sense of direction and coherence in your life. You know what you stand for which helps you prioritize, focus, and be more resilient. Purpose and values fuel passion, perseverance, and courage in face of adversity.

How do you get in touch with what you truly value and feel drawn to contribute to? You need to connect to your intuition and heart’s intelligence.

Intuition and heart’s intelligence

Intuition is “the ability to understand or know something without conscious reasoning.” (Doc Childre and al., Heart Intelligence) It comes from In-tuir which means “looking, regarding or knowing from within.” In a world where most of our attention is directed outward, it can be challenging to hear the voice of who you truly are. “You have to practice opening and connecting with the heart for intuition to grow within you.” The heart is the “access point to the wisdom of our soul or higher source.”

If you sit still and in silence and bring your attention inwards (this takes practice!), you will hear this little voice whispering and inspiring you to serve something larger than yourself. This voice is not the loud one in your head (your ego) ruminating about the past, worrying about the future, judging everything that is happening, and discouraging you from stepping outside your comfort zone. Your inner guidance speaks through subtle insights and nudges that always guide you towards what is best for you.

It has been scientifically demonstrated that the heart processes information on its own, without the intervention of the brain. This is what the HeartMath Institute calls the heart’s intelligence. Heart intelligence is “the flow of awareness, understanding and intuitive guidance” which “directs perception and clarity independently of the mind’s reasoning processes.”

There are many benefits of tuning into and following your heart’s guidance. In a state of heart coherence that allows you to hear your inner guidance, you can experience more ease and flow and experience heightened insights for more effective choices in daily living. When you connect to Source, you take inspired action, rather than reactive, habitual, and fear-based actions.

Surrendering and having faith

To open up to our heart’s intelligence, we first need to accept that there is something bigger than ourselves that is guiding us. “The common language for accepting a higher power is about “letting [Him or Her or It] into your heart.” That’s it. This is about rejecting the tyranny of our intellect, of our immediate observational experience, and accepting something bigger, something beyond ourselves.” (Holiday) When we want to connect to our intuition and Higher Self, we first need to believe in something bigger than ourselves, beyond our limited and biased ego interpretation of reality. We need to surrender and have faith in our inner guidance. Relax and let go of our need to control and accept life as it unfolds. “Flow is faith in action.” (Choquette). We need to turn our ego-mind into a faithful servant of the Spirit. accept our heart as the captain and the brain as the servant and not the other way around.

Link to emotions

Your ability to connect to your intuition depends on your emotional state (and overall state of coherence between your body, heart and brain). As we cover in the blog post on emotional energy, low vibe emotions (fear and stressed-based) reduce your abilities to think clearly and negatively impact your health. They also disconnect you from your intuition and inner wisdom. To connect to and hear our heart speaks, we need to practice bringing ourselves into high vibe emotions such as care, appreciation, gratitude, love and joy. When you vibe high, you can access your highest potential and intuitive insights.

As we saw previously, it is not easy to raise and maintain your vibration high. We all have “addictive low vibration habits” (Childre) such as impatience, frustration, irritation, blame, and judgment. It is easy to fall prey to these lower emotions when we are stressed and operating from fear. As we become more aware of our emotional setpoint, thinking patterns, and behavioral habits, we can slowly shift from these unwanted feelings and choose to experience feelings of care and appreciation. We become better at self-regulating our emotions so that we can walk our why and act in alignment with what matters to us. We realize that we are not our emotions.

Collective intelligence

Individuals who are in a heart coherent state (connected to their heart and experiencing higher frequency emotions) can induce social coherence which enables collective intelligence. When you activate collective intelligence, you can “share insights and crystallize future possibilities” (Childre). Most organizations are dysfunctional, operating from fear and control (induced by constant stress). If you can bring a group of people to operate from emotions of care and appreciation you can change the organizational culture to make it more heart centric. Heart-based living and leadership help make better decisions, allow for more authentic communications and better emotional management, reduce mistakes, and increase energy, creativity, productivity, and resilience. When there is social coherence, we witness a spirit of openness, general respect, and collaboration. People feel more connected, less separated. There is more flow and ease and less situational resistance. We can increase this heart-based awareness by releasing judgments and separation and acting with more kindness, compassionate, love and joy.

It’s all about connection

“Social coherence requires personal responsibility for our energy.” (Childre)

As I mentioned in a previous post, everything is energy. This means that we are all connected beyond the physical dimension we can sense and interpret with our mind. Taking care of your spiritual health thus involved paying attention and caring for your ‘energetic’ relationship with your higher self (or Soul or the Observer behind your thoughts), others, and nature. If you are connected whether you are aware of it or not, ‘feeling’ that you are connected is a great source of energy. When you can sense that you exist beyond your thoughts, emotions, and physical body, this creates a sense of expansion and well-being that can energize you whatever your circumstances.

