Energizers vs Enervators

Continuing with the discussion started by Dhriti in previous post there are two types of people in our lives - Energizers and Enervators. Energizers shares with us spiritual energy whereas enervators suck it up from us. More about it in the following article 'Whip up a tornado!' from the book 'Love is Always Right' by Vinita Dawra Nangia. I hope you will like it.

Mona Dang

Whip up a tornado!

One energized person can change the vibes of an entire room. We all avoid enervators, preferring the breath of life an energizer infuses in us!

In any gathering you will notice two kinds of people — the energizers and the enervators. You feel automatically drawn towards the former, while even the thought of the latter tires you! All of us like to avoid those who are a drain on our energy. Listless people with melancholic thoughts, singularly lacking in energy or life force. These are the names you avoid on your cellphone and in your social engagements diary. They are a drain on your resources and after having met them, you feel you have lost, rather than gained anything.

On the other hand, have you noticed how one person bounding with energy can change the vibes of an entire room? All eyes are drawn towards someone who is full of dynamic ideas and a spirit that strives to do newer things, achieve greater heights. There is no time for depression here because all thoughts are taken up with present action and the thought of further action. You feel energized just meeting such a person and get carried away on a wave of goodwill and the fervour to do something. These are the people who seem to carry the world forward and most of the time you will find them at the top in all fields! Remember the way Indira Gandhi walked, with a spring in her step? Most of the world’s most effective leaders walk with the same spring.

There’s a buzz around such people, their minds are whirring with ideas that spill over and inspire others. The secret to movement is creating energy. Any vehicle, before it moves, floats or flies, has to necessarily create a spurt of energy that propels it forth. In order to fly, a bird creates energy by flapping its wings and taking a short leap; to pounce on its prey, even a lion needs to regroup its energies and focus them on that one deadly leap. So why then should it be any different for us? Those of us whose minds buzz and whirr with ideas are bound to take flight sooner than those who lack the requisite buzz. It is important to create an energy field around anything we do, a vital Life Force — be it prayer, work, charity, or even just plain good old fun. The only time to relax, go quiet and meditate is when you need to recoup your energy sources, think through and give them the right direction.

When given a project at work, for the required period of time, make it your main focus, work up a lot of energy and enthusiasm around it, whip your co-workers into a frenzy of creative energy and action. Involve everybody in the creative force, explore a few extra ideas, consult more people than you need to, listen a bit more carefully, discuss a little more intensely. Become attuned to all the energy that starts building around the project, become one with it and go with the flow. Not only does your work become more pleasurable but it gives you back the energy you gave it, manifold!

What is the idea of doing a project as well as the next person does it? You should not rest easy till you have energized every last atom in your body and let your creative juices flow to ensure that what you added to the work is something nobody else could have given it. A simple task like cooking may bore you; how about bringing a new energy to it by looking up a few extra recipes, bringing in new elements, mixing ingredients, experimenting? The new energy you bring to the task not just makes it interesting for you but also leads to a newer, more exciting dish for your table.

Spur yourself on by throwing self-challenges. Gardening? Why just limit yourself to watering plants and weeding out overgrowth? Up the antenna and challenge your creativity to create a special corner in your garden. Landscape it, dedicate an area to a special kind of a plant you like, coax the plants to grow the way you want them to. Become one with the creative energy of nature and see where the flow takes you.

Feng Shui rides on the principle that everything around us is energy and there is a constant flow and exchange of energy between us and all around. So Feng Shui teaches us ways of creating happy energy in all things around us, so that we gain from that energy flow or qi. The Greek technical term for qi, coined by Aristotle, is energeia, loosely translated as something ‘being at work’. French philosopher Henri Bergsen’s term for the ‘vital impetus’ was Elan vital. In Vedantic philosophy, the Sanskrit term, Prana as the vital, life-sustaining force of living beings, is comparable to the Chinese Qi.

In literature, Romantic poets have yearned to be a part of the process of Nature, looking upon the creative life process as something apart from them. George Bernard Shaw too spoke of Feng Shui rides on the principle that everything around us is energy and there is a constant flow and exchange of energy between us and all around. So Feng Shui teaches us ways of creating happy energy in all things around us, so that we gain from that energy flow or qi. The Greek technical term for qi, coined by Aristotle, is energeia, loosely translated as something ‘being at work’. French philosopher Henri Bergsen’s term for the ‘vital impetus’ was Elan vital.

In Vedantic philosophy, the Sanskrit term, Prana as the vital, life-sustaining force of living beings, is comparable to the Chinese Qi.

