In dealing with energy, much of it has to do with all the stuff I discussed in the Mind portion of the Foundations series. You first have the physical aspect of energy and then the Mind’s components charge or transform the energy. Those components are Intentions, Emotions, Values, and Forces of the Mind. Each of those has a dedicated post in my Foundations series.
But the question now becomes, what happens to trapped or released energy? Where does it go? How does it affect me? And how does my energy affect others?
This is where we begin talking about Energy Fields.
As you know, we are not walking around in a vacuous space. Even when you stand in an empty field microscopic particles and even organisms surround you. And the same is true for outer space. We like to think of space as this great vacuum, but that has also been proven wrong. Space has tiny particles floating around and a thin membrane of Hydrogen and Helium.
Energy transfers in the kinetic state via exerted force. Every time you wave your arms you are consuming calories, a measure of physical energy from fuel you have consumed. You are then making striking movements and dispersing these particles and organisms around you. As these move and strike others in their way, there is a chain reaction of energetic movement. And all you did was probably stretch and yawn. But you have physically altered the energetic state of the space you and everything around you occupied. Physical touch is the first form of energy transfer in spirituality.
That leads us to the first Energy Field, the physical body. There are four energy fields I will be covering. It can be argued that there are more or less depending on “traditions” or what “teachings” you choose to follow. I am going to explain the commonly accepted four for the sake of simplicity. This post will be a deep dive into the Etheric Body.
The most basic energetic fields to know about are:
The Physical Body
The Etheric Body
The Astral Body
The Auric Body
The Physical Body
Often the most overlooked of the energetic field is the physical body itself. And when I say overlooked I am referring also to the teachings that would say the Physical Body is part of the Etheric Body. That kind of teaching limits and hinders the understanding of the Physical Body as a separate complete piece that can stand on its own, literally and metaphorically.
The reason the Physical Body is so often overlooked is because we want to skip it and go right for the woo-woo stuff. The Physical Body is the densest energetic field we work with. It is our sacred vessel and tool for interacting with the world around us. It both regulates incoming energy and directs outbound energy. It receives and processes subtle to obvious signals. I will not go as deep into it here because I already covered all the ways you can better utilize the Body in its respective posts on the Foundations series.
What I do want to say is we should always remember to be mindful of our physical body. This is where Intuition is found and regulatory processes. Also, diseases and disorders can be treated by a skilled spiritual practitioner because we are looking for the “spiritual” or “energetic” causes. So for us, those medical issues are often a signal to look for energy blockages, loss, etc. It is because of this that taking care of our physical body should always be a priority. Especially when wanting to get into spirituality because quite a few of the different paths that exist are highly energy-consumptive. Again singing, poetry, dancing, art, and other “performative” exercises aren’t just there for show. They are done because they change and charge the energy both within and around you for spiritual work. Refer back to Being Silly Works in the Foundations Series.
Make sure you are fueling, resting, cleaning, and listening to the Body consistently. This may not be the “exciting” energy field but it is probably, in my opinion, the most important of the four.
The Etheric Body
Also called the Subtle Body this is the energy field that is closest to the Physical Body. The Etheric body can be described as the bubbles in a bubble bath. It's just a thin layer on the surface that can be felt. This is still a denser energy field than the next two but it is invisible to the naked eye.
The Etheric field is where energy is transferred subliminally. I have said it before and you have most likely heard it elsewhere, “Attitudes are contagious, is yours worth catching?” This energy field is the reason your mood is contagious. Because it does not need physical touch to transfer information. Again, like the bubbles in a bubble bath, the Etheric body is kind of a big bubble surrounding you. Your emotional state will charge the energy of this field and then whoever contacts your bubble will take away a tiny bit of that charge.
A person with a healthy, well-tended emotional state AND an Etheric body can usually detect subtle energy shifts as they interact with different people. Some of these people work hard to obtain that skill while others seemingly have come to possess it naturally. “Naturally” is a loose term because people can acquire such skills due to experiences they have been subjected to. The skill itself is special but can be called Awareness.
Think of a time when you were in a decent mood and went out in public. Everything seemed to be going fine until suddenly you started to feel irritable or anxious unexpectedly. Nothing happened to make you feel that way. It just came in suddenly and you weren’t able to shake it. You don’t think to question it, you just sit in it. You focus on it and start saying, “I’m anxious. I’m irritable. I want to go home! I NEED TO GO HOME!” You get home and still you feel that way and you still can’t explain it because everything was fine…until it wasn’t.
Some people would say that was “intuition” telling you it was time to leave. I would instead say you stood too close to someone else who did not want to be where they were and you picked up their energy. They didn’t try to poison your mood, but they did because their energy charged up too much of yours, and you began feeling the same. There is the flipside too, you could be in kind of a down mood and then someone comes along and talks to you. They walk away and suddenly you feel refreshed and energized after the interaction. They shared some of their mood with you energetically.