Social connection is also great way to combat stress. As Dr Stephen Porges mentions in Finding Mastery podcast, “when you feel more secure through your connections, you become bolder, which means more creative.” Feeling safe in relationships allows for the fear-based response to be mediated and for our body to relax and open-up. When we are operating from fear, we close and get defensive.

When we can let down our guards and connect heart to heart, we can amplify the frequency of the group and help raise our own vibration. Deep, authentic connection has regenerative benefits: it shifts us “from short-term survival (me vs you) to long-term significance of I and Thou (Ubuntu).” (Childre) When we intentionally bring our attention towards caring for others and the environment, we feel less lost and alone. When someone holds space for us to be truly open and authentic, this helps us raise our consciousness, see our shadow, heal our wounds, and release beliefs and thinking patterns that are no longer serving us.

Being in alignment is not easy

Living our values, acting in alignment with what matters to us or what we truly want is not easy. When we are not in alignment, we feel disconnected, lack vitality, and can even become sick. When we are not clear on our values and purpose and are not listening to our heart’s intelligence, it is more difficult to make decisions and feel powerless. We may find ourselves lacking time for what matters. We end-up feeling like we lost ourselves, not knowing who we are and what we care about. We feel like we are living someone else’s life and are stuck in the rat race, busy-ness of life. “Lack of alignment between what our mind says and what our intuitive heart is quietly trying to tell us can be one of the biggest unrecognized sources of stress.” (Schwartz)

How do we fall out of alignment? “It’s when we feel under threat and most overwhelmed that we tend to behave in contradiction to our deepest values.” (Schwartz) When we are stressed, we can’t connect to our heart and listen to our intuition. The fear centre of our brain takes over. “When we lose touch with our intuition or find ourselves too distracted or insecure to trust what we feel inside, we fall out of integrity with our true Self and surrender our creative ability to respond to life’s circumstances, leaving us with limited ways of finding authentic peace and well-being.” (Sonia Choquette, Tune In). The stress and internal chaos of ignoring our intuition can turn into physical and psychological illnesses.

Often, the gap between how we live and our values is “simply about neglect – doing nothing at all or less than you believe you should in a given area of your life.” (Schwartz) Whatever the gap, there is always a story we are telling ourselves and others that makes the gap acceptable (see previous blog post about the power of our beliefs and stories). There is a trade-off we made. The question is: what is this story, this trade-off costing you and others and is it still acceptable to you? One of the underlying beliefs many in our modern society are holding is that there is not or never enough. We seek to fill the emptiness inside us with external accomplishments. But feeling we have and are “enough comes from the inside. It comes from stepping off the train, from seeing what you already have, what you’ve always have.” (Holiday)

Freedom of choice, self-empowerment, and courage

“Our heart energy brings fortitude and resilience into our intentions.” (Childre)

As we learn to connect to our heart and listen to our intuition, we realize that we always have a choice. When you feel grounded and in alignment, it can feel like you have more choices than you previously thought. It opens possibilities. You witness the stories you are telling yourself and your limiting beliefs and can choose to update or upgrade them. You can move past your “triggers” and fear-based reactions, better discern options, and choose what is best for you and the greatest good. You also access a powerful source of courage and energy.

When you connect to your heart and inner wisdom, you also realize that nobody is making you do what you’re doing. You have made the choice, consciously or not. This is an insight that can hit you hard when you truly understand it from your heart, but it is also empowering. I had that experience shortly after my divorce when, sitting by the river, I realized that from now on, I could not blame anyone for my failure to pursue my dreams and desired life. It felt scary and liberating at the same time to let go of the story that I couldn’t do what I loved because of my marriage. Today, I know that following my heart is not easy and often leading me towards unfamiliar and non-traditional paths, but it always rewards me with growth, joy, gratitude, and a feeling of expansion and freedom.

“Acting on our intuition is one of the most empowering choices we can make in our lives. We can’t control the outside world, but by tuning in, listening to our Spirit, and following our intuition, we can begin to chart a new course – one that brings about deep satisfaction and personal peace – regardless of what’s going on around us.” (Choquette)

When you learn to enter a state of heart-brain coherence and tune in to your intuition, it allows you to respond with wisdom rather than react to events. Decisions from a heart-centered place are empowering. Those made from fear are limiting. But wisdom without courage is useless. “It takes courage and commitment to live our deepest values and cultivate our best selves.” (Schwartz) As says Ryan Holiday in this short video, “You cannot be a coward. The first virtue of stoicism is courage. It’s the virtue upon which all the other virtue depends. Doing the right thing requires courage. What is the point of wisdom if it is not to give you insight as to what to be courageous about?”