In literature, Romantic poets have yearned to be a part of the process of Nature, looking upon the creative life process as something apart from them. George Bernard Shaw too spoke of a ‘Life Force’ that directs evolution toward ultimate perfection by trial and error. As you give free rein to your energy and whip up the force of a tornado or the deadly focus of a whirlpool, no matter how small you consider a task, you will witness the chaos that precedes creation, the driving force of progress, of life, of development — the only way to move ahead and avoid stagnation. And you would have internalized it. And become an energizer!

Love is Always Right 

Vinita Dawra Nangia

The Times Group Books 

Kindle Edition.

Take Care of Your Energy Field

Take Care of Your Energy Field

Energy should be treated as precious as money if not more. Thinking consumes a lot of energy. There are two kinds of thoughts. Positive thoughts are energy enhancing. They consume energy but also release a lot of energy. It is like investment giving good returns. Negative thoughts on the other hand consume and drain out a lot of energy. It is like investment that gives only negative returns. We should not waste energy in thinking negative thoughts.

When we interact with people we are sharing energy with them. Interaction with positive people raises our energy level. Whereas negative people end up sucking our energy. Therefore we should choose our relationships wisely. We should surround ourselves with happy and positive people and avoid the company of negative people even if they are in our immediate family.

If we are positive should we not try to influence our environment making it positive rather than avoiding negative environment? The answer is yes if we are strong and the environment is impressionable i.e. people around are open to change. However if the people in the surrounding are rigid and the environment hostile, it is advisable to quietly and graciously leave the environment. Otherwise our positivity will drown in the negative environment and we will end up just like them.

Similarly if a negative person comes into our contact we should observe if the person is adaptable, ready to change, open to arguments. If yes we should try to make him/her positive through love and compassion. However if he/she is rigid and unresponsive we should leave him/her alone and move away from his company. We should keep a distant touch in the hope that he/she may be more receptive to the positivity in the future. Then we may try to help again. It needs lot of patience and acceptance.

Energy levels can be increased substantially through stillness. In this adventure meditation helps a lot. Meditation will help in not only focusing on positive thoughts and banishing the negative ones, it will also lead to still moments in which there are no thoughts. These moments are sacred as they raise our energy levels.

Dhriti Shandilya

The Difference Between Prayer and Meditation

The Difference Between Prayer and Meditation

by Derek Beres

One day after my yoga class, a friend came up and asked what the difference between prayer and meditation was, and if they were the same thing. While crossover exists, and while many people have different approaches to both, I replied that no, they do not have the same goal in mind.

Prayer effectively deals with sympathetic magic—the notion that your thoughts can alter reality from a distance, or influence outcomes in your life which you have no conscious control over.

A wonderful example of sympathetic magic was documented by James Frazer in a subregion of Oceania, deals with the relationship between a wounded man and the agent of his wound. 

In Melanesia, if a man’s friends get possession of the arrow which wounded him, they keep it in a damp place or in cool leaves, for then the inflammation will be trifling and will soon subside. 

Of course, we now know that such a relationship does not exist; any infection or internal damage suffered by the man will not be cured by attending to the arrow. With prayer, there is no actual object to attend to, but rather a focus on a particular thought, which Barbara Ehrenreich has shown is equally ineffectual. 

Attending to the idea that thoughts influence reality through the force of gravity, an occasional claim made by self-help gurus, she writes

"One, thoughts are not objects with mass; they are patterns of neuronal firing within the brain. Two, if they were exerting some sort of gravitational force on material objects around them, it would be difficult to take off one’s hat."

Ehrenreich also dismissed the notion that thoughts ‘send out vibrations.’

"Thoughts are not ‘vibrations,’ and known vibrations, such as sound waves, are characterized by amplitude and frequency. There is no such thing as a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ vibration."

Prayers are sometimes involved in meditations offered by yoga instructors and new age hipsters, though this is a departure from the basic stated practice of one-pointed focus. While it is possible to focus solely on the object or outcome of your affection, the most effective way to meditate is by staying present instead of mentally pretending you’re influencing the future. 

(You can influence how you personally act and react in the future through meditation, but this is a result and not necessarily a goal. This has to do with changing neuronal wirings through plasticity, as well as reducing elevated levels of hormones like cortisol.)

The most common mistake I hear about meditation is that its aim is to ‘stop thinking.’ While attending a workshop with Sally Kempton, who spent 28 years living a monastic existence before returning to public to teach meditation, someone asked her, ‘So how long do you get there for? You know, when you completely stop thinking?’

Sally laughed. “Two, maybe three seconds.”

