Don’t we all look forward to vacations? But what does vacation mean?

Vacation means to vacate.  While you are on vacation, you vacate your ego and your mind. There is no phone, no tv, no past, no future, no people having demands on you and you don’t have to think or worry or care about anything.

You just relax. That’s a vacation.

But think about this: what are you vacationing from?

In all great teachings, liberation is seen as the epiphany of mastership and enlightenment.

Why do we fear freedom?

We fear freedom because it has no qualities.

Think of joy. Does joy have qualities? No.

When babies are born, they haven’t got qualities yet. They are just there, empty. In that emptiness, they are qualityless; so they have joy.

This is one thing that the human mind struggles to understand.

When you are totally empty, you are joyous and blissful.

That’s freedom.

You are not judging and you are not concerned. You are free from worry and from controlling anything.

That is the gist of freedom; a lack of quality.

How can you become free?

In simple terms, you can’t. But why can’t you? Because any effort you make to be free, is telling yourself that you are not free.

So why is freedom so scary? It is scary because freedom is freedom from you.

• When you worry, who is it that worries? You.
• When you are angry, who is angry? You.
• When you are resentful towards someone or something, who is resentful? You.

No matter what happens, it is you that makes it happen.

Can you be free from you?

You cannot attempt to do it because the very attempt is the ego trying to get rid of the ego, which is impossible.

But there is a way.

Ask yourself this question: “Who am I”? When you ask “Who am I”, there is one thing you can be sure of, you will never have an answer.

Maybe in the beginning you will say: “I am my body” or “I am my past” or “I am my name”.

But if you think carefully, all of that comes and goes.  Anything that is impermanent cannot be real, because what is real is lasting.

What is lasting about you?

You will find that what is lasting about you is something that cannot be named, that cannot be defined, explained or known by your mind.

So how do you find what is lasting about you?

Work from the premise of elimination. Find out what you are not.

You are not your name because you can change your name and still be you.

You are not your country because you can be born without a country and still be you.

You are not your body because your body is being recycled all the time. You first are a baby, then you become a teenager and then you become an adult and finally an old person. There are definitely four different bodies right there, in every aspect.

So who are you? There is no way that you can ever know.

And if you think I know who I am, I don’t. But the difference is, that I am happy not knowing. Because then I am so open to wonder and vastness that the possibilities are endless.

I’m open and see every moment as unique and new.

But if you have an idea of who you think you are, then you are limited to that and you cannot be free.

Freedom is not a very difficult thing to do. Just ask: “Who am I”.

When you acknowledge the fact that you don’t know, then the ego drops. Now you’ll never get hurt.

When people talk about you, it doesn’t matter. You are no longer concerned because you know that you don’t know who you are. So how can you be offended if you don’t know who you are? How can that hurt?

When you are sincere, when you are totally open to that premise that you really don’t know and admit it, then something begins to take over.

What that something is could be a moment of grace, could be a shift in perception, could be just a subtle feeling that you are not alone.

This is one thing that most people miss. They become very dry. They read a lot of books, they do a lot of meditation, but that does not awaken you by itself.

What awakens you is dropping the self and the ego. When you are sincere and dedicated to that, you’ll find there is no “me”.

It’s a little frightening in the beginning, but the moment you completely embrace it, an automatic joy will start to inundate you like a newborn child.

We tend to have the idea that when we lose someone we have to feel grief and that it has to be there.

In this article, I’m going to help you to understand grief much differently and help you to lose your grief if you decide that you want to.

What you are going to read is likely to be drastically different from what you’ve read in other articles about this topic. But if you are open to reading further, you might discover something completely different and liberating.

The Phases Of Grief

There are two phases of grief: 1) You want to feel grief. 2) You want to stop grieving.

The main issue with grief is that we often want to stay grieving for a long period of time because we have beliefs about what this grief means for us.

For many people feeling grief means that they care about a certain person and that they should feel sad because of it.

The second issue is that when we want to stop grieving and feeling sad, we don’t know how to do it.

