How do you protect yourself from other people’s bad energy?

Whenever I talk to people about being a reiki practitioner, there’s a high probability that I’ll be asked this question: “how do you protect yourself from other people’s bad energy?” This is the question that kept me from exploring energy work for a really long time. I was scared that it would make me susceptible to other people’s toxic energy, and the way I was living in my twenties and thirties, I had good reasons to be afraid.

What I’ve learned from doing it afraid - as in, at some point I just said “fuck it” and decided to take a certification course in reiki - is that I don’t actually need protection at all, and I learned that by accident, by doing hundreds of reiki treatments on myself and others over the last five years.

I don’t need protection because I know what’s mine, and other people’s stuff just doesn’t stick to me.

The answer is actually hiding within the original question, because protecting myself from other people’s energy requires a foundational bit of knowledge: which energies are “mine” and which ones aren’t? I’m tempted to go off on a philosophical tangent about the capitalist thought-form that divides energies into assets that can be owned by me or someone else, but I’ll skip it for now because it’s beside the point. The useful bit here is “what’s mine?”

What’s mine?

In terms of energy work, “what’s mine” can be defined as the energies I’m bringing in. The sensations in my body, for instance, could be considered mine in the sense that it’s my body that’s generating them. I have a sense that my visions are mine, because I’ve learned through repetition that my inner landscape is a collection of visual symbols. I consider my worldview part of what’s mine, and that includes foundational beliefs like, “I’m safe in the world because I know how to trust my gut.”

In retrospect, I can see how these aspects have always been present, but I didn’t always know how to engage with them. At some point over the last few years I decided to become a student of them, and that shift in my orientation changed everything. Like, I know how to be a student. I understand it in my bones, how studying something makes me more curious than judgmental, and how curiosity and practice turn into skills and expertise, and how the feeling of expertise makes me feel safe. From there, it’s just a simple math equation: practice + curiosity = expertise = safety = protection. 

My expertise is my protection.

The self-help sector is rife with good advice that’s been stripped of meaning in service of the algorithm. We used to call them soundbites - little bits of audio, artfully edited to grab your attention and convey an idea quickly and efficiently. Human Design has a great one that gets thrown around all the time: “love yourself.” So simple! So clear! But “love yourself” as an ethos is both excellent and empty advice, because it ignores the crucial question of how. How do we actually love ourselves? If I were to break that question down even further, I’d ask, what is love? Is it a fancy or a feeling? And if I wanted to be really annoying about it, I’d ask, what are the actions and behaviors that constitute love, and how would I approach becoming an expert at those things?

Most of what I’ve learned about loving myself has come through my reiki practice. I’ve learned how to connect with my breath, which taught me how to slow down and feel into parts of my body that I used to ignore. I’ve learned how to fully relax, because I’ve learned how to find and release tension in my body. I think most importantly, I’ve learned how to stop interrogating myself and doubting my feelings all the time, simply through repetition and pattern recognition. Like, I have a mountain of experiential evidence that says, ok, my body seems to do this thing a lot, and when that happens I’ve noticed these outcomes…it’s a pattern. Done.

An early example of this is how I used to cry every time I did reiki on myself. Just, like, rivers of tears, every time I got to my sacral, for weeks. And then it stopped. I don’t cry anymore when I connect with my own sacral, and I think it’s because I had A LOT of grief in my womb, and I needed to process that. Now, when I do reiki on a client, and I notice that I’m tearing up when I’m working on their sacral, I have a sense that it’s not my grief that I’m connecting with, and I can turn that into meaningful feedback for my client without identifying with that experience as my own.

What I just described is the process of unlearning emotional enmeshment. I can connect with a feeling in my body without making it mean something about me or the client. It’s clean, and for a splenic projector, clean is about as good as it gets in terms of interacting with others. And for me, unlearning emotional enmeshment is an ongoing act of self love. Breaking an unloving habit is the same as learning a loving one, in the sense that we could define self love, at least in part, as abstinence from self-abuse or self-neglect. Where I used to jump to judgment or shame, I can now just pause and be curious and present.

At this point, I think protection and safety are just the byproducts of self-love. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that I’m always objectively 100% safe from harm in the world. There are still dangerous people and broken systems that I have to live amongst and within, but I don’t feel unsafe all the time the way I used to, and that has freed me from a lot of bullshit. Actually, it’s increased my capacity to hold both truths - that the world IS a dangerous place, and that I am safe here as a sovereign being with my own navigation system. Both things ARE true, and I’ve learned how to engage with those truths in a way that’s healthy for me.

And, these are teachable skills. I put together a workshop where I’m laying out a whole methodology of self love, through the lens of energy healing and the nine-centered model of Human Design. If you’re an energy healer, massage therapist, or anyone who provides deconditioning support through Human Design, I want you in this class, because we’re getting into the nuts and bolts of how your gifts are connected to your variables, and how you can develop those skills to make you an even better practitioner. And, if you’re someone who’s always been interested in energy work but hasn’t explored it yet, this might be the right place for you to dip your toe in energetically and see how it feels.