How to Stop Absorbing Everyone's Energy (and Finally Feel Like Yourself Again as a Healer)

There's a question that in inevitably arises in every single Raiki course I have had since the beginning and it is, is this mine or is this theirs? How do I know this is mine? This is the Healer's Journey podcast. I'm your host, Inge Broer, and I want to dig into it today. I don't know if 20 minutes is going to be enough. It's actually for sure not because this is at the basis of all the work that I do. The block we're busting today is the question of I don't know what's mine and what's theirs. It's that moment where your energy feels like sludge and you can't pinpoint what's what.

you kind of walk away from the session feeling maybe either really drained or really elevated but you somehow feel unanchored in yourself like you're holding on to something extra. So let's dig into it. I find this a challenging question to answer because it is the big question of my life. I am somebody who just is naturally really spongy. And before we make that into a bad thing, if you're spongy, too, I bet that sponginess also makes you really, really freaking smart and really quick to observe.

It's a quick study. It makes you really empathetic, but it comes at a cost. And that is for me, it feels like just like a heaviness, which turns into a bit of like a straight jacket, which turns into a kind of like a clamp around my throat, and then I can't move and I can't know what's what. and I paralyze and I collapse and then I have this whole story about how I'm an introvert and I don't even like people that much and blah blah blah blah blah. I've been somebody who approached social interactions in a very like performanceoriented lens.

So I'd need a lot of like time to prepare my character, my persona. I'd be masking. I'd become what I thought wherever I was going needed me to be. And I was very effective at this and very successful at this. And one of my friends back in my early 20s paid me like the nicest compliment that felt so utterly in my body. It was Inca is the one person that I feel I can bring anywhere and she'll always sort of fit in or find her way and not embarrass her basically. And like that's a huge compliment on my social skills, but in my body it was like that sounds so utterly exhausting because it's not because I can that I want to.

So what's mine? What's not mine? What's performance? What's real? What's authentic? What's a facade? These are questions that I can completely get drowned in if I'm not. And so energy work and learning the fine art of discernment are what have literally saved my life. I think if I didn't have this I would be still in some kind of a performance-based thing that would be like performance performance performance shut down burnout performance performance performance shut down burnout. And I am convinced that my body would be paying the cost of that it would have some kind of undiagnosible mysterious maybe autoimmune disease something like that.

So I've often felt a sort of irritation at that question because people want tips and tricks and I've I've got them, okay, and they're useful. But where I want to bring us today is at like the deeper core understanding of what is going on here. Because when we understand and when we can remove any judgment from ourselves and we can love ourselves and how we're constructed, it creates for it allows for holistic solutions. And that's why I feel like becoming a healer and doing energy work is often a lifestyle path as much as it is a calling.

Because when we know what I'm about to attempt to explain to you, we can't keep going on in the same way. So, I want to back up and make this crystal clear. The way it feels when your energy has been merged with someone else's or a groups and you're not clear on what's yours and what's not is that it feels usually heavy in the body. It feels unclear. It feels like a weight on your chest. The thoughts maybe go a lot to like what will people think? There's a sort of a difficulty in doing things because you're stopped by what impact it might have on other people and you give that a lot more attention than your inner actual desires.

In fact, your inner desires can be completely blurred. So, if you've ever said like, "I don't know what I want." Like in that scene in the notebook, the main character is like, "What do you want? What do you actually want? What do you want?" And like she really doesn't know. It's like that. And for you to like know what you want, where you're wanting to go, to find anything intrinsic takes a lot of time. Takes a lot of quiet time, takes a lot of alone time. It might take like a full ritual. It might take someone holding space for you, getting you firmly in your own body for you to know these things.

So that's how you know that's an indicator that you've been merged, entangled, essentially anything that is not that you are clearly in your own energy, in your own boundaries, in your own aura and meeting other people from there. So, if your energy space has like a certain color signature, let's say you're blue and you meet someone who's yellow, you become yellow. You go into a space that is brown, you become totally brown and you can't reclaim your own blue. What we want instead is that there's like a blue that's you and it's meeting that yellow and maybe it's meeting it's making like a marly thing around you.

Maybe it becomes green. Maybe there's an interaction. There's a meeting. There's something new that happens between you and the other person. A third field is created. Or in the case of a group, your blue is now like swimming in the brown, but it doesn't become brown. That's what we want. That is interconnection. And for years, this was completely foreign to me. I would turn whatever color I was with. And the cost of that was that my relationships were like they felt like something had to survive because that's where the strategy was born.

I was born in a time in my early elementary school years and my late elementary school years where I was in a small group and there was a lot of I think there had been a bit of a trauma situation in that school like a lot of people left the year before that's why I got a spot in and there's a lot of unspoken tensions a lot of difficulties a lot of change a lot of movement and I absorbed all of that becoming an answer to it with trying to become um kinder, trying to become softer, more invisible, and it was completely a survival strategy.