Many people have the idea that the intensity and the duration to which they grieve determines how much they loved the person who died.

That’s a hugely common belief about grief, but it’s not true.

As long as you believe that grief means that you care and love someone, then you are also going to believe the opposite to be true.

You are going to believe that if you are happy, when you lose someone you love, then you are a bad and selfish person and that you have to feel guilty about it.

That belief makes you want to stay suffering and doesn’t allow you to become happy again.

Question Your Thoughts

What you really need to do is to reevaluate the validity of the thought that sadness means that you care and happiness means that you are selfish.

Grief isn’t created by how much you love and care about someone; grief is created by the idea that what is happening to someone you love is bad.

Imagine that you are walking with somebody that you love and they suddenly trip and fall on their face. At that moment, you might laugh at them even though they might be hurt or, you might be sad for them.

Neither one indicates whether you love them or not.

You either laugh or cry depending on whether you tell a story in your head that was funny or sad that that happened. It’s not determined whether you love them or not.

If grieving or sadness was created by how much we love someone, then we would feel sad in every single moment after they passed or got injured. But that’s not the case.

You are maybe trying to feel sad in every moment. And at any moment that you capture yourself slightly happy, you feel guilty about it and you immediately tell yourself that it’s bad for you to be happy.

There is like an inner desire of wanting to stay sad because you believe that you love them.

However, in any moment that no story or thought pops up, that says what happened is bad, you are fine.

Sadness Is Just A Bent Of The Mind

You have to create sadness. When those thoughts or stories don’t pop up, you are automatically fine and there is nothing wrong with that.

There’s also nothing wrong with being sad from time to time.

But there comes a point when you have to recognize that the sadness is created by just telling the same story in your head over and over again.

At that point, you have to ask yourself whether you want to keep telling that story in your life or you want to get over it.

The best way of dealing with grief is to:

If you can admit that happiness doesn’t mean you are selfish, then you can move on and start becoming happy again.

Do you find yourself holding on to grief or sadness for a very long period of time?

What’s your most frequent thought when you feel grieving or sad – and how will you try to implement what you’ve just read today?

Let us know in the comments below.

You have to discern between empathy and sympathy. Empathy is where you feel into other people’s emotions. Sympathy is where you just have compassion. But having a lot of empathy means that you start embodying other people’s feelings and what they are going through.

Our whole Planet Earth is comprised of an infinite reservoir of energy as is the human body, and it’s inevitable to get in contact with other people’s energy.

You may bump into someone who may push your burdens.

So how do you stop absorbing other people’s energy? How can you dispel negative energy?

1. Discover Your Unresolved Issues

   You don’t have to focus on what other people are doing. You have to focus on things that you have to repair within yourself that other people highlight in certain situations and circumstances you face in life.

   What happens when you get into a conversation with someone and you feel offended? They’ve hit a nerve which makes you want to lash out at them.

   What have they done? They have acted as a catalyst to awaken the sleeping giant. It could have been any other person in any other location. In fact, you find that it’s not so much the other person as it is your unresolved issues.

   What’s going to help you stop absorbing other people’s energy, is to start taking a serious look at those issues.

   A lot of people live from the outside in, so other people become their problems. But when you start to live from the inside out, that’s when you start gaining more clarity.

   For many people it’s hard to talk about unresolved issues because they don’t want to take responsibility.

   Everybody will be your problem until you start taking a look within yourself and start repairing your unresolved issues, and start healing wounds to become complete, and start reintegrating the fragmented parts of yourself to become your greatest version.

2. Express Yourself 100%

   Express yourself without guilt. What happens when someone talks to you for hours and you want to say something but you don’t want to be rude? You stay silent. You become a sponge. You are now absorbing all of their energy.

   By acting like this you neglect your true authenticity and you stop feeling good about yourself. But once you can really express 100% and remove guilt from the equation, you develop a greater transparency which will allow you to become your greatest version.

