Reclaim Your Energy from the Past

We are all connected: people, groups, communities. Through ideas and developments, we all grow together. But sometimes connections, meetings, emotional entanglements and challenging situations stop us in our tracks, rather than give us what we need. Worst case scenario, we end up giving away our energy and our power along the way, and before we know it we feel depleted, lack inspiration and drive, and wonder how we got to a point where life lacks color and spunk. We might even be so drained that we get sick and develop ailments of different kinds.

Some people see this as a natural part of life. We get older. We lose the passion of the very young. We cannot expect to be sparkly at thirty, fifty or eighty. Life is a hard ride after all, and it’s expected to wear us down, make us jaded and somewhat tired. Or is it?

In the classic book, Entering the Circle: A Russian Psychiatrist’s Journey into Siberian Shamanism, by Olga Kharitidi, there is a story of Olga meeting a woman who has the ability to change her appearance by daily looking through a photo album with pictures of herself, chronologically ordered in age, showing her younger for every image. This woman’s ID card told Olga she was many years older than she appeared.

How was this possible? Was paging through a photo album some kind of magical act? In a way, I would suggest it was. The woman was taking back her energy from earlier days, reminding herself of who she had been, bringing the energy of earlier times into her present day, to be used for altering her being in a positive way.

In many spiritual traditions, the fact that we are all connected is the premise of existence. But also that we, in this interconnected web, can move and affect things out of space and time. Meaning for example that we can go back in time and change the effect of negative situations where we have lost power. We all have experienced times when we were too overwhelmed, weak or inexperienced that we came out feeling like the losers in specific interactions.

We may also have give away our power to subtler influences, such as religious or society value system that we were not experienced enough to see through. While positive daily practices and a good-natured daily life with loving people in itself can make stuck energy in the past get loose and flow back to us naturally, we also have the choice of consciously going back in time and reclaim what we lost.

Several Ways to Reclaim Lost Energy

There are several different ways to go about this restoration. Carlos Castaneda introduced the idea of recapitulation to the larger audience during the 70’s. This technique has later been refined by many authors such as Victor Sanchez and Merilyn Tunneshende. Recapitulation is a method of recovering the power and energy that we have given away to people, places, and things.

It often involves an organizing element of writing down all your experiences according to themes and chronology. After this work you use a certain method involving breathing exercises to systematically go through your life and recollect what you have lost. Although this seems to work very well for many people I personally prefer to go about energy re-gathering from the past in a more organic and self-oriented way.

This suits me because I believe that our essence, or our soul if you will, not only knows what we need. It also knows what we can handle. This method begins not so much with a mental exercise, but with the feelings and needs of the moment.

True deep spiritual experiences and energy work cannot be properly described with words nor fully understood intellectually. They can be felt with the heart or experienced with the spirit. Yet trying to use words to describe them we might say that if you were a whole large clay vase when you were born, you have been leaving shards of that vase behind whenever you have had intense negative experiences.

As you mature you have the option of checking in with your heart and spirit and ask: “What am I lacking? When and where or with whom in my past might I have left it?” If you cannot grasp fully when and where you lost what you now lack, you can simply state the question, keeping it with you when you do the following exercise.

The regathering of what you left behind is an inner journey. As all inner journeys we have to create a certain state of mind to make the most of it. Most importantly, we have to set up a time and place where we are certain to be undisturbed. To start an important inner journey and be interrupted is not only irritating, it can also be painful and cause us more harm.

People who regularly work spiritually, have different favorite relaxation techniques. These can involve lightning candles, burning incense, playing a certain kind of music or drumming. Whatever technique you use, make sure it suits you personally. Also make sure the body is comfortable and feels supported. The whole point with preparation for an inner journey is to become calm enough for the body to relax, the mind to stop chattering and to opening up for the worlds that lie within us.

When you are ready, close your eyes and allow scenes to play up for your inner eye. They may not be exactly what you thought they would be. That is fine. It is even more likely that they are important if they are not what you expect. When you see the scenes of your past with your inner eyes, part of you can see the situation from an energy level. I often see energy as colors, some people see energy as threads, as animal forms or simply feel the feelings.

Just become aware of the exact moment when energy left you, or was taken from you. Then imagine it rejoining and reentering you. It is also possible for you to reclaim or pick up the energy and put it in a bag. Bring it with you and reintegrate it later, in a ceremony, or just before you fall asleep at night.

To reclaim energy from the past is an ongoing process. We can do it as need comes up, and work through our past lives piece by piece. Some people even do it as a daily practice, ending each day with a recovery of energy loss that might have occurred during the day. Whatever method we use, it is important to remember that we all have the ability to go back to any moment in time and reclaim energy and power we left behind and restore it to ourselves. We are not helpless victims of the past, but active agents of the presence.

This article has been published in The Echo World, the alternative magazine in Central Virginia, and at OmTimes magazine online.