Last week, I asked for all of you to do something extremely difficult.  I asked that you take a good long look at your personal energy field and see what you are bringing to the collective.  I asked this because we all should be aware of how our actions and reactions effect those around us. 

The energetic damage that we do to ourselves and others is rarely intentional.  Often, it’s just something that happens because we’re not living consciously. In fact, most of us stumble around completely unaware of the emotions that we are projecting through our energy field.  For example, if you’ve had a frustrating day and you’re tense and angry, those dominant emotions are being projected through your energy field.  As you come into contact with others, unless they are shielded, that energy will affect their mood and emotions as your energy meshes with theirs. Then, these dominant emotions get passed from person to person into the collective energy, infecting everyone, much like germs.

Occasionally, a group or an individual will intentionally try to influence or control the mood and emotions of others by manipulating the collective energy.  The stronger the individual’s personality and the greater the emotion, the larger the effect on the collective energy and the number of people infected. 

Incidentally, this is how Trump won the presidential election.  Without bringing party affiliation into it, think about it for a moment.  His message started as a tirade against minorities, inciting racial tensions within the poor and uneducated.  As this energy caught hold, he attacked women in general and then Hillary Clinton specifically.  As his comments got ruder and crasser, energetically, everyone became emotionally charged. Whether you agreed with him or not, you were effected emotionally by what was being said and done. 

People who were pro-Hillary fed the fury of the collective energy with their outrage. People who were pro-Trump rode that emotion to greater levels of hatred and allowed themselves to be led into darkness.  Those who were watching and not protecting themselves from the fray, got caught up within the collective energy.  Once caught up, the intensity of the energy field simply made it impossible for people to think and feel. When this happens, we unconsciously follow, or are manipulated by, the prevailing emotions within the collective energy. 

 The result of this emotional manipulation is a president with no qualifications, a penchant for pettiness and wild emotional reactions. Coincidentally, that is exactly how Hitler took power in Pre- World War II Germany.  Now, don’t take my word for it, read some history!

The manipulation of the collective energy was a brilliant ploy by Trump and the Republican party to control the election.  Personally, I think it lacked moral integrity and will prove to be the end of our democracy.  Apparently, we as a nation no longer have a moral compass and are no longer the champions of the weak, the poor, nor the down trodden. 

In the weeks to come, I will be focusing on how we can begin to shield ourselves from being controlled and manipulated by the collective energy.  Once we are capable of shielding ourselves, I will share some ideas on how to re-align our moral compass and begin to effect change around us.  Between now and then, practice centering and BREATHE!

Back in the late summer of 2015, Jerry and I started the TTW project to test our hypothesis that using centering and other energy techniques would enable us to develop potential within ourselves that had previously laid latent. We spent a year playing with these techniques in the sports realm (mostly golf and tennis), and we saw real improvement. With our hypothesis thus confirmed, we began developing a program to teach to others.

And then the election happened. The world went completely out of balance, and Jerry and I both felt called to respond. Most of our work over the past two months has been in response to that call.

For both of us, it felt quite natural to write about our experiences and our responses to them, but this led to a question: what are the common threads between the work we were doing on the golf course or tennis court and what we’ve been doing since the election?

In two particular areas, the parallels are very clear. In both cases, everything starts with the practice of centering and exploration of the centered breath. Centering engenders a state of flow, grounds our energy into the earth, and enables us to move through the world in a more embodied state, so we can feel and respond to what’s around us while lessening the distortions caused by an over-reliance on our minds’ thoughts and opinions.

Secondly, in both realms, we bring an intent to *use* the centered state to enable and strengthen the foundation for change. In the world of athletic endeavor, centering gives us the opportunity to feel our way through the blockages that get in the way of improvement and excellence. Within the greater space of our lives, centering provides us the means to experience barriers to flow not as some vague, subconscious disquiet, but as a reality felt consciously within the body.

On the golf course, the tennis court, or the ski slope, the means to measure change is easy. We know what higher-level performance looks like in each of these arenas, and we can measure ourselves against it. But in the greater world, things aren’t so simple. The breakdown in our system is so great that we’re well past the point of any simple fix. We’re going to have to build something new from an entirely new consciousness.

