Vitality

I recently watched a talk about depression and the person giving it concluded that the opposite of depression was not happiness, but vitality. He also spoke about how his depression followed a series of loses, as depression so often does, and about how the innate risk in loving or gaining anything, is to later lose it.

And this got me thinking about how, so often once our material comfort begins to improve and our relationships flourish, if we’re not careful, we can begin to depend on these external events for our happiness, to want to cling onto them and control them in order to make sure we do not lose them. This isn’t a personal fault, it’s a natural tendency we all have.

The danger is that as a result of our focus on keeping external circumstances the same, we slowly turn away from our own vitality, our own innate ability to feel joy simply through the life that flows through us, and depend on external sources as our supply. No wonder then, that fearful and controlling thoughts and behaviours can begin at this point, ironically pushing away the very things we sought to bring closer to ourselves.

So what can we do about this? Well, as much as possible we need to stay in touch with our own vitality, our own connection to the source of innate joyful feelings and find practices that encourage this connection. This needs to be our internal reference point, our touchstone, so that, much as outer events will inevitably change and transform throughout our lives, and people and circumstances come and go, our connections to our inner nature remains intact.

This allows positive events to be celebrated, but not clung to, and negative ones to be felt and then released. Easy in principle of course, but not always in practice.

So what practices can help? Meditation creates a space where an individual’s essential nature becomes the focus, rather than the thoughts and feelings that can so often dominate our waking hours. Mindfulness puts a gentle focus on thoughts and feelings and whatever might be happening around us with an attitude of acceptance, so that whatever is happening in the moment is not resisted, but allowed to be, and as such they begins to lose their grip on us, no longer defining us. I am also reminded of the Buddhist principles of non-attachment and non-resistance.

These are essentially two practices in non-clinging! Not becoming attached to particular outcomes, and not resisting what is in the moment. If we can do both these things, we ‘go with the flow’ and experience life as a journey, an adventure, and not a set of circumstances to be maintained at all costs. Easier said than done, of course, but a wonderful thing to aim at.

Reiki is pure life force, Chi, that is channelled from one person to another, and can have a similar effect. It serves to re-energise us, increase our flow of vitality and remind us of our true natures. I often compare it to plugging into a universal energy plug socket and receiving a boost. That is why a Reiki session can be so healing, not only physically, but spiritually and emotionally. It reminds us who we are at our core.

The other thing we can do to protect and boost our vitality is to ensure that our energy systems are flowing as smoothly and as healthily as possible. When our energy systems flow smoothly we feel good, physically and emotionally. A block can be formed by any unprocessed emotional event that becomes trapped in our energy system, for example fear or grief, and EFT is a therapy that aims at removing these blocks through tapping on the meridian points to achieve smooth flow once again.

Vitality, life energy itself you could say – here’s to it flowing smoothly and abundantly through us all.  Viva!