Everything is energy.

The further down the yogic path I venture, the more I come to understand that energy and vibration are real. I didn’t always believe this. 

It’s simple really. Everything we see and interact with is made up of energetic particles, and these particles all carry their own vibration.

For example, an inanimate object is comprised of subatomic particles which, held together by strong nuclear force, give the object its form. We learn this in physics, but it’s not something we often think about in day-to-day life like, “Oh, this table is a mass of protons, electrons and neutrons whirring away to make a table…” But regardless of whether we notice it or not, it is there.

The same goes for us living beings. Everything in the world is made of different types of energy, including things we can’t see like electricity, sound and emotion, and all of these vibrate at varying frequencies.

For example, water has one vibration, but when it freezes to ice, its vibration changes. When it turns to vapor, the vibration changes again.

Electricity, as we know it, is the most obvious form of energy. Through all these, vibration is the common thread, and the strongest.

Most of our thoughts turn into spoken words or internal chatter. Our words, both thought and spoken, define our actions, and actions, when repeated again and again, form our habits. And our habits define us, they make us who we are on any given day; they play a massive role in our emotions. Think about your habits for a moment. How does each make you feel?

As an empath, it all makes so much sense to me now that I understand. Because I feel things so deeply and so strongly, I now understand how everything affects me on such a visceral level. It’s all energetic vibration.

Just consider for a second the fact that a hug, smile, laughter or a kind gesture brings up good feelings inside. When we cross paths with someone or witness violence, hate or cruelty it brings up uncomfortable feelings inside. We often never stop to consider how or why this is. But the answer seems simple to me now: vibration.

Higher vibration emotions feel better in our body and do less harm. This is not to say we should avoid our lower vibration emotions, we just have to be careful that we aren’t clinging to them because that’s when they can do damage.

Dr. David Hawkins discovered that on an energetic scale there is a critical point where emotions such as greed, guilt or anger that “calibrate below a frequency of 200” affect the body while emotions like love, joy or happiness, which calibrate above 200, have a different effect. He also found that vibrating at a “frequency above 500 is one of pure unconditional love, and it is in this state that we are in complete harmony with our body and our environment.”

As a whole, I believe the world is carrying a low vibration right now. How else did we end up with a President Trump? Fear, greed, terror, anger, hatred, bitterness, anxiety, and jealousy all run rampant.

These are the lowest vibration emotions. They’re dense and heavy and they don’t feel good. I look around and see these energies flying everywhere.

However, we need to do our own work if we are ever going to transcend this mess.

So ask yourself if you fall into the abyss of these seven habits that keep us vibrating lower:

1. Jealousy

Oh, jealousy. The ugliest of emotions in my opinion. Hate is ugly indeed, but jealousy is its own dark beast. There is nothing that will keep us more blocked from energy work and higher vibrations than the green-eyed monster.

When we get caught up in our self-righteousness, we think we are entitled to many things. We get stuck in our own selfishness that whispers to us, telling us that we should have whatever we want. From that mindset, we see others who have what we want and we perceive that it should be ours.

We can’t rise if we are mired in the swamp of “I want.” We can shift this behavior by focusing on what we have rather than what we want. We can’t be consumed with jealousy and grateful at the same time! It’s okay to feel a pang of jealousy, and to use it to discover what we want in life. But when it becomes an identity for us it holds us back. We block ourselves with it. So acknowledge it and let it go.

2. Regret

Simply put, regret is one of the ego’s favorite ways of playing God and living in the past. Could have, should have, would have…

While we sit in that space reliving each event we wish had gone differently, our present moments are passing us by. We regret that choice we made eight years ago and we cling to it. This blocks us from appreciating where we are now. Regret whispers to us that we may be missing out on some better version of life had things just gone a different way or had we made a different choice.

Regret can manifest as depression, anxiety, fear and physical illness. 

3. Guilt

This is a life sucker. Guilt will just eat us alive—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It’s such a challenging one to work with because we are taught to feel guilty about everything.

