Letting It Go

Everyone’s Energy Gets Stuck Sometimes

Here is one way life energy gets stuck when you encounter something that is too much for you to manage and integrate using the resources you have on hand. You can easily imagine a baby or small child being overwhelmed by a new situation. Problems occur all the time, even in the most loving and attentive families.

Imagine that Mom is exhausted and taking a nap, thinking that her child is asleep. She doesn’t realize that her toddler is learning to climb out of his crib. He manages to get out, open a closed door and slip out of the house. He can’t get back in. He whimpers for help but she can’t hear him and only finds him an hour later in the back yard after a frantic search. They are both traumatized and a little bit of their life energy gets stuck in the situation.

Of course, in a family where things are not going so well and a parent is ill or suffering from an addiction or even distracted by way too many responsibilities, a child can get into all kinds of scary and overwhelming situations. Each time that happens, a little more of the child’s life energy gets tied up and becomes unavailable to her.

It happens to all of us. As you get older and go to school you’re expected to learn to do more and more things. You might have been richly rewarded for being careful not to make any mistakes and decided that being perfect was the only way to survive. Your energy can get so frozen into imagining the terrible consequences of making a mistake that you lose your joy in just trying new things.

Life energy gets stuck when something painful or overwhelming happens that you can’t handle. It might have happened 10 minutes or 40 years ago. You freeze it to protect yourself from the pain—perhaps of someone’s disapproval. It is like bumping yourself on a table and either holding tight to the bruised spot with your hand or even refusing to go near the table again.

As long as you hold on to the bruised place you can’t use your hand for anything else. Twenty or forty years later, if you happen to learn you have not met someone else’s expectations you may feel far more ashamed than seems appropriate for the current situation.

When something happens in your daily life that is similar in some way to an event that is frozen in your past, it breaks through your protection and sets off, like a trigger, the distress that is already in place in your life energy system. You just did not even realize your energy was lost in your past—until now.