To fight, feed, free or flow…that is the question: the power of knowing you can choose

There’s certainly no one-size fits all structure for assessing life, but when it comes to looking at the relationships, conditions, environments and situations of our life that create stress in our bodymind, sometimes a simple framework is useful to begin sorting things out.

It’s an art to become objective about our subjective human experience.

In becoming objective, we reach beyond the emotions that charge the body with feeling sensation–that emotional energy that challenges us and can limit our perspective. This shift can:

• support us in processing and healing the unhelpful energies in our life
• help us to use emotion for what it’s meant to do–guide us
• discern which people, places, things and conditions are life-giving
• assess which energies are life-depleting
• give us some elevation over the limitation of stress and perceive possibility we didn’t know existed

Naming things is powerful medicine.

Energy medicine teaches us that we tend to have 4 responses to stress. Knowing these can help us to remove biases and conditioning as we evaluate the impact of stressors in our life. As we develop clarity and evolve beyond crisis, chaos, overwhelm, emotional traumas, anxiety and depression, we see that these 4 responses are also 4 choices, and that we can be the conscious creator of our life by selecting whichever best serves our life in the moment.

The fight response is in place to save our life. We fight to defend our being. The problem is, in chronic stress or with cultural conditioning, our filters and perspectives about what’s truly life-threatening become clouded.

Are you feeling resistance in your physical body? Do you feel yourself tense up around certain people or in certain environments? Are you frustrated or angry a lot of the time and you’re not even sure why? These sensations may be a sign that your mindbody complex is in a chronic state of fight-or-flight.

In this state, we are forced into survival mind and we tend to think our problems can only be solved with sheer power–body-to-body or matter-to-matter. We have to push, shove, manipulate, work harder, endure more grief, and grow more and more fatigued while getting worse results.

If we never elevate ourselves out of the emotions that compel us to fight with the people and conditions around us, our choices and perspectives are limited.

Fight state is not a creative state of mind, and if we are conditioned to fight, our brain might not even recognize an obvious alternative immediately before us. In this state-of being–operating from this level of mind–we are vigilant, waiting for the other shoe to drop even when there’s no real and imminent danger.

If we stay in fight-or-flight state-of-mind long enough, we can lose our sensitivity to the body’s subtle signals that are always directing us to more comfort and less overwhelm.

As director of the body, we can heal our fight mind by taking time away from people and conditions that stress us, to give ourselves a new perspective, a new opportunity to become objective without the repetitious negative stimulation of unhelpful energies. Ideally, this time allows us to take steps, to assume self-responsibility and affords us time and space to identify choices and options we couldn’t see in chronic stress.

We can feed energies that are ultimately unhelpful for us through our unconsciousness, through our not knowing. Becoming conscious–becoming aware–of knowing what we don’t know is for most of us a very, very difficult task.

It’s very challenging in stress, or in the midst of a family, work or cultural difficulty to know what you don’t know, to be aware of something we’ve never experienced or embodied. This sounds obvious, but many of us blame ourselves for not knowing something once we do find it out.

“Feeding a problem” is contributing to increasing the energy of something that is not helpful to our well-being. I’m not going to name specific behaviors here, because life is complex and we stay in difficult situations for all sorts of reasons, but we can use this concept to evaluate our personal tolerance of and willingness to embody a continued involvement in “feeding” the things in life that cause stress.

Withdrawing your thoughts, di-vesting your emotions and even removing your presence from the people, conditions and environments that are unhelpful to your health are all powerful ways to recall your creative energy to you. Think of this as energetically feeding yourself–and self-loving act of self-preservation which may enable you to recall your valuable life-force energy back to you so you have energy to create the life you want.

Freedom in this sense can be either a mental act, an emotional act or a physical one–or it can be all three. To free ourselves from stress is to change our relationship to it.

Can you change the way you think about certain aspects of your life? Can you adopt new beliefs around it that don’t produce the same level of stress?

Can you change the way you feel about things? You can condition your body to better-feeling emotions by noticing the groups of sensations in your body which are a response to the conditions of your life.

What would it be like if you became more cognizant of and more effectively responsive to this guidance and used your energy to creatively rearrange your expectations, your resistance to and your acceptance of them?

I understand just how challenging or even impossible this work might seem, but just ask the questions and maybe a new possibility will reveal itself. Just know that everything is energy.

Your thoughts are energy.

Your emotions are energy.

What we are thinking and what we are feeling is creating our state-of-being.

We can bring more life force energy into your life by stopping thinking and stopping feeling about those things in our life that are out of our control, that don’t bring us peace, that don’t create harmony and which disrupt our heart.

We liberate energy by redirecting our thoughts and generating good feelings by spending time and energy on the things that bring us life.

To flow through life, to me is to embody mastery. I would define mastery as maintaining an inner state of peace and harmony throughout the ease AND amidst the difficulties of life, and remembering moment-to-moment that I have a choice.

Easier said than done, I know. That’s why meditation and medicine are called a practice.

To flow means to be aware, to live as awareness itself, recognizing the inner urge to fight, to feed, to free or to flow in the moment, and to be conscious about the choice to take whichever action preserves my life, my spirit, my integrity and my bliss in the moment.

If you’d like to learn more about how these and other energy medicine concepts can help your life, you can learn about my services here, and peek in on upcoming retreat offerings. The modalities of energy healing are forms of drugless wellness–no matter what you’re currently experiencing or what treatments you are receiving, they can do no harm. You can visit my upcoming classes and retreats page here.

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Email dianamariachapin@gmail.com, or Call Diana at 207-249-2261. Subscribe to my blog at the bottom of this page.  Healing, learning and sharing is my passion…please share this blog with those you think it can help.  We are changing the world, one heart at a time. Thank you!