There's nothing conscious about it. And when someone started to telling me about like, is it yours or not yours? I was like, what even is that? Like that is bizarre. But also felt like whoa, that might be really lifechanging. And if I can reclaim the space around me as my own, that would be great. And so I've already mentioned something here is that when we totally merge with the the energy around us, we lose our individuality. And what also isn't possible is that there is no third field that can emerge.

So there's kind of a loss of creativity. And so we often believe that when we merge with what's around us, we become super harmonious and super chill and super, you know, whatever the space needs of us, we get lost in it. We dissolve in it. We believe we are helping. But what actually helps is like all of that like it can be helpful to be dissolving and to be helpful. But when it comes from an anchored true place inside of us, like if there when there's like a solidity, that's when impact can happen, that's when change is likely to happen.

Because when you merge and you become, you're serving the status quo. And so it feels in those moments of survival that if we ground, if we stay true to ourselves, we're betraying the system around us. But the truth is, the more you ground, the more true to yourself, you stay, the more something new is possible to emerge in this field. And if the space requires for everyone to merge and everybody to lose their individuality and lose their true selves, lose their intrinsic motivation, it's also not helping other people.

So when you ground in a place like that and you hold on to your own color and you are still kind and still harmonious and all of these things, you are starting to transmute the space instead of taking it on into your own body. And that is one of the core things that is hard to articulate in my work but is one of the core results people get and one of the core reasons I do it because when empathic natural healers learn to do this every space they go in now becomes a little bit has a chance of transmuting itself and changing and I've seen this time and time and time again in my clients and is the result that makes me genuinely the most excited because I do get excited about helping people become the healers they were meant to be and do that well and to succeed at that professionally.

But I get somehow even more excited more genuinely frothily like yes when um their family systems start changing because they're showing up differently because they're holding the posture of the healer in a different way when things at their work are changing when they're changing positions at work to suit their intrinsic motivation better and everything starts flowing better in the world. I think that is literally how we change the actual freaking world. Because by liberating people who take on energy a lot to be themselves and to stay to their own colors, they become they they really change the world.

I really believe that because they stop enforcing the status quo. And these are beautiful, loving people. And so they change the world in a beautiful loving way. There's no other way. That's just how it happens. So at this point you might be feeling like my excitement and you might be feeling okay this is like a monumental task to rewire this in myself and it is starting to feel very very very valuable. How do I do it? Well the first thing is we need to dismantle perfectionism. small task but we need to dismantle the essential energetic pattern that you need to present a sort of perfect facade to survive in the world.

It's that facade where you vacate yourself to project a different image that makes you vulnerable for other energies to come in. And so the way I do that with my clients is that I have a few programs where I teach you energy healing to dismantle perfectionism to get closer to your true colors and to live your true colors no matter where you go. Side effect, really cool side effect. You also become an accomplished healer and you become attuned to Raiki and you become a healing force in the world. But it's not really about that.

What it's actually about is that you are liberated from the shackles of your own perfectionism. You are liberated from the handcuffs that you wear when it feels like a matter of survival to please other people to uphold the status quo. This is about it's like a gentle kind rebellion if you will. It's not about becoming individualistic and saying screw you to everybody in your life. It's really not. It's about taking a stand for healing courageously in a way that is anchored and rooted and kind. And that is so much harder than saying screw you to everybody in your life.

Even if that is hard to begin with, it is also in some ways harder than to just keep complying to everything in your life. But that has a cost to keep letting other people's energy run the show. That costs you your life force, your your juice juice. It costs you possibly your health. It cost you your dreams. Start of a solution and it takes longer than this. But the start of solution is 3 months where you learn the skills of energy management and energy mastery. So, I'm going to tell you the first skills, okay, that we do in Healer Awakened.

It's 12 weeks and each week we do a different skill. We actually, if you're listening to this, the week this episode comes out, we're starting next week and I would really like to have you in time to not be a perfectionist. Like, just like feel the resonance in your body as I tell these things. And if it's like super vibrating and like yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Just just get yourself in. The first skill is to come back home to yourself. And so that is it could be a three-month course on its own, but what it is is to notice that you have energetic tendrils all around you.

And a lot of those energetic tendrils are plugged into other people. We're all interconnected in these invisible webs. And it's not wrong to be plugged into other people. We need that web. It is actually very nourishing and life sustaining. But you need to be able to choose with discernment and sovereignty what you're plugged into. So you're going to call your energy from wherever you've invested it in to review. Where am I invested? And so at some point I realized that when I was really scared of making some moves that were intrinsically motivated, really like my own soul's path, but I was like, "Everybody's going to think yada yada yada." And somebody asked me, "Who is everyone?" And I was like, "What do you mean everyone's everyone?

