Holding back. It’s what I do nowadays. Rather than move forward with all of my energy, I hold back and guard my energy preciously. Perhaps I don’t have enough energy, but I think it’s because I’ve let my energy become too stagnant. I keep refusing to dive into ChangeYourEnergy.com every time I’m pulled into its projects. I reject being a team player.

This is not how I used to be. I used to be a team player. I used to believe in things. I used to want to use my energy for a cause. I used to believe in what I’m doing.

Now, I hide.

I think I hide because I fear rejection—from myself and others. I don’t want to prove once again that, “I can’t do it.”
I can’t be cool.
I can’t write well.
I can’t come up with good ideas.
I can’t track and check things.
I can’t make a strategy.
I can’t do things for the future.
I can’t speak well.
I can’t communicate in a way that people care about and listen to.
I can’t match with the people around me.
I can’t stop being angry and frustrated.

But actually, I know I can. That knowledge hovers just beneath the surface of my consciousness. It doesn’t need to go any deeper, because I happily ignore it. I’m protecting myself. But from what? The trials and tribulations of living? From the pain and suffering that will always come with pulling your head out of the sand and looking life in the face? Why do I, like so many other people, self-medicate?

My personal drugs are caffeine and media, especially books and online TV shows, both American ones and ones from Asia. I can go for days and days without expressing my true self much with these easily-accessed helpers. It’s no wonder my anger and frustration grows until it spills out to every area of my life!

I try to regulate these emotions with empathy and understanding, but this strategy only seems to go so far. It doesn’t allow me to be the bright, shiny beacon of hope and love that I want to be, and that I see Body & Brain instructors and members being. I can’t even deny it’s possible with its manifestation right in front of me.

Lots of change is happening around me right now. It offers the opportunity to step up and become something more than I’m showing, to step into my greater potential. This, the wonderful people around me, the feeling of evil energy seeping out of my tailbone blockage, and the distance from my own vague dreams are my motivation to change.

The only way I know how to change for real is by changing my energy with mind-body practice and new habits (aka Brain Education).

What I will change:

1. Do more training every day. I will do all 3 Solar Body exercises for 10 minutes each (Toe Tapping, Brain Wave Vibration, Plate Balancing Exercise), plus Energy Dance for 5 minutes.
2. Curb consumption. Limit reading to non-fiction and video watching to 5 hours per week. (Even as I wrote that, many parts of me said, “No way!”)
3. Pray sincerely every day without doing anything else at the same time.

This plan makes me feel hopeful and miserable and scared all at once. I’m going to latch on to hope though. I’m choosing hope right now. Taking these actions will make me strong enough emotionally and mentally to enact greater changes in my life.