We feel guilty when we say no and when we say yes. We feel guilty when we don’t meet the high demands and expectations of those around us, including the unreasonable ones we place on ourselves. We spend so much time creating beliefs around what is “right” and “wrong” and then more time beating ourselves up for the “wrong.” It’s an endless vortex of soul-sucking energy.

Forget right and wrong and just live well. Guilt is supposed to be felt when we actually do something that’s messed up. The other guilt, the one we’ve been programmed to carry, is a distorted version of this. We can examine why we feel the need to live by someone else’s standards when we feel guilt over being true to ourselves.

It’s normal to feel guilt when we do something that goes against our own moral code, but holding on to it will make us sick. Transmute guilt with forgiveness.

4. Fear

The thing about fear is that, unless we are actually under immediate threat, we create it. Then we let our created fear dictate our choices and actions all through our lives, and we don’t even realize it.

We construct scenarios in our minds, and then we feed off them. Fear is our reaction to a perceived threat. The imagined scenarios we draw up in our minds usually never actually take place. Yet we let fear control us and keep us trapped. It prevents us from taking part in things we would really like to do, and we make up excuses and lies in our heads about how we aren’t interested in said activity anyway—so why bother doing it? We tell ourselves,“Nah that’s not for me,” and we don’t even try.

We stay imprisoned by our fear. And vibrations don’t rise in prison. Feel your fear but don’t cling to it. Transmute fear with love.

5. Judgement

We all here serve as mirrors for one another.

The funny thing about judgement is that when we are stuck in it and we are judging others, we don’t even realize that we are just judging ourselves. The very thing we are noticing and critiquing in another is the very thing that needs addressing in ourselves. And on the other side of that, judgement comes from intolerance. One hallmark of high-vibration beings (think Jesus, Buddha, Mother Teresa, Dr. Martin Luther King) is that they are compassionate and, above all, tolerant.

It is only our ego that tells us we know better about how someone should be living. We don’t have to like what anyone does or how they live, but we don’t have to condemn them either. This doesn’t mean we turn a blind eye and condone evil acts, it simple means we stop judging other people for what they’re doing. When we feel judgement, we need to turn within and explore why.

6. Blame

I can’t stress enough how important ditching the blame habit is. Nothing will dis-empower us faster than blame. It gives away our power and keeps us in victim mentality. It blocks us from healing. And most of all, it prevents us from ever taking responsibility for the state of our life. Because when we take responsibility, we have to take action.

Blaming others and the world keeps us in a safe, low-vibration bubble of relative comfort, albeit miserable comfort, but comfort nonetheless. Sh*tty things happen to all of us, but if they’re still defining us 10 years later it’s no one’s fault but our own.

That’s my take away after being a survivor of sexual assaults, cancer, armed robbery, emotional abuse, and drug addiction. I blamed for a long time and it almost killed me. I don’t give away my power anymore, my vibrational state is too valuable to me. No one else is responsible for our happiness.

7. Clutter and Attachment

One of the fastest ways to kickstart our own healing and transition processes is to physically clean out our space. Energy can’t flow though clutter. If we hold on to stuff, we’re also holding onto energy. This is a recipe for stuck, stuck, and more stuck!

I draw close to panic when I am in a cluttered place. I am so sensitive to the energies attached to everything that I feel claustrophobic. It’s actually frightening to me and always has been, only now I understand why. It’s all the trapped energy I feel.

If you haven’t used, worn, or touched something in six months, pass it on! Not only do we feel better in our space but we also feel good for donating items to people in need. Double win on raising the vibration.

It’s almost the Lunar New Year and this is the perfect time for reassessment and house cleaning to get rid of what no longer serves us.

Do yourself a favor and ditch these habits. It may not be easy but it will be worth it.

~

Author: Lindsey Carricarte

Image: @sheryl216 on Instagram

Editor: Khara-Jade Warren