Why does it take so much courage to follow our wisdom and intuitive guidance? Because doing so often requires a “transformational shift”, a willingness to “rearrange your priorities a little, examine and change your beliefs one at a time as needed, patiently implement new habits and behaviors, and allow your Spirit to influence you on a daily basis.” (Choquette). You have to “choose to listen to the deep, inner you over the outer world, and be open and vulnerable enough to say so and act on your intuition. You may meet with resistance from within and criticism from outward, but none will be greater than the power of your true Self when it’s in charge.”

Whatever you do, it is your choice. You always have the choice. The best place to make decision is from your heart or inner guidance. Your higher self always guides you towards the best course of action for you and humanity. To hear or rather sense the nudges from your intuition, you need to calm down and tune in. When you are stressed, distracted, and moving through your day mindlessly, you won't hear it.

Fear disempowers us

Fear disempowers us and is the “biggest collective challenge across the planet”. “Fear put a haze around our sensible assessments and choices by numbing our higher reasoning capacity.” (Childre) Fear separates us from one another, but also cut us off from our intuitive guidance and higher potential. Fear allows our ego to take over. But “we have the choice to practice emotional regulation when triggered by fear” so that we can hear and follow guidance from our higher or best self.

As more of us choose love over fear, connection over separation, we will be able to create a healthier and more fair and resilient society. But for that to happen, we need to first get still and then act on our inspiration, not our impulses to transform fear into power. “Whatever it is that you do, I promise you, it will be better the less motivated, the less informed by fear that you are.” (Holiday) When you are inspired, you are “taking the Spirit in.” (Choquette) You move from worry, resistance and fear towards a state of flow which makes you feel more positive, confident and creative. You open-up to the adventure of life!

Stillness is the key

“Don’t feed insecurity. Don’t feed delusions of grandeur. Both are obstacles to stillness.” (Holiday)

Inner stillness “facilitates connection to our natural inner wisdom and guidance.” (Childre) It is “the primary source for increasing our foresight and discernment.” We can tune inward by shutting down outside noise and inputs. But we must first learn and appreciate the value of slowing down. Slowing down allows us to notice ad listen. Slowing down the body and the mind allows us to create space to connect with our heart. A space that allows for vision, emotional regulation, and inspired action. However, “stillness requires practice because our mind will try to occupy that space.”

Spending and renewing your spiritual energy

“What is the point if your soul is not alive?” (R. Sharma)

To balance your spiritual energy pillar, you need practices that connect you to your spirit and engagements towards others and something bigger than yourself. You need to balance care for yourself and care for others (Schwartz). When you care for others, you ‘spend’ your spiritual energy by turning values into action: serving others, connecting to others, and taping into energy of our best self. When you care for yourself, you ‘renew’ your energy with practices such as meditation, introspection, prayer, reflection, mindfulness.

If we don’t take care of ourselves, we may experience overcare. “Overcare is when our initial feelings of care about something or someone turn into worry, anxiety and overidentification – this can escalate into emotional depletion and the obvious stress that follows.” (Childre) Care has a “balance point”. When we are out of balance, caring drains us, reduces our ability to help, and can lead us to an “energetic burnout”. When we are in “balanced care”, caring nurtures us and others at the same time. “With commitment and our heart’s guidance we can free ourselves from the seductive stress that (the habit of) overcare and constant worry bring us.” (Childre)

How to master your spiritual energy

Are you ready to tap into your spiritual power? First, I encourage you to review the proposed tactics from the previous blog posts on the physical, emotional, and mental energy pillars. The healthier you are and the less restrictions you put on the flow of your energy, the better you will be able to tune in to the infinite source of inspiration and energy. Key practices are those elevating your emotional frequency, reducing mental clutter and worry, and giving your body the high vibe food, sleep, movement and rest it needs for your energy to flow freely.

Here are 10 practices that you can try to harness your spiritual energy pillar:

1. Identify your purpose and values

Not sure how to identify your values? First, find a list of values: there are many free versions on the internet. When you are ready, connect to your heart’s intuitive guidance by sitting still, closing your eyes, and taking 10 slow deep breaths imagining the air flowing in and through your heart. Once heart-centered, circle all the values that resonate with you. Select them from your heart, not your head. Pick as many values that resonate with you in the first round without assessing or judging them. Then, go through your selection and try to reduce the list to top 10 values. You may choose to combine values together under one umbrella value. Finally, reduce the list further to the top five values you feel you aspire to live by the most. If you find it hard to identify your values, reflect on what you cannot stand in others, which usually contrasts with what you stand for.

