There's nothing worse than running low on energy, right when we need to be sharp and charismatic. But when it comes to optimizing energy levels in our at-work lives, as well as at home and on the turf, what can we do?
Limited Personal-Energy Reserves
The very idea of managing our personal energy as we would manage our business expenditures or our wine intake or whatever else, is a relatively new idea to most of us - but an essential idea to explore and master.
- What is the source of our personal energy, moment to moment? How does our energy level determine our success, our health, and our enjoyment of life? And can it be in fact managed to our optimum advantage?
First of all, obviously we run on caloric energy from the food we eat. To be specific, we breathe in oxygen ... that combines the carbon from food we eat ... which generates a mini explosion inside us - releasing heat and energy.
- A happy balance between proper diet and relaxed full breathing, combined with plenty of exercise, is optimum for energy management at the gross biological level (see earlier blogs on the crucial 'breath factor').
There is also the variable of emotional energy; every time we get angry, frustrated, or anxious, we're burning personal energy - and usually with no immediate gain from the expenditure.
- Every time we relate, we expend energy through giving our attention and compassion. Hopefully we receive in equal kind and amount.
Caution: there are people who give us an energy boost in their presence ... but there are 'mana munchers' who suck attention and energy. Energy management involves consciously sharing our emotional energy, and also avoiding energy drains.
The Attention Variable
Attention management and energy management seem closely related - and indeed they are. When we pay attention to something or somebody, we are giving them our energy at that moment. Therefore we must manage our focus of attention wisely, so that we expend our limited reserves of energy in directions that further our own lives.
- "Energy flows where attention goes" is a core law of Huna philosophy in the ancient Hawaiian tradition. Focus nurturing energy on a project, and you bring it to life ... deprive it of your focused attention, and it withers. How and where we choose to focus our moment-to-moment attention, and with what emotional charge, determines how we relate energetically with the world around us.
We optimize our personal energy by managing our focus of attention. Therefore it's important to consider how and where and why we focus our attention, every moment of our waking lives.
This is a core premise of what's traditionally been called 'chakra meditation' ... in which all seven primary energy centers in the body are charged, balanced, or cooled off - by focused attention. Indeed, a great deal of the benefit of meditation comes from its natural positive influence on our energetic system.
Chakra Management
Recently, cognitive science and ancient meditative wisdom have combined their 'equal and opposite' insights, in the search for practical ways to manage our energy, both at work and in intimate and family relations. Where ancient wisdom and cutting-edge research are found to be congruent, explosions of insight often occur.
In this light, Hindu yogic masters discovered thousands of years ago that there seem to be seven energy centers up and down the human spine. Cognitive studies indicate the same - as does personal experience. The seven energy centers have been identified as:
1) the 'earth chakra' at the base of the spine
2) the sex/creativity center in the genitals
3) the power center in the belly and breathing
4) the emotional heart center in the chest
5) the communication/reasoning center in the throat and brain
6) the 'third eye' insight/integration center higher up
7) the 'crown chakra' at the top of the head.
- Modern approaches to 'Personal Energy Management' involve focusing regular attention to each of these seven energy centers. By consciously focusing attention to these centers, a person is able to actively gain and maintain an energetic homeostasis that optimizes health and performance.
Practical Applications
All of this has been on my mind today, because I have a book coming out in German on personal energy management, and I need to focus my creative attention toward producing a video of several chakra-balancing movement exercises that go with the book. If I don't focus my power of attention and my creative energy properly, that work won't get done.
I realize that Energy Management is a vast topic, almost beyond our minds' ability to grasp. I wrote my first book on the topic, Kundalini Awakening In Everyday Life, over a dozen years ago, back when I was immersed in the meditative dimensions of energy management. Since then I've shifted into much more pragmatic applications of the insights drawn from ancient meditative methods.
But the fact remains - it's important to take energy management seriously, both in business, in relationships, in sports, in love-making, in everything we do - because everything we do involves the quality and quantity of our personal energy.
- Luckily, we do have the capacity, through cognitive/meditative methods, to turn our attention to our own inner energy centers - and give them the nurturing boost and integrative help needed to operate at maximum personal energy.
Basic Fact: our bodies seek balance and homeostasis at energetic levels, just as they do chemically and emotionally. All we need to do is master and apply a few key cognitive focusing methods so that we aid rather than thwart our inner energetic balance. Our own power of attention needs to be regularly aimed, with love, toward our own energetic condition.
That seems to be what successful meditation is all about - focusing inward, and using our loving attention to nurture our own inner balance and wellbeing. More on this in a later blog.
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