Takeaway: If you’re looking to remove negative energy and tune into your healing frequency, you’re in the right place. In this post, you’ll learn:
Common sources and signs of negative energy,
Strategies for how to get rid of it,
How to shift your understanding of energy, and
Tips for cultivating a healing energy.
Let’s dive in.
It can feel challenging to exist on planet Earth at this time, especially when many folks are starting to wake up to their lives and commit to doing deep emotional work. And if you're an empath, you feel all your emotions PLUS everyone else's stuff.
So what do you do when everyone else's emotions are overbearing? How do you clear negative energy that feels like heavy peanut butter making it difficult to think straight or make decisions?
Part of the journey to becoming an empowered empath is learning how to release energy that isn't yours while also replenishing yourself through tapping into your soul essence. When you learn how to ground out negative energy, or foreign energy from another person, place, or thing, you develop a greater awareness of your true frequency.
Let's take a closer look at what negative energy is, how to identify it and view it with more neutrality, and how to let it go.
What is negative energy
Although other people's energy can feel bad or good to us, it's important to note that it's our perception that likes to label energy in a dualistic way out of fear (I.E. bad vs. good, right vs. wrong). Our ego often decides very quickly whether something is helpful or threatening, which can create more inner turbulence and dysregulation if we feel or sense something that doesn't naturally feel good to us.
We would define "negative energy" or "negative emotions" as energies that we perceive, feel, or sense that don't align with our current frequency. They might feel off-putting, especially for highly sensitive and empathic people who absorb or take on other people's emotions around them. When you naturally soak up the energies around you, it's easy to become afraid, resistant, and full of self-doubt in your ability to protect yourself.
So, consider this:
To clear negative energy, you have to view it with more neutrality. When you immediately label it as bad, it becomes bigger and scarier than it is.
When you feel more confident and strong in your own energy, you feel less threatened when other people and situations don't feel uplifting.
From a science perspective, energy has different wavelengths, which we can sense and feel. Part of learning how to let go of "bad energy" is becoming less afraid of being overwhelmed by other people and their emotions while strengthening our connection to our higher selves so we become more neutral to foreign energy. This helps you confidently interact with other people or exist in hard situations without becoming exhausted or disempowered.
In a way, part of working with challenging energy is changing your perception about how strong you are and what you are capable of letting go. To clear negative energy, or foreign energy that we have absorbed, we have to practice building up our ability to connect with higher frequencies, which many people dub, positive energy.
Signs of negative energy/foreign energy
When we interact with people throughout our day, there are some common signs that we can track in ourselves to begin understanding when we've absorbed foreign energy. This is very important for healers, caretakers, parents, empaths, and helpers of all kinds to become familiar with to avoid high-stress hormones and an overactive nervous system.
Blurriness
When we are centered in our energy, we experience clear thoughts and can sense our own needs. If you feel blurry after interacting with someone, or even technology (think of how you feel after scrolling for too long), you probably absorbed foreign energy and your body and mind feel unfocused. Again, negative energies are energies we absorb that don't feel good to us, so noticing when you feel icky or off is a clear sign of this.
Stagnancy
Energy is constantly moving and shifting, just like our emotions. Children can easily flow between emotional states because they haven't been programmed to have a positive or negative evaluation of how they feel. Hence, when your energy field feels stagnant, the first thing to do is listen deeply to yourself to see if there are any emotions in you that need to be recognized. After doing this, if you still feel stuck or blocked, it might be due to someone else's energy sitting in your space. Often, cleansing negative energy from your space to create movement in your energy field can be done through guided meditation work, inspiring affirmations, or simple reminders that the energy you feel is not yours and no longer welcome in your space.
Lethargic/unmotivated energy
Do you ever have days where you struggle to do the things you love even though you know it would make you happy? You might imagine cooking something, playing a game, or going for a walk, but you have negative mental impressions or thoughts that can't do it or you're not enough.
Whenever this happens, it's important to get curious about whether or not the heavy energy in your space is actually yours. For instance, this could be the energy you absorbed from another person that week, or energy from the past that has been imprinted in your body or mind based on your upbringing. We often carry around old energy from other people that we have chosen to define ourselves by that is no longer serving us, so we feel bullied by it.
For example, this could be an unkind belief that there is something wrong with your body that was taught to you by a parent or a friend. Over time, you have absorbed this belief and made it who you are, when in fact, your higher self doesn't agree with this concept at all. This is a great example of foreign energy that you took on, that was never your truth in the first place. When we absorb other people's feelings, beliefs, and emotions from the past, instead of letting them go, they feel heavy and work against our energy systems, causing tiredness, lack of motivation, and lethargy.
Overwhelm/anxiety
Although it's important to take responsibility for your emotions, we find that many sensitive and empathic people struggle with feeling flighty, ungrounded, and overwhelmed when interacting with people because life feels like it's on steroids. With so many people declaring they have anxiety or social anxiety, as an empath, you can easily make everyone else's problems your own if you don't pause and sift through your energy field with awareness. Again, to release negative energy, or foreign energy, having a practice that centers you in your energy field is crucial. It helps you see your life more clearly and differentiate between other people's emotions and your own.
Sources of negative energy
If we continue to view negative energy with less fear and see it as foreign energy outside of us, we can begin to view people with negative energy as struggling with lower-frequency emotions, and beliefs, such as pain, grief, shame, and hatred.
For instance, someone who is considered a chronically negative person probably struggles with fear and views life as painful. Holding a very strong belief that the world is bad and people are bad, will magnetize difficult situations and outcomes to someone, creating a sad cycle where that person manifests their beliefs over and over. When someone struggles to embrace joy and gratitude and carries negative energy blocks in their space, it might feel painful for empaths and sensitive people to be around them.