   Many times the reason why so many people don’t express how they really feel is because they have been told that their true feelings don’t matter.

   Growing up we worked on the reward and punishment principles. If you did things right, or even if you did what your parents wanted, you would be rewarded even if you didn’t really feel deep down this is what you wanted to do.

   

   We all have a lot of repressed emotions. Suppression is depression, and once you can express yourself 100%, you start to reduce anxiety.

3. You Are Not Responsible For Others

   You have no control over how other people respond to you, how they act to you and how they feel towards you.

   In doing so you free yourself by the burden of carrying someone else’s behaviour on your shoulders. Therefore, you don’t absorb other people’s energy. It’s nothing personal.

4. Find Your Environment

   It’s not all about the outer environment. It’s especially about the inner environment. It’s never where you are at, it’s where you feel you are at.

   Why is the environment so important? Our environment alters our DNA, but in particular, it is our perception that alters our DNA.

   The environment alters your mood. How you see yourself governs what you become. You have to take 100% responsibility for where you place yourself. More than ever, when you place yourself in an environment which complements your own energy, the magic starts to happens.

   What you see with your eyes and what you have inside of yourself becomes a reflection of how you feel. Once you have harmony within yourself, you stop absorbing other people’s energy and you start imprinting your energy on the world around you.

5. Let Go Of The Need To Be Validated

   You don’t need external validation. You only need support. Many times along our lives we search for external approval, which is why you start absorbing other people’s energy. Because you feel frustrated if you are not getting it.

   Once you love yourself 100%, once you trust yourself 100%, once you have confidence in yourself 100%, you begin to validate yourself.

   To stop absorbing other people’s energy, you have to stay true to yourself 100% and allow your authenticity to flourish and blossom without other people’s opinions.

   Yes, what others have to say does matter but at the same time you must become aware of how you react to other people’s views.

   Once you start taking action and remain focused on your activity; even if people say “hurtful” things about you or your work, you are not even concerned. Why? Because you love what you are doing.

   The world is all about contrast. Contrast is essential. Once you surrender to contrast and understand that we need friction, you also understand that there are always going to be people that will get on your nerves, unless you start changing your perspective and realize that these people are also serving a role in the world.

   Just remind yourself to connect with those who remind you who you are. This helps you to stop absorbing harmful energy and to start absorbing more positive energy.

6. The Invitation

   Nobody can enter your dominion without an invitation. You attract every single person into your life.

   We are consciously or unconsciously inviting people into our lives, and not absorbing other people’s energy is to remind yourself of this every single day.

   

   You have the power within to choose whether or not you want to invite a certain person in your temple, which is essentially within yourself.

7. Do Not Pay Attention

   When you wake up in the morning, you only have so much energy. Throughout the day you use that energy by giving it to people and things around you, until the end of the day where there’s almost nothing left and you feel tired and you go to sleep again.

   What you have to understand is that some people fill you with energy and some people drain you of energy. The people that drain you of energy are also called “energy vampires”.

   They can be your colleagues, your friends or even close family members. An energy vampire is someone who uses your energy to survive.

   One of the important things to do is to really identify whether they are temporary energy vampires or inherently energy vampires.

   A temporary energy vampire is someone who is going through a difficult time in his life or someone in the family has died and for a few months they are energetically draining.

   But if someone is inherently an energy vampire, then it’s really important to take note of that.

   That’s a personality trait that’s not going to change any time soon unless they are actively working on it. Most energy vampires don’t want to work on themselves anyway.

   One of the things to do at this point is to identify these people. One way to do it, is by asking yourself after you have spent time with someone, “Do I feel uplifted or do I feel drained?”.

   You don’t want to feel drained. You want to avoid those people. You have worked so hard to uplift yourself and be a better human being. Why would you allow someone else to come and drain you?

   There is no reason to feel guilty about it. Even if they are a close friend or a family member, it’s ok to eventually walk away from them because what you are doing is looking after yourself.

