Upping Your Vibe

We’ve all felt it.  Someone walks into a room and the energy shifts.  Perhaps the person brings a sense of heaviness.  Or tension.  Or an uplifting feeling that elevates the mood and makes everyone smile.

Isn’t it interesting that we can feel stressed around some people but good around others?  We carry this energetic residue and can emit it ourselves.  This is because we’re made of energy, in mind, body and spirit.  So what we feel when we’re around others turns into how we feel.  Energy is a vibration that travels in waves, attracting like energy.

If our energy is low, we may attract poor health, stress, moodiness, tension, anxiety, relationship challenges, complaints, the feeling that nothing is going right.  We can get stuck in this downward spiral and struggle our way through difficult times.  Negativity is contagious with the ability to infect and influence the behavior of others.

When our energy is elevated, we may experience overall wellness, positive outcomes, helpful and supportive people, high energy, the ability to handle challenges in stride, gratitude, creativity, flow, inner peace and happiness, laughter and joy.  When we’re in a great mood, everything seems to go our way – people smile and treat us well, traffic lights turn green as we approach and synchronicities that seem to unfold like magic.  This is an upward spiral that we can ride indefinitely.

Creating positive energy is a skill, a muscle we can exercise and get stronger.  The best way I know is through supportive wellness practices, along with loving ourselves and connecting to divine energy to boost our positive energy supply.  Surrounding ourselves with positive messages and reminders also go a long way. Gratitude for the day, for our life, for our loved ones, for ourselves, for the blessings we have – all fill the tank and uplift the spirit.

Why is keeping our vibe high important?  Studies have shown that positive thinking leads to good health and life success.  But optimism and positive thinking are not about focusing only on the good.  It’s not about ignoring the negative or avoiding life challenges.  Actually, it’s a tool to calmly face everything that life brings – the joys, the challenges, the highs and the lows.  It keeps us out of fight or flight reaction and centers us in our own power to handle whatever comes our way.

Now that sounds wonderful in theory, but in practice, we all come up against negativity from time to time.  How do we become aware of negativity and work with it without dwelling in it?

I suggest a three-step process to handle negativity:  1. Awareness, 2. Reframing, and 3. Releasing.  Here’s how it works:

1.     Awareness

Actively scan your thoughts, words and actions for negative attitudes, expressions and counterproductive behaviors.  Can you recognize where the flow of life feels restricted or your body feels tense?  Those are signs of fear and negativity.  Allow those feelings to be there and honor the fact that something feels off.  It’s a signal to look deeper.

If this is new to you, a great place to start becoming aware is in your self-talk – the things you say to yourself – and in what you say to others.  Note whenever you use a tone that’s critical, judgmental or blaming and pessimistic words such as can’t, won’t, hate, give up or never.  The act of noticing is the first step in amending behavior.

2.     Reframing

The word reframe is defined as: to express words, concepts or plans differently, such as “I reframed my opinion,” meaning, I expressed it in a different manner.  This doesn’t mean there won’t be failure or disappointment.  But reframing the situation as a lesson for growth can be helpful, especially if you can get to a place where you believe that all experiences work out for your greatest good.  Visualize best case scenarios – what can go right?  That’s the kind of thinking that can take us from problems to solutions.

What’s interesting about reframing is it actually has impact on our physical bodies.  For example, you may be exploring a significant life change and every time you envision making the change, you may feel clutched by fear.  You can acknowledge the fear while finding ways to think of past successes and times of resilience you can apply to this current situation.

3.     Releasing

The Oxford dictionary defines the word releasing as:  allow or enable to escape from confinement, to set free.  I love this definition.  I get a sense of birds in flight and a lightness of being.

That’s what you’re looking for in this step – to identify the things you’re consciously or subconsciously carrying around that no longer serve.  Once you do, you can either let them go or find a way to emotionally detach from them.  The energetics of emotions, such as disappointment, hurt, pain, shame and guilt along with the need to forgive others and yourself, carry weight.

What are you lugging around these days that may be depleting your energy?  Try setting it down.  You can always pick it up again.  But my sense is that once you feel what it’s like not to carry it, you’ll probably choose to travel lighter.

Both energy awareness and positivity are wellness tools.  They can transform pessimism into optimism.  The glass may be half empty, but it’s also half full.

Journal Reflections:  Do you naturally connect with positivity or negativity?  If it’s positivity, how can you leverage that attitude?  If you skew toward negativity, how might you begin to work toward a more positive outlook?