Push Pull

Two broad categories I’ve noticed:
☝🏼 People who direct (or push) their energy outward relationally
✌🏼 People who take in others’ energy (or pull)

The intensity and urgency of the push or the pull varies. The push can feel like anything from a gentle probe to a violent invasion. The pull can feel like anything from a smooth invitation to a soul vampire. 😂

One of my favorite things to do in my 1:1 energy sessions is help people notice and feel their existing tendency, and also experience the felt sense of embodying something new.

Of course we’re all fluctuating between the two (or along the spectrum), in macro and micro ways, all the time. But I find most people to have a dominant or default tendency — and it seems that we mostly have no idea that we’re doing the one we’re doing, or that there’s any other way to exist... because it’s just the water we swim in.

So part of how I show people their default habit is by showing them how a change feels. A static evaluation of their energy might be less tangible than a shift.

Examples of what I mean by a static evaluation:
🌿 “What does your field/energy feel like right now?”
🌿 “How far beyond your body does it feel like your energy extends?”

These can be hard to feel into!

Here’s what I mean by a shift for them to sense into:
🦋 “Imagine I’m standing 10 feet in front of you — without moving your body, try extending your energy toward me”
🦋 “I’m going to start pushing my energy into yours, notice what you feel”

When our energetic dynamic shifts like this (even over Zoom!) they really feel it and it can be a big lightbulb moment.

With people who gravitate towards the “push,” I try to show them that they can hold themselves without pushing their energy onto others. I also try to help them find and open their receptive capacities, which dull and atrophy when they’ve been closed off long-term.

With people who gravitate towards pulling, I encourage them to be bigger. To take up more space, literally. And to see what it feels like to push into me, gently.

Importantly, I’m helping people connect with all of this in a very embodied, felt-sense way, rather than an abstract idea or concept that gets layered on top of what their body is actually doing.

At some point I’d like to write in more depth about how this plays out in relational power dynamics, but for now I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader… to feel into how these energies and karmas are pushed and pulled — relationally, collectively — along complex lines of power and privilege.

I’m really excited about the potential here!! For rebalancing relational power dynamics, in a ground-floor kinda way ❤️‍🔥

You can learn more about my 1:1 energy sessions here.

This post is adapted from an Instagram post I did during Inktober.