The centered state creates the space for that change. As a society, we find ourselves without a map for how to proceed. Our political history tells us where we’ve been–tribalism, empire, feudalism, democracy–but it’s no longer clear where we’re going. All we can do is open to the energy of the situation. By using the practice of centering to move toward greater flow, we can begin to find the new truths that our present situation demands.

We need to seek flow not just in the gym and the playing fields, but in all of our day-to-day activities, from the conversations we have throughout the day to the types of information we allow into our minds and bodies.

We’re facing a great crisis–and a commensurate level of opportunity. We simply must seek and cultivate a state of flow. Our well-being, indeed, that of our entire world, depends on it.

Last week, I asked that you explore the collective energy around you.  The question that I left unasked was: What do you bring to the collective energy field? Are you a source of chaos and drama? Or do you bring a balancing force to the collective energy around you?

This week I would like you to monitor your personal energy and notice what you bring to the collective.  It isn’t necessary to adjust or change anything, just pay attention to the effect that you have on others and your environment. 

Last year, my piece about wintertime goals was focused primarily on sports- and health-related objectives while keeping my focus on the need to stay in touch with the energy of the season. I aimed to stay healthy and uninjured. I pledged to ski with less stress and more flow.

With respect to my sports endeavors, I’ll declare similar goals this year. Staying healthy and uninjured, and the consciousness of the body’s needs that that requires, is a good goal. I struggled enough with injury in 2016, particularly that torn hamstring back in May, that I don’t want to suffer similar in 2017.

If you’ve been following TTW since the election, you’ve seen that our focus has expanded since then. The depth of anguish over the past two months has convinced us we need to actively connect our practices to the bigger picture in our lives. With that in mind, what might my goals look like for winter of 2017?

As I write this in mid-December, I haven’t yet taught a lesson this season. By the time it’s published I will have taught many. My students tend to be from all over the country. If last season is any indication, politics will not be spoken of much during our chairlift conversations, but I will probably get some idea that what people are going through is different from last year.

I want to be able to hold this space for my students. I want to find a way to broach or at least acknowledge that things are pretty challenging in our world right now. That the election seems to have thrown a lot of people off, irrespective of their particular political bent. I want to learn to speak more comfortably about the energetic aspects of what’s going on, and to tune people in to ways of dealing with it. I’ll be standing on a mountain as I do so, so I’ve got a pretty solid chunk of ground to teach grounding.

I also want to explore how to make things easier. A goal needs to be measurable if you want it to be an effective guide to behavior, and right now I don’t know how you measure *easier*. When I experience it, I certainly know it. In skiing, in snowboarding, in tennis and golf and soccer (when the weather rolls back around to allow those activities), I want to do what I do *easier* than I have done.

An exploration of cultivating ease will be something I will practice, and something I will to bring to my students this winter. People need it. We’re pretty addicted in our culture to making things hard. And it’s not serving us.

In response to my piece last week, there were some questions concerning the difference between the collective energy field and the universal energy field.  I thought it would be appropriate to deepen our understanding of the two.

The universal energy field is dynamic and robust while being grounding and stable.  Sit on a mountain top or next to a stream and the wonder of the universal energy field is easily felt.  It comprises the heavens, the earth, and everything in between. Even though we humans are also part of the universal energy filed, there is little we can do to affect or change it.  It is immune to our petty bickering and political messes.  It knows no countries or religion.  It simply IS.  If we attune ourselves with it, it provides a foundation of strength and balance that acts as a guide for living a connected life.

The collective energy field is the energy that you surround yourself with, from the people you associate with, to the places you go, and the information that you consume daily.

Many of us do not get to control the collective energy around us.  Whether it’s at work, school, or play, we are surrounded by people and circumstances that we cannot control.  For example, I work in a public recreation center.  Because of the people who made New Year’s resolutions, and the kids being out of school, the energy within the building right now is quite chaotic with the frenzy associated with a new year.  Each person who walks through the recreation centers doors adds to the collective energy of the building.