Everyone's going to think this." And he's like, "Well, you're not a mind reader. Who is the person you're picturing in your head?" And it turned out it was one person who would never judge me, who would never anything. It's just that that person was this symbol of everyone. So when you're giving that kind of person, and it can be somebody you don't really know really well, it can be a friend you had like a decade ago. It can be a teacher you had when you were a kid. Often it's like very absurd, but that person is still or your image of that person is still running your energy.

So, you're going to call your energy back from all of that. You're going to bring yourself home because you can't make choices from anywhere else than that. And then the second is you're going to rewire your relationship with support through your relationship with the earth's energy. Now, for a lot of us, this is uncomfortable and we don't really want to let ourselves be held. We don't really want to put ourselves down. We're more comfortable running around everywhere. And yet, if you're going to be an energy healer, channeling energy, you have no choice but to be supported, grounded, rooted, anchored into the earth.

Because that energy that you're holding on to, it wants to go somewhere that is loving, nourishing, kind, and you've been taking it upon yourself to be that, but you're not big enough. the earth is and you can be a conduit for that energy to the earth and that is what you will be invited to do. The third skill is leaning enough into faith to let go because for a lot of us who tend to hold on to other people's energies, we have this subconscious belief that like nobody else is going to do it but us.

And if we let it go, all hell's going to break loose. So it's sort of discovering that okay maybe that person can be held also by the earth and not just by me. I can let go. I can let God I can allow the universal loving healing energy that is all around us through me too. And if you're paying attention, if you've ever done Reiki before, you might recognize somewhere in your body, hey, wait a minute. Isn't this the setup to channel Reiki? And the answer is yes, it is. But normal Reiki classes skip over this.

Maybe you do a 20-minute meditation. That's really great. We're taking 3 weeks because this is important. This is where it's at. If you want to be someone who uses discernment, who changes the world for good, you cannot absorb everybody's energy anymore, that has to stop and instead become a healing channel. Not using your own energy, not absorbing it on yourself. And that's what we do in week four. You become the healing channel. You allow Reiki energy to move through you and you begin a selfhealing journey, a self-clearing journey.

You're going to be attuned to Reiki, which is a clearing of your energy of sorts. It's a connecting your highest potential down to your most embodied expression. It is opening and clearing and you're doing a self raiki journey. Because when we're not sure of what is ours and what is other people's, we can get tense and just like hold everything in our bodies and as long as we don't move, everything's okay. But as soon as we move or get a massage, like the emotions explode, well, you're doing a 21day self-healing journey.

You're connecting to this healing energy, moving in your body, and you're clearing out all that gunk, all that stuff that you've been holding on to that is not yours. From there, we're learning how to hold space for other people without taking it on, but keeping a compassionate neutrality. We're learning the language of the chakras. We're learning how energy flows. We're learning where things get stuck. And then you get to practice putting all of this into action by giving your classmates Reiki or people in your life as well if you feel ready for that.

And you're learning to hold space without taking anything on. You're holding to ask questions. You're learning to hold space for transformation. And then if anything does get stuck on you and if you feel heavy and if you're carrying other people's around stuff around, we look at how to clear that from your own energy, how to take responsibility for what resonated, what stuck. And we continue this learning by learning how like to look at energetic bubbles and get really clear in our discernment of how all of these dynamics work.

We learn about mistakes, about repair. We learn how to expand our container and be able to be more and more in our own energy through gratitude, savoring, and pleasure. Because ultimately the more we are in our own energy the less any other energy can come. The more we become who we are the less anybody else can colonize and that is the real work. So there's 12 skills that were building in healer awakened. If you listen to this episode and you're like oh my god I've done raiki before and it was like the beginning of an answer to all of this and taught me the tricks of the roses around me.

like imagining my bubble, but I know there's another level. There's a level of embodiment that I want and I haven't had yet. This is it. It is built for people who have never done Reiki before, but it is even more built for people who have done Reiki and know the answers in Reiki, but the first time went too fast and they didn't get to embody it enough. So, my dear, I want to take a stand for you and I want to invite you into healer awakened. There's not a lot of time left before our next round. So, what I really want you to do is I want you to come on Instagram, find me at I N G H E A L Singa Heels if we're not connected already, and DM me just the word awakened or DM me.

I listen to your latest episode and mind love and this is me. And then we talk. And I never push anybody into any of my containers if I don't think they are completely right for them. My goal is always to empower you to make the best choice for you because I've had people in my containers that it was not and it wasn't fun for me either. So I hope you'll trust me with that. This has been the Healer's Journey podcast. I'm your host, Inge Broer. Music was by Lana Chakra. And I hope to see you in my Instagram inbox.