That is why Intuition is different. Intuition comes from physical and energetic signals and urges you TO DO the uncomfortable thing. Intuition doesn’t induce anxiety, panic, or escapism. Sure we fight it at first before we learn to trust it. That may seem like anxiety but most of the time we fight it with excuses. “I strongly feel like I should contact this person today but I’ll see them tomorrow so I’ll just wait.” Tomorrow comes but the person you put off seeing doesn’t come with it. “I feel like I should make a left turn this morning but that’s gonna mess with my commute routine.” Major car accident happens along normal routes causing you to be extremely late. See? Excuses to “stick to the status quo” are the main way we fight our intuitive instincts. Surprise anxiety that doesn’t “inform” you of an action to take is something you picked up from someone else’s energy.
This energy field should have attention brought to it throughout the day. There are numerous methods but the easiest way is to be mindful of the way you are feeling. Starting at the beginning of the day, get a good baseline on how you feel before you leave the house. Then periodically check in with yourself. See how your mood fluctuates and changes throughout the day from the different interactions you have with people around you. If you check in and feel a shift has occurred that you don’t want you have the ability to then shift that mood. This way you don’t perpetuate the bad mood others are giving off. This is especially important for anyone who does have a career with physical interactions with people. Doctors, cosmetologists, tattoo artists, etc.
While physical touch is not needed to transfer charge between two people’s etheric bodies, physical touch IS a guaranteed transfer of energetic charge. The Etheric body expands and contracts all the time. Someone with an expansive Etheric body can walk through a crowd and pass off their energy. A person with a contracted Etheric body can get nose to nose with someone and still not pass off their energy. But the act of physical touch means that the energy is being transferred because the Etheric body is a field that always coats the Physical body. It can be like a skintight glove but it's still there on the surface.
And on the other end, the more you become aware of your Etheric the more you can control the expansion and contraction of it along with the energetic charge it holds. Then you can be a ripple that creates a wave. If you are in a tense environment or situation you can switch to a calm, peaceful mood and then expand it outward calming down those around you. I used this often when I worked in a nightclub.
One day, a young woman passed out on the sidewalk right outside our doors. Her friends were hysterical. I switched to a calm and methodical mood. I checked her vitals first then called out to the bartender to bring me things I needed like water bottles, towels, hand sanitizer, etc. As I washed my hands and prepared to do the first aid that was needed. I looked at her friends and delegated tasks like who was to call 911, who needed to stand on the lookout for the paramedics, and who needed to help me with the friend. As I was inducing vomiting to get the young lady to relieve some of the copious alcohol from her system, another woman came out of the club and started trying to help. She was sober and had only been drinking water and was a Registered Nurse. Together we got the young woman back to consciousness and awake just in time for the paramedics to arrive. The nurse looked at me after and said, “I know other nurses with years of experience who would not have handled that as calmly as you just did.” I shrugged and said, “Bar life…. let's go clean our hands.”
Now don’t get this twisted. This is not a method to be used to “control” or “manipulate” others. This is about having control over yourself. Using your Etheric body in a manipulative way can AND WILL have repercussions on you. Especially if you come across someone who can sense it and counter it. The goal here is to know yourself and what type of composure you need to have in a given situation. Sometimes feeling and expressing anger and dissatisfaction is necessary despite society telling you to repress that emotion.
Also, we don’t want to play the blame game. As you become aware of your Etheric body and the energy of others, you do not want to “call out” or “attack” a person who is giving off negative energies. You can compassionately try and speak with them to help alleviate some of their emotional baggage. But it's not always their fault that their energy is charging people in negative ways. They don’t have any intention to cause others to feel their pain. But they do need to be allowed to feel what they feel. They just might not know how to express it healthily.
There’s a difference between someone feeling a certain way and subtly affecting people around them and someone who is weaponizing their emotions against others. A person weaponizing their emotions is not subtly affecting others. They are going out of their way to perform actions and speak words purposely trying to make others feel what they feel. It is ok to recognize this and say something to them about that behavior. Abuse is abuse and no one should accept abuse by making excuses like, “I don’t know what they are going through so I’m just going to take it.” No that is a terrible notion that society has been imposing on people. You taking it is permitting them to continue doing that to others. They feel empowered to take out any tiny pain on their victims. Sure sometimes big things are going on in their lives but a person empowered to exhibit that behavior can stub their toe in the morning and then everyone around them has to suffer for it. The weaponizing of emotions and traumas is not healthy for the abuser or the abused and creates those repeating energetic memories as we discussed. A person who consistently weaponizes their emotions should have someone take a stand against them and their behavior. A person who does it once in a blue moon should still have someone tell them, “Hey it's not ok to speak to others/me like that. Your pain doesn’t permit you to hurt others/me.” This can still be done compassionately…just know that sometimes compassion does equate to tough love too.