From the Buddhist perspective, this is where deep compassion, empathy, and neutrality are important to develop to remain calm, open, and boundaried when sharing space with someone of a lower-frequency mindset.
By learning to sit with the emotions in yourself that feel achy, tender, sad, or painful, we build a strong spiritual muscle within us that activates in tougher energetic situations. We feel understanding, centered, and calm in chaotic emotions wafting off of others.
It's important to note that lower frequency energies are not easy to be with in love and neutrality to begin with. Watching people hurt other people out of shame, resentment, control, power, and so on can feel traumatic to our energy fields when we are not plugged into our soul essence. Our soul essence is made of love and deep wisdom, and when you bring these two tools to a painful situation, rather than fear, it has the opportunity to soften and transform the experience.
6 tips for removing negative/foreign energy
Here are some ways to begin gauging whether you absorbed foreign energy and how to let go of it if you did:
Start using the words "Return to sender" or "Cancel" if you recognize someone else's energy in your space.
Use a gauge to get clear on what percentage of the energy is yours. Close your eyes, imagine a digital scale in your mind, imagine putting the energy you feel on the scale, and ask, "What percentage of the energy I'm holding is actually mine?" Chances are, it might not be 100%.
Release it into the earth through earthing or grounding practices.
Learn energy healing work to gain more sovereignty and clarity over your energy and chakra systems.
Dialogue with the energy that feels sticky or heavy by asking it questions and writing out the answers. After reading the answers ask yourself if the responses are your authentic self or old energy you've absorbed through beliefs or family programming.
Sweat, move your body, and drop out of your mind and into your heart. The mind likes to take foreign energy and draw it out through unhelpful stories or overthinking. Unplugging the thought cycle through exercise can dramatically release energy without having to push it out through reasoning.
Let's look at some specific strategies for clearing negative energy in a person’s body, home, and life.
How to get rid of negative energy in your body
To dissipate negative energy, or foreign energy that feels stuck in the body that you've absorbed, here are some additional ways you can release the energy out of your field.
Shaking: Shaking practices involve vibrating your entire body to release tension and dislodge energy, facilitating a natural way to come back into your center and experience more lightness and ease.
Breathwork: Breathwork utilizes controlled breathing techniques to shift your energy, clear the mind, and release emotional blockages that can be lineague-based, promoting a sense of peace and well-being.
Ecstatic dance: Ecstatic dance encourages free, uninhibited movement to music, allowing you to express and release pent-up emotions and negative energy through the joy of authentic, creative play.
Self-massage: Self-massage offers a method to physically manipulate your body's tissues, easing tension, enhancing circulation, and encouraging the release of old energetic patterning held in the body.
Guided imagery: Guided imagery is an amazing meditation technique that directs your imagination towards positive, calming images, which helps the body unwind and let go of stagnant or unhelpful frequencies.
How to get rid of bad energy in your home
To shift the energy in your home space, it's important to note that this could be land-related, entity-related, work-related, or family-related energy. If you feel like the energy is land or entity-related, this can be a more complicated matter and should be handled with the help of a psychic medium or through a house-clearing.
Here are a few tips to shift the energy in your home:
Adopt the 7/10 rule: Walk into each room and take a look around the space. Look for objects or possessions that don't feel inspire you or bring you the same joy as they used to. Rate the objects you see and donate or sell things that don't feel uplifting, inspiring, or helpful. Things that are aligned with our field are 7+. By holding onto things that don't feel aligned with us, we create stagnancy and misalignment.
Create an altar or a space that makes you pause and remember your soul essence: Part of staying connected with higher vibrational energies is remembering you're a soul throughout the day. Creating an intentional space that amplifies that message and holds this frequency can be crucial in our chaotic lives where it feels difficult to recognize our inherent, loving selves.
Notice where the most chaos lives in your home and choose to face it: The home is a larger metaphor of the mind and it can be a fractal representation of your mental processes and the chaos you allow into your space. Cleaning out a closet, a cabinet or even reorganizing the tupperware drawer can provide a new sense of ease and clarity.
How to get rid of negative energy in your life
If your life doesn't feel inspiring and you feel weighed down, the first step to understanding how and why foreign energy is stuck in your system is asking yourself this, "Why am I choosing to stay disconnected from my higher self?" Our higher selves naturally repel lower frequencies, so being bombarded by foreign energy is a clear sign that you are disconnected from your soul essence. Take time with this question, and then check out these additional strategies to cleanse the energy in your life.
Get curious about who and what you are spending your time on: When we feel a high level of self-worth and self-love, we rarely spend time with people who feel like a negative influence or engage in activities that make us feel crummy.
Create space for your higher self to guide you: Many of us want to feel our soul essence support and nurture us, but we pack our days so full of activities, we make it difficult. When you are guided by a higher frequency aspect of you, emotional negativity rarely sticks. Excessive bad energy seems to avoid us more often, and we don't fall into a negative mood or negative mindset as frequently.
Find time to play: This is a hard one for adults. Play naturally uplights our perception, and we can more easily release sadness, frustration, and anger simply because we feel fulfilled by joy and fun. We recognize that we don't need to take everything so seriously, which directly impacts our ability to soften and stay neutral to foreign energy from other people.
Learn energy healing: Energy healing is the fast track to becoming an empowered empath and tapping into your inherent soul essence, which we interpret as positive energy.
Find your healing frequency with our energy medicine programs.
If you found yourself lit up by the strategies we offered to support your body, home, and life, we might be a good fit to support your healing journey to becoming empowered in your empathy and sensitivities.
To learn more about your inherent soul essence and how our energy medicine programs bring profound healing and insight to your life, book a free consultation call here.