Many of my clients come in carrying other people’s ‘stuff'. This shows
up as clogged energy in the solar plexus chakra, or heaviness on the back, or
even the other person’s pain lodged in the heart chakra. Many of us,
particularly women, are programmed to be sympathetic and empathetic from an
early age. We often are ‘fixers’ so want to help everyone and anyone - whether
they want it or not!
As I have discussed in an
earlier blog we actually do a lot of our communicating on the auric level. As
such we read each other’s auras and identify each other’s (often faulty)
programming. Friends, workmates and relations will pick up on our energetic
message of fixer, helper, rescuer, repository of other’s pain etc, and decide, “Oh
great she/he will carry all this for me.” And so they dump and then go off
feeling much better for it, and exclaiming the benefits of having us as an
acquaintance. Meanwhile we are left feeling heavy, drained and tired. If even
when out shopping total strangers feel it appropriate to tell you their life
story – this is you.
And certainly it used to be me.
Once, as a university student, I was on a train leaving Newcastle-upon-Tyne
when a bloke sat down and started to tell me his life story
which looked pretty bleak. I say ‘looked’ because I was going purely on facial
expressions. I couldn’t make out a word he said – anyone who has heard a strong
Geordie accent will know how possible that is (think Ross Noble calling a horse
race).Anyway I must have made the right noises at the appropriate times as when
he got off the train I did manage to catch, “Thanks a lot pet, I’ve
never talked to anyone like that in my life before.”
So how do we change the pattern?
Firstly we need to recognise that we can’t fix everyone, and it is totally
inappropriate to believe that we can or indeed should. In fact we can be
hindering a person’s growth and development if we are forever taking their load
for them. We have to learn to sympathise, but not carry other people’s baggage,
no matter how much we love them. That does not mean we become mean or hard-hearted,
just that we give ourselves permission to allow others their burden. After all we
are much more useful over the long term if we walk beside a person, rather than carry them on our backs. This also makes it easier to hold a place of non-judgment
and compassion and reduces the likelihood of ‘giver’ fatigue or resentment.
In my sessions I release the
energy around conditioning or experiences which have fed the faulty belief that
we have to be the wonder-woman/superman of everyone’s lives. I then reinforce
that release, by discussing tools to break out of the pattern. One young client
came up with a great way of dealing with this. She tended to get people in her
life offloading onto her, and she was tired both of it and from it. So she now imagines
a big bowl in front of her. The other person dumps their stuff into the bowl
and she envisages helping them to sift through it until they take it back in
its new shape or, if they’re stubbornly attached to their pain, reclaim it in
the same, sorry old state as before. While my client is still being caring and concerned,
she is detached from the energy of the issue and the person and doesn’t feel
depleted or put upon.
I think this technique will also
reveal in time that we are at our most insightful when we are neither distorted
by the need to get 'our strokes’, nor drained by the effort involved. Gradually
too we will discover our truth that we don’t have to rush in to rescue and
carry, in order to be loving, lovable and loved!