Passing charges back and forth through the Etheric body is NOT the same as forming cords between yourself and others. Just before I started typing up this post someone said that to me. The understanding they had was that every person you meet or come across creates a “cord”. I was already getting a little miffed at how “buzzwordy” cord-cutting was becoming. What is a cord?
A cord is an energetic bond between you and another person. This can be friends, family, lovers, etc. Cords take time to form through repeated interactions with another person. Cords are the reason you can go days, weeks, months, etc. without hearing from someone and then one day say, “Hmm I should contact them.” Just to discover they needed you at that exact moment or they say, “Oh wow I was just thinking about you.” Cords do carry energy signals from you to another person and a lot of the time that energy can be emotions. But think of cords more like wires or tubes. The energy is carried through them between you and the other person but the cord itself is formed by the memories you made with that person. The more memories and time spent the stronger the cord. Someone you have only known for a week to a couple of weeks can have a cord started but if you stop interacting with them the cord can and probably will fall off on its own. The memories will be absorbed into your subconscious and the energetic link will cease to function. The time to do a cord-cutting is when you no longer interact with someone but you still have some strong emotional attachment to them as well.
But here’s the thing, when you do cord-cutting (also I don’t even like to say cord-cutting, personally, I prefer to say a Releasing but for simplicity, I’ll keep the term as is) there are things you should do before you perform the act and things you should be aware of for after.
Before you do cord-cutting you need to sit and process the emotional attachment with that person.
You need to bring them up, feel the emotions you feel when you think about them, and change your emotional state and etheric body to calm or indifferent.
You need to examine the emotional memories, take responsibility for what you did, and accept them for who they are with what they did.
You then need to realize that you are holding onto those emotions for some reason and you need to work through that. Maybe you want to stay angry at them. Maybe you have hope they will come back. Whatever the case is, you’re holding it tightly.
Once you have worked through all of that, you are then ready to cut the cord. The memories will go and be stored in your subconscious but the energetic link will cease to flow.
What can happen after cord-cutting?
You can never hear from them again.
They may feel the severed energy flow and reach out.
The energy flow was not cut and they can reach out cause they feel the spark from you tapping on the cord.
What do those three outcomes mean?
If you never hear from them again then that’s fine. You worked through the emotions and their time with you has come to an end. You have learned all you can learn from them and they from you. It’s ok. It’s nothing to be sad about. Just accept that it is what it is and you already cut the cord so there’s nothing left for you to do.
Generally…this is the most desired outcome.
If you work through all the emotions of the memories in a healthy way and they reach out some time after it can mean that they are still meant to be in your life. There are still lessons to be learned and memories to be made. That is the point of relations with others to help each other grow and become better versions of each other. And that is true for both good and bad relationships. Whatever caused the collapse of interaction is now gone and processed through on your end at least. You can feel out the waters and slowly work towards reestablishing the cord more healthily and strongly. Maybe even helping them process what they felt on their end.
Good relationships help enforce our strengths. If this comes back you can still help each with those strengths. Maybe you learned something from your time apart that can help them in the next steps of their journey.
Bad relationships help us realize our weaknesses and discover new strengths. If a bad relationship comes back after a cord-cutting then you can take the opportunity to discuss some of the pain but from a healed perspective. Not assigning blame. This is usually a great opportunity to write a new chapter between the two of you. You just both needed to step aside for some time and figure yourselves out. This is especially common with family.
Healthy Cord-Cutting can see return people and because the emotions have been processed, forgiveness given, etc. you can begin anew.
This is the kicker point. This is where I see the “trendiness” of cord-cutting becoming a problem. When you do a cord-cutting and the person ends up coming back around, if you have a strong visceral emotional response to their return then you did not do a cord-cutting. You sent a psychic dart or arrow at them. This is an action and response you initiated. You said, “Ha! I’m gonna cut you off.” You wanted them to come back for the express purpose of being able to tell them off or get revenge. This isn’t my assumption. This isn’t my opinion. Be honest with yourself. That’s what you wanted to happen. Because if you had done a true healthy cord-cutting you would not have those kinds of emotions or thoughts. You would be up there grouped with the people in number 2. You grabbed the cord and shook it. Congrats, you shook the hornets' nest and then got to play the victim when they came out to sting you.