   By uplifting yourself, you uplift everyone around you. If you allow somebody to pull you down, then you are actually doing a disservice to all your other friends and to all your other family members.

   By allowing one person to pull you down, you are not allowing you to uplift your other friends and family members that are around you who could be uplifted by your presence.

   When you pay someone attention, you are essentially giving them energy. You have to change your focus to stop absorbing other people’s energy.

   Whatever you focus on grows.

   Are you focusing on what you want or are you focusing on what you fear?

You create your own reality based on thoughts and feelings. You have to remember how to protect yourself from harmful energy. Remember to have fun and smile.

I hope you learned something you might be able to apply to your life. Join the conversation in the comment section below and let me know what other methods you use to stop absorbing other people’s energy.

P.S. If you liked this post, check out this other article on the subject, How To Deal With Toxic People.

Inner Balance Method 1: Change your relationship to time

A lot of people say they don’t have time, but the real problem, in this case, is not a lack of time but a lack of harmony within themselves.

The harmony or inner balance that we refer to can also be defined as the equilibrium. It’s about being neutral, it’s when all your cells are sinking in your praises.

The way our whole world is designed is to take away our time.

Time is a very limited, but probably one of the most powerful resources you could have. The more time you have, the more you can actualize and manifest your wildest desires.

But it’s all about how you use time constructively every single day.

What takes away your inner balance is attributing value to things that don’t matter. When you attribute value to the things that matter, you create more inner balance.

Inner balance is what is most important to you right now and are you making time for it.

Inner Balance Method 2: Don’t Label Emotions

Don’t label depression, anxiety or insecurity as negative. These emotions are not illnesses, they are part of the expression of life.

When you say that anxiety, depression or insecurity are bad; in essence you are suppressing feelings because you believe it’s not acceptable to feel that way.

Instead, embrace sadness like you embrace happiness. It’s ok to be anxious because it’s a sign, it’s a message being communicated to you through your body which propels you to become your greatest version.

The same goes with depression. It is a message that we have to read, we have to open, we have to be attentive to because with that you find your greatest power. You can’t find your power when you say “that’s unacceptable to feel depressed”.

Stop judging how you feel. It’s not so much what we go through that causes the disharmony, it’s about our attitude and thoughts towards the things we go through.

Inner Balance Method 3: Food

Some people say they don’t have time to prepare food, but they have time to eat fast food.

Many of the foods you eat, mirror back how you feel about yourself. If you eat junk food, a lot of the time is because you don’t feel worthy.

People always say, “I will eat the best food when I finish studying” or “I will eat healthy when I get that new job”. But remember that once you take care of yourself 100%, everything else is taken care of.

Don’t wait. Start treating yourself better right now.

Inner balance starts with self-care, it starts with the relationship you have towards yourself.

Inner Balance Method 4: Relax

Slow down. Many times we are afraid of standing up for our right. Once you start to slow down, through meditation for example, you also realize that you don’t have to lie to yourself.

We regularly show to the world what we think the world wants to see, but at the same time you have to ask yourself, “Am I staying authentic to how I really feel?” It’s not about just saying yes or no to people.

It’s about listening to the intuition inside of yourself to see that you always have to be in alignment with your real feelings. You have to get inside your emotions and honor them.

If you don’t do that, you automatically place yourself in an environment which doesn’t complement your energy. Being in the right environment brings more harmony and balance into your life.

Inner Balance Method 5: Change perspective

Oftentimes we feel discomforted because deep down we are not doing what we know we are meant to do. We are living someone else’s life. When you are living someone else’s life, you always feel unbalanced.

Attributing value to things that don’t matter causes unbalance. A great way of getting it back is to really focus on activities that make you energized, those activities that are most important to you.

It’s not about how much money you made today, it’s about how you felt making it.

Inner balance is about feeling everything without judgment and accepting yourself 100%.

Share with the world, uplift the world, inspire the world, but then realize you are the world.

Before the world can change, you have to change yourself. You have to bring about the inner balance within yourself which is needed for the great change.