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What’s Your Woo IQ?

Our consciousness is expanding. Every day our information doubles. As we progress we are reminded of how intricately connected everything is, and how full of mystery. Realms of study that we thought to oppose each other are now beginning to look more and more alike.

What is also happening is a return to ritual arts. We are remembering what it is like to connect with our psychic instincts, the power behind the intention and the significance of symbolism. We are sharing cultural remedies, exchanging ancient healing practices, and uncovering new ways of being. People’s interest in how to find a shaman or need to find a spiritual coach is creating an entire economy based on the exchange of ideas and values.

The universe is recognizing itself in a whole new way.

To articulate this development, we are creating a new language. If you are dabbling at all in spiritual arts, transformation, consciousness or cosmology, you may come across the following concepts.

Let’s Get Woo-y

1. Holding Space

I remember the first time I needed to explain this. Years ago I was doing some private healing work with a client. His wife was present and as we moved into the work, I asked if she could hold space during the process. I wanted her presence there versus absent-mindedly waiting, but I was also aware that it would be natural for her to want to control what was happening. When we want to see someone get better or heal something, we often want to do the work for them. This might look like trying to take over a process for them or we may even “become the other” and will an emotion for them.

Another way we do this is through prayer. When someone goes through a hardship, we offer in the sincerest of efforts to pray for them. But even in this, praying for someone (specifically without their permission) is asking something to be done on their behalf. While we can invite grace and wholeness and love into our lives and ask that others receive it too, prayer is meant to be for the self as a direct line to the Divine versus the attempt to use the Divine to exert our influence on someone else’s life.

Holding space is different. Holding space in the act in which we reserve a spot in the energetic field to hold neutrality for someone else. We aren’t trying to will anything for them or influence the outcome in any way and neither are we ignoring the situation or turning away. We are simply creating a container in the collective field to allow the other to have room to process and heal without outside influence. There is a place in our mind where we see them as a whole and we hold that instead of holding them. In this way, the person gets our love and support but also clarity and freedom from influence. Holding space is one of the most powerful things you can do for someone else because you aren’t doing anything to them or for them except trusting that they are whole and complete.

2. Power

The word power has many uses and connotations. In the spiritual community, we generally regard it as a person’s own presence within herself.  Power is being connected to your wholeness within.

In shamanism, when we say she is full of power, we mean she is resourced in herself.  When we say call in your power animal, we mean call in the animal spirit that helps you feel resourced in yourself. Call in the ones that help you remember your wholeness.

If we say call in the power of God, we mean call in the consciousness of wholeness.

Here it is important to remember that objects or people don’t actually have any more power than you do. So when we say you are giving over your power, we mean you are handing your resourcing over to someone else. You are handing over your assets necessary for effective operation.

Everyone and everything is a miracle. There is no hierarchy of miracles. No one’s power is better or more important than yours.

3. Grounding

Ground in. You hear this a lot. You have probably heard it in regarding someone else. A person who is balanced and comfortable on earth and in society’s systems is someone we describe as being very grounded.

Grounding is an act to counterbalance the work you are doing in higher or spiritual realms. By that I mean psychic work, connecting to the divine, even dreaming and imagining. We ground in after this work not because it is opposing but because it is balancing. Think of an electric system having a ground plane. Its purpose is to give the current a return path.

If you aren’t grounded it could show up in a variety of ways. Physical symptoms are dizziness, feeling tired or clumsy or it could be more psychological like flightiness, constant daydreaming, or forgetting.

A few simple tricks to help you stay grounded are to walk outside barefoot or do a grounding meditation.

4. Divining

Divining is when you discover (or uncover) something through intuition. I think there is a misconception here about divining and diving tools. Tarot cards, runes, pendulums, tea ceremonies, and reading the stars are all examples of divining tools. The act of diving has long had a supernatural or magical connotation. It is indeed miraculous, however, the divining process is rooted in an individual and not the tool. 

In reality, there is Divine in everything, therefore we can divine from anything. As we know it now, everything is holographic and a reflection of everything else in the universe. This means we can pull information from anything to gain the insights that we are seeking. It brings us back to the concept of power in that diving tools actually do not have any power; it is the reader’s own ability to follow their intuition and use the tools as a framework to deliver the message. It helps them decode what they see in the mirror.

5. Energy

Used in almost every religious and spiritual modality and in medicine like acupuncture, energy healing is restoring the flow of an individual’s vital life force. Descriptions of energy don’t do it justice as it alludes to a definition. It is like the psyche in that we know on some level it exists because we have an experience of it, but it does not fit within the parameters of physical science or 3D observation. It works as an element of nature, influencing what is around. It is detectable but often only by tracking its path.

Mystics describe subtle differences in energy such as Prana, Chi, and Kundalini, but they are pointing to the same base idea. In humans our energy field is the system of life force flow, typically running through a chakra system and in and through the toroidal field that encompasses us. In shamanism, everything has an energy or “spirit” and reading that energy allows us to gain insights and see how the field is interacting with ourselves and with the world at large. It is also the method used to communicate with objects and beings who can not communicate with human spoken language.

In medicine, our energy flow influences our physical health. Blockages that exist in our energy field show up in the habitual ways we act, in our psyche, and as health issues as well.

Energy is best understood through direct experience and more than likely you have had a direct experience with it. For example, have you ever been to a concert and described the energy of a crowd? How about the vibe of a room? Maybe you’ve said something like, “I don’t have the energy for that right now,” and it isn’t your physical energy you are talking about. Or perhaps you met someone that rubbed you the wrong way and you couldn’t explain why. It is not that they are a bad person, but when your energy and their energy meet it is charged, usually based on prior experiences with and beliefs about that type of energy pattern.

You’ve probably heard people say, “it’s all just energy,” which is true and not the whole truth at the same time. All things have an underlying life force and energetic pattern, and that energetic pattern gets coded through the experience of observation and manifested in 3D reality too.

Energy holds a unique place in being one of the greatest woo words of them all and also so immersed in our experience that we often don’t realize that we know exactly what it is, that it does not need definition, that it doesn’t need empirical data, that it is everything.

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