Trusting your energy, Listening to inner knowing

Episode 44: Trusting Your Energy

Learning to Listen to Your Inner Knowing

Episode Description

Have you ever had a feeling that something wasn't quite right—but talked yourself out of it? Or

sensed that a new direction was calling you—but doubted yourself because you couldn't explain

why? In this episode, we're exploring what it means to trust your energy. Not blindly. Not perfectly.

But with curiosity, discernment, and compassion. Our energy is constantly communicating with us.

It shows up in what energizes us, what drains us, what expands us, what contracts us, and what

repeatedly asks for our attention. Perhaps trusting your energy isn't about becoming more certain.

Perhaps it's about becoming more willing to listen.

Reflective questions for thought or journal prompts: 

1. What consistently gives me energy?

2. What consistently drains me?

3. Where do I feel most like myself?

4. Have there been times when my energy knew before I did?

5. What am I trying to talk myself out of?

6. If I truly loved myself, what would I stop arguing with myself about?

7. What is my energy trying to tell me right now?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everybody, welcome back to the Adapted Life Finding Next with me, Julie Hasselberger. I'm so happy that you're here. Yeah, today is episode 44, and the fifth episode in season five of my podcast. So this season we've been talking about energy, and you know, we've talked about some different kind of components of that, and in first episode we talked about the spark, second uh the second episode of season five, we talked a little bit about where our energy goes. We also discussed tending to our energy, and last time we talked about something very important, and that is protecting our energy, a little bit about boundaries, and so today I'm gonna talk about trusting, trusting our energy, trusting our intuition, trusting ourselves. Have you ever just gotten a feeling like something is not right? And it's not a dramatic feeling, you don't have any proof, it's just this gut feeling that something feels wrong, you don't have any certainty, it's a quiet feeling or a whisper or a nudge, and then almost immediately you just talk yourself out of it. I think a lot of us do this often. Um not because our wisdom has disappeared, but we just stop trusting that feeling as being our wisdom. Oh, you know, so we just sort of talk ourselves out of it. Oh, you just you know, it's nothing, you know, kind of thing. So when when did we actually stop trusting ourselves? That's the question, right? As little kids, children, as children, as little kids when we're playing, we we listen to our feelings, we listen to our intuition. That's how we know what we want to do or what we want to play, or you know what how we base our life is based on our feelings. And along the way, we are taught to dismiss that. We are told that we're too sensitive. We are possibly having our feelings dismissed, like don't be so sad, cheer up, uh, why are you angry? Stop being angry. We maybe experienced grief in our life, trauma, loss, disappointment, betrayal, and significant pain. And little by little we start to look outside for the answers instead of inside. So as we become adults, it feels like we silence our inner knowing a little bit sometimes. So our energy actually often knows better and before than our actual mind does. The one thing I've noticed is that happens in my life a lot. Like my energy will sense something and it will know, and I will just get this really strong feeling. And then my mind is like, What is this? Like, you know, so the mind doesn't keep up with the the uh the initial feeling sometimes. It's not because I'm psychic, and it's not because I'm always right, and it's not because I'm some kind of a guru or you know, whatever. Uh, but my body, my emotions, my intuition, and experiences are constantly gathering information. And the more trauma that we go through, uh, the more difficulty we go through, we just start to develop this remembrance of what it feels like. So when things start to indicate that that might be happening again, our body is able to remember the facts of what has happened to us. And that's the inner knowing, the quiet, like, oh no, not again. You know, when you are intuitively feeling something is definitely not wrong, it's your inner energy telling you, hey, you know, but sometimes it's other things uh that help us um pay attention to that energy. Sometimes it's when you leave a conversation and you are just exhausted, and that conversation has left you feeling drained and like what had just happened, you know. Um, some some really itchy, ugly feeling that you just like, I'm just exhausted. I I can't deal with that. Sometimes I feel energized if I'm in a project. So on the flip side, I'll be doing something, and I think I'm having a tired day, and then all of a sudden I'm so turned on by what I'm working on. Like when I'm writing in here, when I'm working in here, I'm very motivated and my energy picks up and it feels really good and it feels right, and it's because I'm doing something that I love, and my body remembers that I'm doing something that I love and it shares that information with me. So sometimes we feel resistance, like when somebody wants to uh somebody asks you to do something and you really don't want to, and you do it anyway because you don't want to hurt their feelings, or you feel resistance about I don't know, going somewhere where you just really want to stay home, that kind of thing. I don't know. I'm just saying that sometimes our energy knows things before we do in our minds. And the question is, do we also know this? Are we paying attention? And I think a lot of times people just literally lose that communication with their own intuition and their own energy, and they're wondering why they're tired and sad and depressed all the time. So I talked a little bit last time about discernment, and again, discernment is really the bridge between your intuition, oops, between your intuition and taking action. So if you don't know the definition of discernment, here you go: the ability to perceive and understand and judge things clearly and wisely, especially when the answer isn't obvious. It's more than intelligence, it's more than intuition, it is the combination of awareness, wisdom, experience, observation, and inner knowing. It asks what is really true here. So when you're discerning something, you're trying to determine what is