I received a post on a social media the other day, saying ‘What’s your vibe, and I tell you your tribe.’, with an image of a group of people dancing to the music. As I was going through the week, it popped up from my memory several times. A nice catchy rhyme, a message easy to agree with, and some associations which triggered me to dive deeper into the ‘vibe’ and ‘energy’ issue.
My first association with this message was the saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’. Second thought was about the energy and vibrations, and how everything is connected, and that we attract what we are in current state. Than started popping up several questions, like: How aware are we of our own vibe, and what it actually reflects? Do we really know what we receive from a vibe of others? Is it really so clear what we bring to the certain environment, or relationship? Is there a gap between our desires and aspirations, and our reality, and if yes, what kind of a gap, and why, where and how it reflects?
In the dictionary a term ‘vibration’ is defined as a mechanical phenomenon whereby oscillations occur about the equilibrium point – a person’s emotional state, the atmosphere of a place, or the associations of an object as communicated to and felt by others. The ‘vibe’ is supposed to be more about ‘how we are’, not so much about ‘who we are’. However, the vibe is the reflection of our energy, and that is all we are, and all there is. As Albert Einstein said “Everything is energy, and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.” Scientists have proven that the solid matter does not exist in the universe. All particles are vibrations of energy, and what we perceive as our physical world, is really not material or physical. The atoms that make up our body are constantly vibrating at a very fast rate of frequency. We are energy, and how we vibrate creates the reality around us. Since the world around us resonates with whatever vibration we are giving off, it is extremely important that we are aware of our energy flow. The way we think, feel, experience, and act affect our energy. Other people and surroundings affect our energy. Relationships, work, creativity, music, movement, nature, sport, meditation, art, etc. affect our energy. Either to achieve goals, progress, recharge when necessary, or to sustain our health and well-being.
There are many practices how to work with your energy, and there are many recommendations and tools about how to change your energy to transform your life available, so I will not go more in detail about it here. What interests me is the part that is a bit more hidden, less revealed, or less acknowledged for whatever reason. In the following I would like to highlight the issue of our energy and vibe from 2 perspectives. First, through the perspective that everything is energy, and second, through the illusion of the seen and the known. With these two perspectives I believe it can be shown how to observe our energy and vibe in a more conscious way. It can help us to identify the potential for a possible shift, change, or transformation of energy. With this information we can decide whether we will act and interact intentionally in a more authentic, creative, and fulfilling way.
First perspective: “Everything is Energy.”
As said above, everything is energy. Our thoughts, emotions, feelings, experiences, and also memories that we store from our past are energy. Our pains, disappointments, wounds, resentments, broken dreams, and unfulfilled promises and expectations, they are all energy. We are also to some extent affected by thoughts, emotions, and feelings of people around us, and by the environment we are part of. They all have the power to influence us and our vibration, and co-create our reality. It works the same the other way around.
If we want to live in the moment, and not in or from the past, or in the future, we have to be conscious about our energy, and what it consists of. When we check ourselves in a certain moment, we can realise that we keep on sustaining different thoughts, emotions, feelings, experiences, and different information. We do this because we believe that they are ‘part of us’, they are ‘ours’, that we ‘earned’ them by struggling so hard and overcoming all challenges so far to be where we are at this moment. We are proud that we have survived or achieved something, and we want to have a proof of that. Although it seems that this is who we are, in reality we do not need to carry around all of these ‘old’ and ‘outlived’ energies anymore. We could let go of at least the ones that already thought us a lesson and made us who we are today, and because of that we can use them from now on only as a reference when needed.
We often say or hear that for every next stage in life we have to renew ourselves, and to let go of the old and outlived, in order to make room for the new to come in. But I wonder how much can we be really aware of the possible past energies that might still reflect in our energy and vibe, and why we keep on carrying them around. As we acknowledge a challenge, a lesson learned, and a newly gained experience and knowledge, we manage to rationalise and accept this energy shift to certain extend. But on the energetic level, I believe it is much more subtle process, and it needs something more than just going through the lesson to transform the energy properly. We can notice this more often or easier by others, but less obviously by ourselves. The clear sign that some energies from the past are still being present in our current vibe, and that they need to be transformed at some level, is when we for example caught ourselves in repeating similar situations over and over.
Questions to explore:
- Can you recognise how much of ‘the past’, ‘the used to’, and ‘the comfortable’ energy is in your vibe today?
- Why do you keep on sustaining these energies?
- What might change in your reality, if you would let go of these ‘past, old, used to’ energies?
Second perspective: The Illusion of the Seen and the Known.
