Avenues of Engagement

Our interactions with other people are one of the most important aspects of our life. This is true in both health and disease. In health, we can connect with other people in profound ways and co-create wonderful experiences and manifest beautiful expressions. In dysfunction, we connect with other people through issues, live with other people’s energy and issues in our space, and express our communal dysfunction in undesirable bodily, personal, and interpersonal ways.

What does a healthy interaction with another person look like?

Healthy interactions require that we keep other people’s energy out of our space and keep our own energy flowing through us but not into other people’s space. We meet people on the edge of our energy; no merging occurs at all. Unfortunately, as you might imagine, this level of awareness and personal development are quite rare.

Understanding how we engage with other people and developing a practice to make our engagements more functional and healthy are perhaps the most important topics to address with our healing work. These are significant considerations on a daily basis for everyone.

There are only a few ways to engage with another person’s energy: through an issue (something we want, something we are trying to get away from, some less-than-ideal quality of our energy) or on the edge of our energy.

Fortunately, we can heal our issues to resolve dysfunctional engagements, separate from other people’s energy, and create the opportunity to have genuinely healthy connections.

After each interaction, ask yourself how you engaged with or opened to the other person. Then relax through the feeling of that energy. By healing the avenue of engagement in this way, you will improve the functionality of your engagements and become aware of alternate ways of interacting.

The most difficult aspect of our avenues of engagement relates to qualities of our energy. These may not seem dysfunctional, though if someone else’s energy ends up in our space or our energy is in their space, we know we must heal something. Common qualities include being accepting, nice, or caring, taking responsibility, trusting other people, giving other people value / worth, and accepting other people. While we may think these qualities are desirable, when they create an opening for engaging with another person’s energy, they are not functional or healthy. Once again, simply relaxing through how we engage with another person heals that energy and reveals healthier ways of being.

(For more information, review the chapters titled, “Separations,” “Relationships,” “Energy Traders,” “The Energy of Engagement,” “Dysfunction Junction,” and “Avenues of Engagement” in Book I, “Healing: The Path to Freedom.”)