really true here. So it invites curiosity and it's gonna ask, What am I noticing? What patterns are emerging? What keeps showing up for me? What constantly gives me energy, and what consistency is that? Like what is it constantly giving me energy, this thing, or maybe not so much. What consistently drains me? Fear often feels very urgent. Intuition feels quiet, a subtle, quiet sense. Discernment allows us to slow down and listen to both of these things. Feel fear, but I really don't think this is something that's gonna hurt me. Here's an example I have for you. Okay, I had to discern uh a crisis in the middle of the night recently when I was sleeping and my husband was traveling, and I had uh just put in air conditioners. Our house is old, so they go in the windows, you know. And I was to sleep and I had the dog and the cat in there, and about 1:30 in the morning, the animals were like literally on top of me, and I'm like, what is going on? And I look up and I see this flapping of wings. There was a bat in my bedroom flying in circles over my bed. And I leaped up and I screamed, my heart is beating, and I'm panicking, and I'm fearful. And I got the animals out of the bedroom and I got outside and I shut the door and I could hear this thing flying around in there, and I'm like, oh no, somehow I left a gap and the bat got in the house. What do I do? And so it took me about a half an hour of standing there, going, uh, I'm gonna die. I don't know what to do. John's away. What do I do? I want to go back to bed. I don't know how to get this bat out of here. And I just sort of like stood there holding the door with my hand shaking, going, Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. And then little by little I said, okay, take a breath. All right. I then I decided I'm gonna be a warrior, right? So I go downstairs, I get my winter coat and I zip it up and I put the hood over my head and I get an umbrella and I put the umbrella up and I go back upstairs and I go into the room like totally protected. This thing isn't gonna get me, you know, and I'm thinking it's gonna bite me, attack me, you know, and I'm in there. And and then I'm like, where'd it go? And I'm looking around, right? And all of a sudden, I had this feeling like, have I ever heard of anybody getting killed by a bat? No, why am I so afraid? It's the middle of the night, I'm unnerved, I'm home alone. So I put the umbrella down. I couldn't find it, it had stopped flying, it was on the floor. And in my experience with bats, once they get to the floor, it's difficult for them to fly. So this little tiny thing, it's like this big, you know, this little he's crawling around on the floor, making some kind of a horrible squeal or like screech. And all of a sudden, I'm like, I'm not in danger, and I switched into care. And I said, Oh, you poor little thing. So I opened up the window and I opened up the screen, and I said, Well, how am I gonna get it out? It did start to fly again, and it ended up in the bathroom, and then it ended up back on the floor. So I had one moment of like, ah, and then I just realized it was more afraid of me than I was of it, and I was not going to die from a bat getting into my bedroom, and I was really overdoing it with feeling like I needed to, you know, be the warrior. I also had a broom and the room in case I needed to hit it, because I know some people would hit it and kill it, but I didn't want to kill it because when I looked at it, it was really just this poor little creature who was trying to escape. So I took a towel, put it over the bat, I took it to the window, and I just sort of like went poof and he flew away. And I said, please don't come back, and I cleaned everything up because the room was in total disarray, and then I went to bed. So I was able to discern that I was not in danger, and in actuality, I performed an act of kindness for this little creature, and I felt good about that, and uh yeah, I'd always been afraid of them, and then I'm like, why am I afraid? As long as I'm careful that I don't touch it, and like you know, it's fine, so yeah, crazy though. Imagine that. It was so scary. I was like, I can't. Our energy keeps records, and then our mind will rationalize, our mind will explain things away. Our minds will often forget things, and like it's where the stories are, right? It'll tell us stories like, oh, bats can do this and bats can do that, and bats can get in your hair, and bats can bite you, and they have diseases, and all of these things may be true, but at that moment, that little thing was not going to do any of those things, right? Our mind can forget that it's just a sweet little creature that needs to go outside because it accidentally thought it found a new house to live in, right? So our energy then keeps records, and our energy is what remembers what nourishes us, our energy remembers what depletes us. And part of healing is learning how to discern that and and understand that and read that in ourselves. So maybe that's a a funny little example, but learning how to trust yourself and your energy is difficult when you're in a very stressful life and you're uh surviving, you're a survivor, you're caught in the midst of it. I don't know how I survived all the years I did in complete hypervigilance when I had lost my identity. I think I was reading Daniel's energy more than my own. I mean, I became exquisitely good at knowing what this child who couldn't speak needed. And to the point that I almost forgot who I was and what I needed. It was a lot. So loving yourself means believing yourself and trusting yourself. And by that I mean your yourself, your your soul, like your deepest, highest form of yourself, not everything in the world that tells you who they think you are. So how how then can we deeply love ourselves if if we can't believe ourselves, or if we're believing things that aren't true? If every feeling is questioned and every need that you have is dismissed, if every intuition is argued away, maybe then self-love is more about loyalty to yourself, being loyal to you, listening when your body needs to rest, listening when your energy is asking for attention. Perhaps one of the deepest acts of self-love is saying, I hear you, I believe you, I'm listening to you. So where do we listen to ourselves? One of the best places to listen to yourself is in stillness. Energy rarely screams, it whispers, which is why stillness matters. And it's um it's not like you uh have to sit in complete and total silence, but being still is really