If you cut your finger while making dinner, you’d apply some ointment and a bandage. When you’re trying to recover from a cold, you drink plenty of fluids and cut back on activities when possible. After an intense workout or a long hike, you stretch, take a hot bath, or maybe even get a massage.
Most of us attend to our physical wellbeing in countless ways. However, we don’t give much attention at all to our energetic wellbeing.
So what can we do to care for ourselves when energetically we’re feeling down? Is there such a thing as a spiritual salve to soothe raw and ragged emotions? This article will show you 3 powerful steps you can take to protect your energy when you’re feeling vulnerable.
The Anatomy of Vulnerability
A good way to understand what vulnerability is to begin by defining its polar opposite. In energy terms, the polar opposite of vulnerability is a feeling of resilience, self-worth, confidence, empowerment, and inner balance.
Internal alignment is our natural state of being. When we are well established and feeling solid within ourselves, we are immune to many potentially disruptive external forces. Snide remarks and criticisms roll off our backs. We don’t waste time looking to others for acceptance or validation. We’re in touch with our need. Physically, mentally, energetically and emotionally. We uphold our own boundaries.
When we haven’t taken the time to tend to our own energy field, we become susceptible to feelings of vulnerability. This could show up as feeling hyper-sensitive to noise or activity. We may experience it as self-consciousness or insecurity. It could even take the form of dwelling on something from the past or feeling anxiety about the future.
Anything that causes us to disconnect from our inner source of power leaves us in a state of vulnerability.
Protecting ourselves when we are in a vulnerable state is not about isolating ourselves from others. It’s not about establishing rigid relationship ground rules, or about trying to control other people’s behavior. It’s about feeling, validating, and resolving the imbalance that is happening within ourselves. The only way to protect our energy is to become masters of its flow. And this is 100% an inside job.
Here are 3 steps for protecting your energy, and restoring yourself from the inside out, whenever you are feeling vulnerable:
Step #1: Get familiar with your inner landscape.
Begin by finding a quiet, distraction-free place, where you feel relaxed enough to close your eyes and go within. For the next few minutes, give yourself permission to focus entirely on your emotional and energetic wellbeing.
Take a couple of deep breaths, and allow yourself to become aware of the ebb and flow of your own mental and emotional energy.
As you connect with your energy body, notice the energy surges and pulsations near your heart and solar plexus.
Allow yourself to become sensitive to any areas of weakness, fear, or vulnerability. Simply allow these emotions to be there. There is nothing you need to do to try to release or change them. All you need to do is give them your undivided love and attention. Emotions naturally resolve themselves when they are fully experienced and validated.
Step #2: Recognize that for every emotional extreme you experience, you have the capacity to bring in its polar opposite.
The very fact that you’ve been feeling vulnerable is pointing you to reach for greater stability. This shift is an inside job – only you can accomplish it.
To shift your emotions from vulnerability to inner strength, simply give more attention to how you’d like to feel.
Identify for yourself how you define the polar opposite of vulnerability. Is it strength? Resilience? Objectivity or neutrality?
However you define it, take a moment to conjure this emotion within you. Use the power of your breath to invite this energy into the space previously occupied by vulnerable feelings.
Develop an energetic courtship with the emotion you’ve defined as the opposite of vulnerability. Call it into your being daily, until it becomes a practiced vibration within you.
Step #3: Decide in advance how you want to feel in each new situation.
The primary reason we become susceptible to feelings of vulnerability is that we are not intentional about directing our emotions. But unless you plan ahead for how you want to feel, you’ll be at the mercy of other people’s moods.
Flip this pattern on its head by deciding how you want to show up prior to each important interaction.
How do you want to feel when you give that presentation at work? What kind of mood do you want to be in when you meet your spouse for dinner?
By deciding how you want to feel ahead of time, you become the master of your own energy field. This is not only the key to releasing vulnerability but to attracting all that you desire in life.
Christy Whitman is an energy healer, celebrity coach, and the New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Having It All: A Woman’s Guide to Unlimited Abundance. If you’re ready to discover the limitlessness of your own wisdom and power, join Christy’s conscious community and begin to manifest greater abundance in your life with 7 days of free meditations. Connect with her at www.ChristyWhitman.com.