How do I know this is a “trend” that started? Cause I see it on social media. There have been certain influencers who have posted in their stories “reviews” about their cord-cutting workshops. These reviews say things like, “It works cause I cut it and he came back and I told him, ‘Oh no Mother Fucker! I don’t think so. I’m done with your ass.” If you did a healthy cord-cutting there should be no reason to still be harboring animosity towards that person. If someone comes back and you still have any kind of adverse emotional reaction like the example I just gave I promise you haven’t cut any cords. You got their attention is all.
I do say that this kind of behavior needs to be called out not just for the people “doing it” but also for the “influencers” who are perpetuating this behavior. It's adding to this mindset of quick instant gratification and yet there isn’t any real growth. But someone says above in a message to the “influencer” and then the “influencer” posts it in a story glorifying the negative behavior to further promote their “workshop.”
This is one of many callouts that will happen as this Pathworking series continues. At this point in my blog…it is time to make some callouts because I will never sit by and watch unhealthy behaviors go on like that. Mostly because I have my affirmations, as I listed in a post in my Foundations series, one of those is, “I harm not lest I be harmed, but I shall defend the defenseless.” People taking workshops like this and don’t know any better are defenseless and being preyed on for money. The people getting psychically attacked are defenseless cause they are just getting an energetic reminder of someone and then getting cussed out for following up on that. It's a loop of pain that doesn’t need to exist.
All of that may have seemed like a deviation from talking about the Etheric body. It is a very big component of the Etheric body. The Etheric body is all about the energetic outward manifestation of what is going on in our Minds. Especially our emotional well-being and the way we present those emotions through the values we carry ourselves by. Because the Etheric body is so intrinsically tied to this, cords are going to naturally be found attached to it.
The compression and expansion of the Etheric body is also a skill that can be learned to help regulate it. There are many reasons why the Etheric body will do this on its own. Such as when you get really good news and feel elated or excited. The Etheric body will expand because you want others to be excited for or with you. It will also contract at times when you feel sad and depressed because you don’t want people to interact with you at that moment. But those examples are very generic and it won’t always happen that way. Your Etheric body could just as easily expand when you feel sad or depressed because misery enjoys company.
I have spoken a few times now about “terminally happy” people. Happiness should be shared when felt. A “terminally happy” person though will have a very compressed Etheric body. They pull all of their Etheric energy in as close as possible, making it dense and formidable. It's a defensive tactic. The closer their energy is the less likely someone can “infect” it with something other than happy. They also don’t want their true emotions to escape and peek out from behind the mask. They can’t bear the thought of someone knowing their happiness is just for show. So they repress everything.
Repression pulls the Etheric body in close creating this shell-like structure. Projection expands the Etheric body outward and stretches it to its limits. The further away your Etheric body is the more likely you are to affect others and be in turn affected by others. A person with serious mood swing issues most likely has a very expansive Etheric body and they are picking up on the energy of many people around them at the same time. Which is a lot of information at once and their emotional state destabilizes.
Healthy expansion and compression of the Etheric body is known as expression. To express your emotions you take note and awareness just as I said before. You then process your mood and communicate it simply and completely. As this is practiced over time, your Etheric body will baseline itself into a healthy-sized bubble specific to you. I can usually feel mine at a 6-8 inch range from my physical body. I like this range because I’m an ambivert, I am observant in settings with people I don’t know, but overall I enjoy being in the company of others. Your Etheric range will baseline at a range comfortable for you.
It does take time and patience to get acquainted with and be aware of your Etheric body consistently. Once you do so, the range of energy work you can do multiplies quickly. Changing your Etheric energy to reflect the value of Understanding, for example, is a great way to get an energy reading on something like a crystal. As I said in foundations, there are generic “meanings” or “expectations” of different crystals. If you instead tap into your Etheric energy and use that to “read” the energy of a crystal you will quickly start to notice that two different pieces of the same type of crystal can be giving off two very different energies as they relate to you.
Knowing that; the actual possibilities of what can be done with the Etheric body go well beyond the scope of this post (cause it already ran pretty long). It also will go beyond the scope of this blog, to be honest. The Etheric body has been utilized to amplify the intentions of groups working ceremonially. The laying on of hands in church settings is the Etheric body being utilized to channel healing energy. Reiki is a strong use of the Etheric body’s energy. This is where you start on finding/developing your path. Coming into alignment with your energy and how your energy works is what determines your path ultimately. This is the reason I have been putting so much focus on energy as a part of this series.
You have to decide for yourself how your energy works and how to proceed in the best way possible for yourself. I do not feel that the Etheric body is talked about nearly enough. It gets more attention than the Physical Body. But I see where people try to just put them together as one thing and they need to be fully explored and explained by people. Sadly, most people just want to jump directly to the Astral Body and the Auric Body. Then they get confused by what they experience. Hopefully, the next posts can help to clarify that though as I talk about them.
Until then, I wish you harmony and peace of mind. Thank you so much for reading. Have a fantastic day!!
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