Another perspective through which we can look on the energy and the vibe is the illusion of the seen and the known, as the reflection of the revealed and hidden parts of us. In this regard we can use the image of the person as an iceberg, where we see only the pick of the iceberg, and everything under the sea is hidden from us. For example, we see a successful person, but we are not aware of all the hard work, risk, struggles, failures, perseverance, fears, action, doubts, criticism, disappointments, rejections, sacrifices, and other experiences that the person went through in his/her life in order to achieve the level of success we can see now as the outcome on the surface.
We can use this image of an iceberg to illustrate also possible blind spots, misperceptions, and misunderstandings. Through life experiences we are exploring, revealing, learning, and unlearning about ourselves – our ‘iceberg’, and we are learning to accept it as a whole. As individuals we have different models of the world, and with that we each create and perceive our own reality. Things reveal to us as we go through life, experiencing and expressing ourselves in different roles and in different relationships. They do not reveal to us in advance, and not in one piece at the beginning of our journey. We communicate among each other, and learn from each other. We try to be as conscious and authentic as possible, and using our senses and intuition to receive more and proper information about each other. But we perceive and understand issues and others through ourselves, through our lenses, filters, values, beliefs, and experiences. We often interpret, assume, and project our issues on to others. We create stories, and not just wonderful, supportive, or funny ones. We often create rather dramatical scenarios with many twists and turns, as we put ourselves into our mental and emotional processing.
We are sometimes so caught up in our ‘iceberg’, that we often assume and expect that others perceive it the same as we do. Sometimes we might have troubles in accepting some parts of us. We think that we can hide this from others, consciously or unconsciously. We sometimes even hide something from ourselves. We hide it so creatively that afterwards layers and layers need to be peeled off to get to the core of it. Sometime we might get caught up in trying to control what we show at the ice-peak and what not, and how we do it. But in fact we can not hide anything, because it is all energy. It is all out, in our vibe. We can only make it less obvious, or less clear. And when doing so sometimes others can not really understand us, or we do not understand their response to us. We are talking about an alignment or misalignment of the inner and the outer. We can pull on layers and layers of different energies to protect ourselves, but it is still all there, somewhere, to be revealed when the time is right, when the proper situation appears, or when that certain person comes into our life, and this respective energy needs to be transformed.
When we become more conscious about energy, we start sensing more. Usually we notice a certain change in the energy when, for example, someone in our life suddenly starts to think, act, or respond differently. Or when others are responding to us differently as before. In this regard, it is also interesting to acknowledge how hard we sometimes allow and accept the necessary change to happen, especially in relationships that are important to us, either in romantic, other personal, or professional ones. On rational level we know that everything changes, and that the only constant is a change, but still, when it happens to us, we are less enthusiastic to accept this life wisdom. Especially if it was not our initiative to make the change, or when we want to control how the change should happen. It is not always easy to persevere in this transformation, and there is no recipe how to deal with this properly. We all respond differently in different situations. Sometimes we feel sad, hurt, disappointed, or frustrated. But it is possible to transform these energies into something more creative. This is possible if we come from a place of being open enough to learn, and being compassionate and patient enough so that the process can unfold. Afterwards, also the understanding, and the acceptance follow.
At the end of a day, it amazes me, either in professional or personal relationships, how well we are able to communicate, function, and live, although there are so many ‘possible hidden issues’, so many combinations of different effects, so many possible misperceptions, and potential miscommunication and misunderstandings. I guess that our intuition, compassion, and the fact that we are all connected, is the glue and the guide for us to know how to be together, to live and work, and to create and co-create. Life lessons and interactions with others are teaching us how to be more and more authentic, more of ourselves, and letting others do the same. They are teaching us to be more responsible with our own energy. It is liberating and empowering to let go less potential energies, and transform the potential ones into something creative to achieve what we desire in a more sustainable and fulfilling way.
Questions to explore:
- How do you perceive your own ‘iceberg’?
- How does the seen, the known, and the hidden manifest in your interactions with others?
- What is preventing you to allow yourself to do the necessary change in a creative and sustainable way?
Some Takeaways to conclude with:
- All is energy. We have the power and the responsibility to take care of our energy flow.
- Use some of the above reflections to stimulate you to give yourself the permission to peel of layer after layer of the energy which is not you (anymore).
- Check your vibe daily, and see if there are some energies which need to be said ‘Thank you and Goodbye”.
- Encourage yourself to shine brighter in what you are. Do it daily.
- If in doubt, trust the vibe, but do not jump too quickly to any conclusions. Keep in mind that we are all a masterpiece as we are, and a constant work in progress at the same time.
- Take care of your vibe. It is your unique signature, and the reflection in the world.