uh a valuable way to uh stay present, focused. That's where you listen to what your heart is telling you, right? So if energy whispers, where does it show up for you? Right? Where does your energy show up if it's needing to speak to you? Where is your stillness found where you're just at peace and you can just just breathe and be? I hope this is making some sense. But for me, my stillness shows up in the early morning when I wake up. Take the dog out and sit and uh either journal or meditate, or often I'll just sit. Sometimes I'll fall asleep again if I'm still still sleepy. Sometimes it's while I'm painting and I just get lost in the flow of whatever it is that I'm blending the colors for or creating. I love being at the ocean because I feel such a sense of not only stillness in my soul, but vastness of how uh incredibly beautiful the ocean is and what it represents. So when all the noise settles, we can also begin to hear what our energy's been trying to tell us. And we can uh start to understand what it is that we need. I remember doing some deep guided visualization meditations where I actually had to ask myself who I was and wait for the answer. And that was very telling for me. And then I would just journal what I was thinking, who am I I started to develop a real spiritual awakening the more that I was still and learning how to listen to the stillness, I was always fascinated with energy and self-energy, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that as a very young child, I had a parent who had a pretty severe mental illness, and I think you learn how to scan for energy when you're in a um really scary, abusive kind of situation. And so I've always been very intuitive and empathetic and empathic because I had to, you know, you just there's things that you develop, and I think the more trauma you go through, sometimes you start to really be able to have a good sense of it. I don't know, but there was a lot of it that developed uh from being a special needs mother to a beautiful baby boy who had such incredible needs 24 hours a day, and I listened to those needs for 26 years. Yeah, I'm not a superhero. I'm just a survivor who developed resilience and skills to get through it. And still there were times when I didn't trust what I was feeling, or I knew something was going on and I was trying to deal with it, but then I was gaslit or dismissed or pushed away and told I was crazy when I knew in my soul something was wrong. Yeah, you gotta you gotta discern what is real and what isn't real sometimes. It's hard, especially if you're in trauma. It's very hard. You need to be regulated and feel safe to be able to really start to heal. So rebuilding trust, rebuilding trust one step at a time. So trust is rebuilt one small moment at a time. Every time we honor a need, every time we tell ourselves this is the truth, every time we keep a promise to ourselves, we are rebuilding trust. Trust grows when we honor our own self-boundaries because we create self-boundaries in order to honor our own growth, right? And our own safety and our own development and our own ability and our own energy. So we're not depleting ourselves, so we're focusing on what we need, and then we begin to trust ourselves that we're doing the right thing. And it takes time, but it is something that the more you work on, you just feel it happening. So, in closing, I want to give you guys some reflective questions to talk about or write about or think about, just in terms of this general conversation about energy. Here are the questions. Number one, what consistently gives me energy? Number two is what consistently drains me? Number three, where do I feel most like myself? Number four, have there been times where when my energy knew before I did? Next. What? Number five, what am I trying to talk myself out of? Number six, if I truly loved myself, what would I stop arguing with myself about? Uh number seven, what is my energy trying to tell me right now? So that's it. What is your energy doing right now? My energy is telling me that it's a good thing I did this today because it's really helping me feel a little bit better than I did earlier when I was feeling kind of low. I was thinking about my son, and then I'm like, no, I gotta continue to push into the things that I've been intuitively working on, and I honor his life by wanting to encourage other people, and that's why I'm doing this. This is my gift to that love I had for my son and for myself. So perhaps trusting your energy isn't about becoming more certain. Perhaps it's about just being more willing to listen, more willing to believe yourself first, more willing to trust that the wisdom that you're seeking may already be within you, and you just need to spend some time in stillness, paying attention to yourself. So I thank you for coming back to the adapted life, finding next. This named podcast is based on the life of having a special needs son and the extreme adversity that is uh comes along with that and having to adapt everything in your life in order to keep that person alive, really. And and Daniel needed everything, and everything we did just sort of was re-engineered around this son who was born with a deformed brain and would never live independently. So I lived two lives. I lived life for both of us for 26 years, and that required a lot of adapting and changing and being willing to let go of a lot of norms and pressures, but also it was very isolating and very challenging. And so after he died, I thought about the podcast and I said, I don't know, can I keep doing this? As this this was all based on helping to support special needs families and parents and just being in community with that. And I said, Well, I guess there's a need because I'm still adapting, and I don't know yet exactly where I'm going because a lot of my identity disappeared during that time after I had him, and then after he was gone, and so I'm still trying to find myself and find my path and heal from very intense trauma and grief and some layered issues and complexity, and so I'm trying to find my next, but I think a lot of people are also trying to find their next, and that's why I'm here. So I hope that resonates. I hope to hear from everybody, and I will see you next time. And remember to ever so slightly, if you can, find some stillness that gives you time to listen inwardly to your own soul and what it's telling you, and begin developing trust for your intuition. And I love you, and I will see you next time. Thank you. Bye, everybody.