It’s a truth I’ve come to own over years of learning to hold the equilibrium of my physical body that allows me to lead a normalish life – akin to countless others who think they have a shortfall of energy, I possess almost too much energy inside my cells rather than  too little. Those waves of crashing exhaustion that periodically seem to want to floor me are because my tank is overspilling with energy, not running dry.

It’s an observation that was first made to me, outside of myself, by my excellent therapist, who takes an energy reading at the start of every treatment session. She would feel the barrage of kinetic fizz strobing off me as soon as I entered the room and, one hand held over my torso or my head would confirm, I was running hot with energy, supersonic with energy; my whole system was abuzz with electric charge that almost sent her spinning back from the table. She could tell how my propensity was to fry my own biology, like an electrical circuit that is of such a high voltage that it blows the whole circuit board (and there was often a “just in time” feeling about the sessions I  had with her, though that urgency happens less often these days). She would make it her hour’s mission to bring my voltage down sufficiently for her to work on the subtle misalignments of my nervous system and fascia and I would walk out of there feeling cool, calm and, perhaps for the first time in a while, truly surrendered to tiredness (not crashing exhaustion) as though I could sleep for a week.

There’s a question I was on the verge of throwing out to my social media audience, so often did this thing happen to me that it used to seem weird and concerning yet, in the context of this post, it no longer perplexes me like it once did. That question is, do any of you set off security alarms for no reason as you enter and leave shops because I certainly do? It happens all the time, shop after shop with tedious repetition…happened just the other day when I was out with my husband. I’ve developed the habit of hanging around near the threshold after I leave, like I can’t quite make up my mind which way to go so they can see I’m not doing a runner with hidden loot stuffed up my coat. Monday was the first time for a while (inevitable sooner or later) that a security guy actually came out to accost us, picking on my husband to give him the third degree. “No, its me” I owned up; “it happens all the time, I just trigger alarms wherever I go”. He looked genuinely perplexed when I said this, observing he had never heard of it happening before and wondering if it was something like a hidden security tag attached to my bag. “No, I’ve tried all that, walked in carrying nothing but the few clothes I’m wearing while someone else holds my bag, my jewellery and the contents of my pockets…and still triggered alarms”. He was genuinely bewildered but, at some level, I’m really not at some deep instinctive level where I understand myself better than my conscious mind knows with its logic.

I’m also one of those people that can mess with the functioning of technology when my energies are spinning high and who gives out electric shocks with an “ouch” factor; my daughter and I give each other powerful shocks all the time. In short, I’m like a nuclear power station at some deep-cellular level that no one can  ever make head or tail of and I think it’s probably a characteristic in common for people with Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome; I suspect it has traits in common for those who develop Alzheimer’s and MS and I know it has a lot to do with electro-sensitivity and reactions to certain foods, especially sugar (which I wrote about in my last post Knowing Your Sugar Tolerance ), as these are the straw that breaks the camel’s back of a secretly high-energy person who thinks their battery is constantly flat. Thing is, I know this has nothing to do with the way I am eating anymore; I eat fresh, light and almost always raw these days yet, with regular slow-burn energy sources designed to keep my engine ticking over. My fundamental health has never been better yet I burn out and I tip over – still – like the best of them.

Beyond any excuses, any theories about breakdowns in my system, any failings in my health, I honestly think it’s just me, the way I’m designed…and I say that with confidence because I see also see it is a feature of so many others, especially women. And when I notice it as an ever more common trait – this burgeoning power that wants to be let out of its box more like fireworks filling the sky with chrysanthemums of colour than a slightly damp match –  I find myself wondering why it is generally considered such an inherently “bad” thing, this hot flush, this almost too much to handle thing that toasts our cells until we learn to live more in tune with our bodies on our own (not society’s) terms. What if it isn’t a failing at all, this heat and overwhelm, this feeling that you might just burst in your attempts to contain it; what if it’s just a deeply misunderstood, therefore misdirected, thing. What if this is a rising power, a kundalini force, that is here to serve us and then us the world as women learn to lead the lives we are meant to live on our own best terms, following our hearts; a power that waits only for us to learn how to handle it without frying our own synapses. Perhaps this is that time of all our lives, a sort-of coming of age, when we get to do this very thing…and not a moment too soon, for our own health and that of everyone since that is the kind of trickle-effect it would have if women stopped imploding themselves with their own self-denied energy hoard.