Punctuated gasps combined with laughter in the room. Kempton went on to explain that you cannot stop thinking, but you can slow down the rapidity thoughts and create space between them, which in turn helps you think more clearly.

I incorporated that idea into my classes by reminding yogis that as challenging as the postures and sequences might physically be, stillness is harder. This is nearly always evidenced near the end of class when we’re forward bending and some prefer to play with their toes or look around the room instead of focusing on being still. 

So this, for my practice and teaching, is a much more relevant application of meditation: to be able to focus on one thing at a time. While engaged in meditation itself, this could involve many things: breathing, a mantra, an image. The basic idea is to let all your thoughts converge onto that solitary point and sit there for as long as possible. 

Inevitably, working from the definition that ‘your mind is what your brain does,’ thoughts scatter. Choosing a focal point at the outset is desirable, so if you find your mind wandering, you can bring it back ‘home.’ 

This is where prayer and meditation meet: in silence. Spending quiet moments alone in reflection is beneficial for our emotional reactivity and thinking process, and these benefits have the ability to make us more calm and composed overall. 

The danger arises in expecting an outcome from either. This is well-stated in yogic and Buddhist philosophy, where you don’t meditate for a specific result, staying open to all possibilities. From what I’ve seen in the American version of prayer, however, plenty of danger exists when the focus is on the outcome, rather than the simple act of being still.

Too often I’ve found the emphasis on outcome in the yoga community. This is contradictory to a main teaching: to know what you can change, know what you cannot, and most importantly, know the difference between the two. Meditation helps us understand that difference; sympathetic magic irreparably blurs the two.

Strive towards stillness, and let your actions and not thoughts alone help shape your reality.

The Biology of Belief

The Biology of Belief

Bruce H. Lipton Ph.D.

We are made in the image of God, and we need to put Spirit back into the equation when we want to improve our physical and our mental health. Because we are not powerless biochemical machines, popping a pill every time we are mentally or physically out of tune is not the answer.

Drugs and surgery are powerful tools when they are not overused, but the notion of simple drug fixes is fundamentally flawed. Every time a drug is introduced into the body to correct function A, it inevitably throws off function B, C, or D.

It is not gene-directed hormones and neurotransmitters that control our bodies and our minds; our beliefs control our bodies, our minds, and thus our lives … Oh ye of little belief!

Positive thoughts have a profound effect on behavior and genes but only when they are in harmony with subconscious programming. And negative thoughts have an equally powerful effect. When we recognize how these positive and negative beliefs control our biology, we can use this knowledge to create lives filled with health and happiness.

We have been taught to wage war against microorganisms with everything from antibacterial soap to antibiotics. But that simplistic message ignores the fact that many bacteria are essential to our health. The classic example of how humans get help from microorganisms is the bacteria in our digestive system, which are essential to our survival. The bacteria in our stomach and intestinal tract help digest food and also enable the absorption of life-sustaining vitamins. This microbe-human cooperation is the reason that the rampant use of antibiotics is detrimental to our survival. Antibiotics are indiscriminate killers; they kill bacteria that are required for our survival as efficiently as they kill harmful bacteria.

Now that we are aware of this inter- and intra-species gene transfer mechanism, the dangers of genetic engineering become apparent. For example, tinkering with the genes of a tomato may not stop at that tomato but could alter the entire biosphere in ways that we cannot foresee. Already there is a study that shows that when humans digest genetically modified foods, the artificially created genes transfer into and alter the character of the beneficial bacteria in the intestine.

Similarly, gene transfer among genetically engineered agricultural crops and surrounding native species has given rise to highly resistant species deemed superweeds.

So many of us are leading limited lives not because we have to but because we think we have to.

Since the dawning of the Age of Genetics, we have been programmed to accept that we are subservient to the power of our genes. The world is filled with people who live in constant fear that, on some unsuspecting day, their genes are going to turn on them. Consider the masses of people who think they are ticking time bombs; they wait for cancer to explode in their lives as it exploded in the life of their mother or brother or sister or aunt or uncle.

Millions of others attribute their failing health not to a combination of mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual causes but simply to the inadequacies of their body’s biochemical mechanics. Are your kids unruly? Increasingly the first choice is to medicate these children to correct their “chemical imbalances” rather than fully grappling with what is going on in their bodies, minds, and spirits.

The science of epigenetics, which literally means “control above genetics,” profoundly changes our understanding of how life is controlled.

DNA blueprints passed down through genes are not set in concrete at birth. Genes are not destiny! Environmental influences, including nutrition, stress, and emotions, can modify those genes without changing their basic blueprint. And those modifications, epigeneticists have discovered, can be passed on to future generations.