When you consider how many people come through those doors, the music playing over the noise of the patrons, the number of televisions that are tuned to the news and people moving as fast and furiously as possible, the collective energy field within the recreation center is potentially harmful.

Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing shielding techniques and other methods for controlling the collective energy that surrounds you.  But before we can shield ourselves from it, we must learn to recognize and become sensitive to it.  To do this, we have to expose ourselves to the collective energy around us.  To help limit the amount of exposure and potential damage, I highly recommend that you start by grounding yourself and cementing your connection to the earth.

Once grounded, allow yourself to notice the energy around you.  Watch the people go about their business, the expressions on their faces, the feel of the room.  Don’t join the energy, just notice it.  Practice this exercise in many different places, from your favorite coffee shop, your place of employment, to the facility in which you work out. Again, don’t manipulate the energy field, just notice the collective energy around you, while you stay safe and grounded.

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In myriad ways, I codify the energy of the season into my behavior. I am working quite a bit teaching skiing these days, but I observe that my relationship with the mountain in winter supports my energy. I am outside in the crisp cold air during the day. But as night falls I go home, eat dinner, do little of anything else. I go to sleep early.

With respect to my vocation, writing, I express the energy of the season by taking a sabbatical. My goal is to do no writing work of any sort during the two weeks around the solstice, the last two weeks of the calendar year, our culture’s holiday period.

So while I am working, I am still resting. The mountain supports my energy while I’m teaching. At night, in the morning, the computer will often stay off. I’m not reading drafts, I’m not revising, I’m not writing anything new. The closest I get to writing is in reading the writing of others. Some nights I sit by the fire and exult in the pleasure of the written word without demanding anything of myself except, as best I am able, a return to the pleasure writing gave me when I was a young boy, so many years ago.

I’m as quiet as I can be during this period. Thus I respect the energy of the season by respecting the intention of my sabbatical. And when the new year awakens in a few days, I can meet it with renewed vigor.

In the weeks leading up to the winter solstice, the reoccurring theme among my clients was a lack of sleep.  Night after night, they would get 3-4 hours and then suddenly be awake.

Now, I’m not talking about one or two people.  About 75% of the people I see on any given day would report these same things.  As I questioned them about activities and life circumstances, the majority reported enjoying the holiday season, which always included more shopping and parties than they were accustomed too, as well as, family gatherings and a myriad of other activities that fuel the collective energy and negatively affect their energy system.

What I didn’t hear was that they were taking time to sit and harmonize with the flow of the universal energy.

I found that the following exercise helped calm their energy systems and usually helped balance their sleeping patterns within just a couple of days.

Connecting to Universal Flow

Find a place to sit comfortably and take several centered breathes.

Now, take several minutes and ground yourself using the grounding breath that we developed and practiced a couple of weeks ago.

I recommend starting by using the grounding tubes. They create a solid foundation when learning new techniques. 

As you sit grounded and centered, notice the feel of the energy around you.

On the surface, you’ll discover a buzz or heightened vibration to the collective energy around you.  This buzzing, busy energy is what effects our sleep and our ability to feel centered and stable. Be careful to keep yourself separated from this energy as you’re noticing it. It’s easy to get caught up in the rush of that energy.

Now, using the grounding breath – allow yourself to drop below the noise and the buzz of the collective energy field into the quiet and calm of the universal energy field.

At this time of year, just after the winter solstice, the universal energy has a very quiet and reflective feel. 

Allow yourself to sit within the universal energy field for at least 5 minutes.  Allow your energy to harmonize with the universal energy.

There is nothing to do here.  As you quietly sit within the universal energy your system will automatically harmonize with the universal flow.

At this point, it is time to get up and continue with your day.  You can let your grounding tubes dissolve but stay connected to the universal energy.

Initially, it will not take long for your energy system long to re-harmonize with the collective energy. Over time and with practice, you’ll develop the skill necessary to keep your personal energy field separate from the collective. 

Finding balance between the energy of the moment (the collective energy), and the universal energy flow is critical for a balanced and healthy life.  Next week, we’ll work on creating an energy shield that will help us maintain that balance.

