wispfox

Some things that I don't think I ever mentioned here, in any of my random and not so random references to energy work and similar things. Yes, this is intentionally not filtered.


As a kid, I did not play with energy work, and didn't really get an idea of it as a method until not long before work group started. Didn't start really being comfortable with it until some time into work group. I didn't learn to shield until high school, and that was because I _had_ to.

When I finally actively created a shield, it was because my empathy decided to come back out of where I'd tried to hide it. While I was in the middle of a crowd, in high school. First thing I did, once I figured out that it wasn't all in my head, was leave the room (my _god_, the difference that made was amazing). The next thing I did, drawing on various reading I'd done (mostly based on Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar), was imagine some form of shield between me and everyone else's emotions. Note that I did _not_ at that point actually have anything other than my imagination to sense what I did, and was never entirely sure that it did anything. But it helped. I had to refresh my shielding for a while initially, until I figured out how to make it automatic, but _all_ of my initial shielding, for the longest time, was simply stuff that I was basically imagining. Except that it worked, although never as well as I might have preferred. It wasn't until much more recently (and work group honed this skill, as well as my ability to sense energy, as mentioned in the next paragraph) that I was able to get beyond the sense that I was imagining all of this, and actually be able to _feel_ these things. I suspect that my shield sensing and my energy sensing was more or less simultaneous. And my ability to create more functional shields appears to have improved along with my ability to sense them.

When I was first playing with energy work a few years ago, it was _not_ because I could actually tell that things were happening or feel them or anything, it was purely a theoretical thing for me, and a very frustrating one because of this. I don't know at what point I started being confident enough in what I was sensing to trust it, but I _know_ that this was partly simply about figuring out how to pay the right kind of attention to _use_ the information that I was probably always getting. I had to teach myself to interpret what my senses were telling me, to attune the right part of my brain. And, having had work group around to help confirm my awakening awareness was invaluable, because I needed that external confirmation desperately, and they tended to be able to put things into words that I could understand (others have tried to put things into words, but the words were so... useless to me that it often just was worse than useless).

Speaking of putting things into words, I've found that it's intensely difficult for me to do so if I'm trying to explain how I do what I do, what it feels like, and such things. It's so very much _not_ verbal for me that I doubt I will ever feel any other way than that I'm simply approximating, and fairly poorly at that (sometimes, failing entirely to find words). Interestingly, though, I tend to get somewhat poetic when trying to describe what things feel like... And I note that I'm _much_ better at finding words for this stuff than I was before work group, because that's something that we do a lot of, since there's so much variety in backgrounds and methods of interpreting things.

Work group has definitely been good (early on, even!) at giving me examples of things which I could no more ignore than I could ignore the reemergence of my empathy in high school, thus giving me greater confidence in my skills, which in turn improves them.

The only thing I can easily point at as something I did instinctively as a kid in this arena was healing-type work. I can remember taking headaches from people, and then teaching myself how to _not_ take them into myself (although, I have to wonder how effective I was with this, since my headaches reduced greatly in intensity since leaving home, and my mom was the one I most often removed headaches from). I suspect that this is a large part of why I've done (untrained/instinctual) massage for most of my life. And, interestingly enough, around the time that I started really putting energy into figuring myself out post-graduation, I mostly stopped the instinctive forms of healing, because I'd realized that I had a tendency toward giving too much and not taking care of myself. (And tended to be drawn toward people who were hurting a lot, and didn't really understand yet that they had to be willing to be helped or all I'd be doing was hurting and frustrating myself)

Sometime in high school, when my intensive study of other people started actually paying off in ability to stop having everyone's behavior seem completely alien to me (still mostly did, but not completely), the physical healing mostly shifted over to psyche-area healing, probably in combination with the spontaneous reemergence of my empathy (which, along with every other 'extra sense', I blocked off as not being possible not long after I started school. Even though I grew up in an actively other sense positive family). I suspect that my general fascination with how other people think and work aids with this, simply because I can generally find words to explain _why_ [foo] feels like it doesn't fit in with the rest of my sense of a person, and perhaps help people with the things in their head.

I've since started to think that perhaps I ought to cautiously let out the part of me that does healing instinctively. It has never been entirely gone, as I've retained some non-instinctive healing ability, through some combination of reiki and the psyche-level stuff I mentioned above. But I did make a very conscious effort to focus on myself and having a reasonably good sense of how much I could and could not safely do, as well as a constant check on my current mental state. I think, though, that I may have a sufficiently good groundwork in my self-awareness, as well as in figuring these kinds of things out, that it might be safe to investigate bringing back the instinctive healing I did as a kid, try to get a sense of it, and see if I can figure out how I did it.

So. Yeah. Much as lately I've been very willing to talk about this kind of stuff, in some respects at least, it's still very new to me. Certainly, having reasonably good senses of things, and _trusting_ them, is new. And my willingness to talk about such things has increased immensely as I've finally become comfortable with it (which tends to be true for most things in my life, actually - comfort is required for me to talk about most things, except for with a very small number of people. Mostly, I think, because lack of comfort makes finding words for things immensely difficult).