Biological behavior can be controlled by invisible forces, including thought, as well as it can be controlled by physical molecules like penicillin, a fact that provides the scientific underpinning for pharmaceutical-free energy medicine.

Logically, genes cannot preprogram a cell or organism’s life because cell survival depends on the ability to dynamically adjust to an ever-changing environment.

Discovery after discovery about the mechanics of chemical signals, including hormones, cytokines (hormones that control the immune system), growth factors, and tumor suppressors, cannot explain paranormal phenomena.

Spontaneous healings, psychic phenomena, amazing feats of strength and endurance, the ability to walk across hot coals without getting burned, acupuncture’s ability to diminish pain by moving “chi” around the body, and many other paranormal phenomena defy Newtonian biology.

Adverse drug effects, like those contributing to the HRT controversy, are a primary reason why a leading cause of death is iatrogenic illness, i.e., illness resulting from medical treatment.

Iatrogenic illness is actually the leading cause of death in the United States and that adverse reactions to prescription drugs are responsible for more than 300,000 deaths a year.

These are dismaying statistics, especially for a healing profession that has arrogantly dismissed three thousand years of effective Eastern medicine as unscientific, even though it is based on a deeper understanding of the universe. For thousands of years, long before Western scientists discovered the laws of quantum physics, Asians have honored energy as the principal factor contributing to health and wellbeing.

In Eastern medicine, the body is defined by an elaborate array of energy pathways called meridians. In Chinese physiologic charts of the human body, these energy networks resemble electronic wiring diagrams. Using aids like acupuncture needles, Chinese physicians test their patient’s energy circuits in exactly the same manner that electrical engineers “troubleshoot” a printed-circuit board, searching for electrical “pathologies.”

The trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry puts its research money into the search for magic bullets in the form of chemicals because pills mean money. If energy healing could be made into tablet form, drug manufacturers would get interested quickly.

Pharmaceutical drugs suppress the body’s symptoms but most never address the cause of the problem.

There are no serious research funds available for studying energy medicine. The rub is that without supportive research, energy-based healing modalities are officially labeled “unscientific.”

Have you ever walked down a dark street at night and instantly felt drained of energy? What were you experiencing? Destructive interference, just like out-of-sync pebbles thrown into a pond, or, in popular jargon, bad vibes!

Remember unexpectedly meeting that special someone in your life and becoming so energized you felt “high”? You were experiencing constructive interference, or good vibes.

However, our new understanding of the universe’s mechanics shows us how the physical body can be affected by the immaterial mind. Thoughts, the mind’s energy, directly influence how the physical brain controls the body’s physiology. Thought “energy” can activate or inhibit the cell’s function-producing proteins via the mechanics of constructive and destructive interference,

The fact is that harnessing the power of your mind can be more effective than the drugs you have been programmed to believe you need. Energy is a more efficient means of affecting matter than chemicals.

Seemingly “separate” subdivisions of the mind, the conscious and the subconscious are interdependent. The conscious mind is the creative one, the one that can conjure up “positive thoughts.” In contrast, the subconscious mind is a repository of stimulus-response tapes derived from instincts and learned experiences. The subconscious mind is strictly habitual; it will play the same behavioral responses to life’s signals over and over again, much to our chagrin.

When it comes to sheer neurological processing abilities, the subconscious mind is millions of times more powerful than the conscious mind. If the desires of the conscious mind conflict with the programs in the subconscious mind, which “mind” do you think will win out? You can repeat the positive affirmation that you are lovable over and over or that your cancer tumor will shrink. But if, as a child, you heard over and over that you are worthless and sickly, those messages programmed in your subconscious mind will undermine your best conscious efforts to change your life.

Be aware that there is hope even for those of you who used positive thinking and failed miserably.

Emotions were not only derived through a feedback of the body’s environmental information. Through self-consciousness, the mind can use the brain to generate “molecules of emotion” and override the system. While proper use of consciousness can bring health to an ailing body, inappropriate unconscious control of emotions can easily make a healthy body diseased,

Endowed with the ability to be self-reflective, the self-conscious mind is extremely powerful. It can observe any programmed behavior we are engaged in, evaluate the behavior, and consciously decide to change the program. We can actively choose how to respond to most environmental signals and whether we even want to respond at all. The conscious mind’s capacity to override the subconscious mind’s preprogrammed behaviors is the foundation of free will.

Beliefs control biology! Ponder the significance of this information. We have the capacity to consciously evaluate our responses to environmental stimuli and change old responses any time we desire … once we deal with the powerful subconscious mind. We are not stuck with our genes or our self-defeating behaviors!