The solstice has passed. It is winter.

Did you, as I recommended last week, put down your burdens, for even a moment? Did you allow yourself a little space to breathe, to step out of the freneticism that our culture demands this time of year, to give yourself some repose? Did you notice the quiet behind all our culture’s noise?

In these days just on this side of the solstice, our energy should be at its quietest. One energetic year has just ended, the new one has just been born. Now is a time for quiet contemplation. We might look closely at ourselves: Who have I been? Who am I? We can even begin to ask, without demanding an answer, Who am I going to be?

Already now the days are getting longer. A small part of us looks ahead, already, to spring. Soon enough it will be time for planting. What, then, should our work look like in this time of quiet? How do we meet this moment?

Hold on to the quiet as long as you are able. Soon, it will be time to pick things up again. What tools are we going to need to sow and cultivate springtime’s seeds? Take your tools. Replace the splintered handles. Sharpen the edges. Rest and prepare so that you are ready.

Today marks the winter solstice.  Not only is it the shortest day of the year, but it denotes a major shift within the universal energy.  With the sun being at its furthest point from the earth, tonight is the longest and darkest night of the year. 

For many, it represents the “long dark night of the soul,” that point of spiritual crisis on the journey towards consciousness.  This journey is often rife with the symbolic death of major aspects of our lives, ideals, and beliefs that must be shed for us to become conscious and whole again. 

In his piece on Friday, Ben alludes to the idea that as individuals and a Nation, we have indeed entered the long dark night of the soul. And even though the sun will come up tomorrow, we have a long and trying journey ahead. 

To borrow words from Dr. Jean Bolin, a Jungian analyst:

“While the night of the winter solstice is always over at dawn, we don’t know how long we will remain in a winter solstice phase, and many fear while in the midst of it that there will be no light at the end of their tunnel and that dawn will never come. When help is sought, that very act is an expression of helplessness and hopefulness; an admission that we can’t get through this on our own and hope that with help, we shall. Often this is the turning point.”

Often, it is at this point- this point of crisis–that I am called upon and invited into my clients’ lives.  For them,  the hope of successful resolution is often fading and I am seen as a candle, a ray of light within the darkness.  I personally, have walked that long dark road more times than I like to admit.  And, In the course of my life, I have born witness for the journey of many clients and friends as they have walked that road. 

As the sun rises tomorrow, know that Ben and I are here, willing to do what we can. Although it is dark and often scary, together we can be the light to help guide our families, friends and even our nation through this trying time.

Energetically, the time approaching the winter solstice is a time of consolidation. It is a time of letting things come to rest. Nature around us has substantially gone dormant. While we as a species obviously do not hibernate, we too are meant to respect the energy of the season.

In our culture, divorced as it is from the natural cycles that feed our energy, we make no differentiation between the short, dark days of winter and the long, hot ones of summer. Yet our bodies know the difference, and cry out for us to acknowledge that difference, to respect it.

As we separate more and more from the natural energy of which we are a part, we become less and less grounded. Ungrounded energy tends to float upwards, coalescing in our heads, strengthening our sense of the reality of our thoughts and taking us away from the here and now. Thus the danger of becoming too ungrounded: it becomes easier and easier to believe our own bullshit.

We are carrying so much at a time when the energy of the world is requesting that we put things down. It can feel fraught, dangerous, to acquiesce to that request. Won’t we fall behind everything that is going on around us?

Honestly, there is a chance that we will. But I wish to pose to a question: at what point does the damage to your health become a cost too great to bear? Does that our culture all but demands of you to behave in an unhealthy way mean that you should do so? Or should you set up boundaries against it for your own well-being?

I urge you to choose the latter. What would it feel like to take just one of your burdens, set it down for a little while and breathe? (If necessary, you can always pick it up again.) This is the energy of the season. Even a few moments of repose, of connecting with the quiet flow of the season’s energy, can provide us with an important respite.

Give yourself that respite. In myriad ways, these are very challenging times. To deal with them effectively, we’re going to need to take care of ourselves. Who else will?