Because I recognise the trait in my mother too; you could just tell she was a woman of abundant energy and power, not in her chosen lifestyle or an urge to run marathons (no) but it was a tangible thing about her; something that I witnessed scaring people when she entered a room. Yes, everything about her had an energy, a force you could register without a word being said, yet it became a power misdirected, drawn inwards out of shame or a feeling that nobody wanted it. As with so many women of her generation, it was assumed she would pour all of her energies into making a home, taking care of her children, her husband, his mother but, for many women, that was so often the snake eating its own tail of frustration in the end. She got very little back for herself in return for all this effort of taking care of others and worrying for them; no sense of letting her own personal passions take flight. In the end, it inverted, drawing back inwards to hide out in the dark cave of her liver – the mulching ground of the body, where we tip all those big unsightly things we don’t really know what to do with, convinced they are just another waste product like the cast offs from our diet. Only, sometimes, it can be like tossing a sofa into the tip and the recycling plant finds what we put in there way too huge to process…and so, from nowhere (she wasn’t even a drinker) she got liver cancer and died far too young after a lifetime in which the zenith of her power had been poured into kneading bread, lugging shopping and dragging a vacuum cleaner. This is what happens when we don’t know how or when to own and thus direct our innate power; and, irony, when this becomes chronic we can feel like we have no power at all.

I woke up in that utterly depleted state of “no energy” just this morning; really, I felt as though I could just about crawl to a sofa and stay there all day if only I had that option. These days, I know better than that and crawl…instead…to my yoga mat. Two minutes later I felt the wisdom of my actions bear fruit as the energy carpark that I had built up in my cells in the night started to shift and redistribute. It felt like a cork popping as this energy freed itself from its holding spaces and started to flow like a gently babbling stream through all the cell walls that make up human me and then, like watching candy floss whip up from a vat-load of sugar, began to string and spiral, to fluff and spin into an  energy gauze that encompasses the whole of “little” me, becoming “big” energetic me as I am as an energy body operating in the broad energy field of subtle existence. This is the field where we start to direct our best intentions, to connect with other people and circumstances outside of space-time and to live our best (most powerful) lives!

So why do we find it so hard to connect with this super-inspired energy field as soon as we wake up in the morning and set about our day; why do we so often feel chronically leaden and “done” before we even start, only to slip further down that slide and self-medicate with more foods and behaviours guaranteed to make us feel more depleted as the day goes on? If only we had one of those infrared cameras that show pockets of heat we would probably find our nighttime energy accumulation was all stockpiled into one, maybe two places when we wake in the morning…likely our heads, our stomachs (depending on what and how late we ate our last meal) and that whole solar plexus region where we ruminate about our lives. So, it’s not that our batteries are flat after we sleep; it’s just that all this energy is waiting to be re-directed in positive ways that truly serve us, not left to stagnate in well-guarded pockets of cells that become our pain zones while our overwrought nervous system exhausts itself knocking at the door of the hoard, asking for small hand-outs of fuel. Right at the core of this distribution process (which starts with gentle movement, such as yoga, to engage the body with it) are the practices of mindfulness and self-love. When we step into our day mindful of ALL that we have at our disposal instead of a lack mentality; aware of our innate power, which is something we need never fear drawing upon since it is ours to use as we see fit, we are already on the way to accessing our stockpile of life force, our prana…and then learning that it has no end, there is only more where that energy came from, on demand. Partnered with an abundance of self-love that means we regard ourselves as more than, not less; spilling over, not depleted; capable, not useless; accumulating, not losing; having more resources than we quite know how to handle (though we can learn how) rather than having nothing at all…well, everything changes after that!