For your purpose, I suggest you start by becoming aware of activities and pursuits that light you up. Make a list of all the things, places, people, and pursuits that give you energy, uplift you and make you feel joy, love, and abundance. Consider working with a coach that can help you with the process. Often, our mind gets in the way, and we need to remove what is holding us back to allow our true purpose to be felt, understood and embraced.

2. Practice mindfulness, deep breathing and meditation

Mindfulness and meditation are not only good to train attention as suggested in the previous blog post on Mental Energy, they also help us witness and raise above our thoughts, feelings, and sensations and recognize that we are more than what we experience. We are also the observer. Deep, slow breathing also helps us calm down our nervous system and connect to our higher self (the part of us that is aware of the thoughts and emotions). We also become more conscious, more accepting, can see the bigger picture, and feel a deeper sense of connection and purpose. When we sit still, in silence, and paying attention to breath and the present moment, we get to hear our intuitive guidance.

3. Set heart-inspired intentions

o As you saw in the blog post on Mental Energy, setting intentions can help you align your actions with your values. The key here is to let your inner voice identify the intentions that will then give clear instructions to your brain. For example, my ego may tell me to focus on what I look like and my performance in front of my colleagues. My inner voice may rather suggest that I focus on being present and listening to my colleagues.

4. Act on your inspired actions now

Don’t wait for your brain to find 1000 excuses to not do it as I covered in the previous blog post. It takes practice to listen to and trust your heart’s intelligence. I am sure you can recall a time when you didn’t listen to your hunch (inspired action) and regrated it later, learning your lesson the hard way. I am sure you also remember a situation when you acted spontaneously and felt a great sense of joy and creativity as a result. Many of us have learned to hold back because we often confuse spontaneity with impulsiveness. Being impulsive is reacting to an emotional impulse. Spontaneity is acting in the moment based on intuitive guidance.

5. Make time for connecting with others

Invest some of your energy to build and maintain good relationships that make you feel safe, seen and loved. The more you surround yourself with people who makes you feel safe to be yourself and express your who you truly are, the more you will experience high vibe emotions and the easier it will be to tap into the energy of your best self (spiritual energy). Deep connection with others also allows you to release stress an renew your energy.

6. Do what you love

Are you putting everyone else and your obligation before your own needs all the time? To feel alive and full of energy, it is important to nourish your soul by making time for people, places and pursuits that uplift you. Make time for what you love to do, even if you feel tired. I promise you, even a few minutes of doing what you really enjoy will uplift you and renew your energy.

7. Spend time in nature

When we spend time in nature, even only a few minutes per day walking by a river or in a park with trees, it reminds us that we belong to something bigger, that we are part of an ecosystem. Nature’s beauty and diversity can also wake up a sense of awe in you, connecting you to something sacred beyond what can be understood by your mind. Nature, especially trees, also make us feel better, uplift our mood, and help us tune in.

8. Close the alignment gap

Take time to do some introspection regularly and check in with yourself before deciding or investing your energy. You can ask yourself the following questions: What is the right thing to do? Am I serving something beyond myself? What rituals could I build that would create a better alignment between what I say I value and how I actually live?

9. Tune in to your intuition or Spirit everyday

Develop rituals that invite you to slow down and listen to your intuition at least once a day. Listen inward, open your heart, trust what you feel, let go of the fearful need to control things and (Choquette). You may want to take notes of the nudges, feelings, signs, and insights you get. This will help you get better at hearing (or sensing, seeing, etc) them.

10. Surround yourself with beauty and colors you like

Beautiful things, whether natural or manmade, helps us connect to higher vibration and source of creativity. Beauty is the expression of the sacredness of life. It speaks to our heart and soul and can heal us. Learn to appreciate the beauty of the ordinary. “It is better to find beauty in all places and things. Because it does surround us. And will nourish us if we let it.” (Holiday) And this is particularly true for nature. Nature’s beauty has the power to uplift you, to clear the clouds in your head, and inspire you to do great things. Colors also have different vibration. If you want to experience life in colors, add colors to your décor, your meal, your clothes, and objects you use everyday.

Remember to slow down, breath, tune in, accept, allow, enjoy, and flow.

Balance self-care with caring for others to avoid overcare.

Help others and serve a greater purpose to give your life a meaning.

Follow your heart and live in alignment with your values for more ease and fulfillment.