THE POWER OF LOVE ENERGY

It’s 2009. I’m driving the family minivan. I’ve been sick for about a year. Doctors don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m feeling drained, running errands, with my children in the backseat. As we wait at an unusually long red light, I sense some movement in the back. In my rearview mirror, it appears that my three-year-old son is waving his arm in a strange fashion at something outside his window. I look to see if someone is waving back at him but see no one. “What are you doing, Son?” I ask.

“I’m throwing LOVE balls,” he replies, as he continues his deliberate “throws” – one imaginary love ball at-a-time. “That man in the car over there looks mad. So, I’m throwing love balls at him.”

Love Balls. It was a metaphor I used to teach my children about the energy that is inside all of us that connects us to one another. Because we are connected, we have the power to impact others with our energy. That means we can make people feel better just by sending love energy to them. When I taught this lesson, we began throwing imaginary love balls at each other. That was a few weeks before we sat at that red light. My son, in his innocent wisdom, was now trying to help a stranger with love energy. I don’t know if it helped the stranger but it helped his older sister and I. We burst into happy laughter. His love energy was adorably contagious.

Before I got sick, after a big rain, we would go on a mission to save all the worms in the alley behind our home. The roadway would fill with unsuspecting worms, waiting to be crushed by cars that drove and parked in the alley. My children and I placed the worms that we could find into grass and dirt on the side of the road, letting them live and be free. We are all connected, I explained to my beautiful darlings, as we worked at our cause. I was planting a seed that would hopefully give my children comfort as they navigated their lives. The human experience is one of separation and brokenness. It is ever-seeking connection and wholeness. Each one of us must find it ourselves but we can help each other along the way by planting seeds.

When I taught connection and “love energy” to my children, it was new to me. Before that, I had seen myself as hopelessly separate from everyone and everything. A book by Wayne Dyer, called “There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem,” was what caused the shift in me. Knowing that we are all connected began a change in me that was both monumental and magnificent. It was so big and beautiful because I was so alone and broken. Suddenly, I wasn’t alone anymore. And, I was quite a bit less broken.

I felt a sense of power with my newfound realization but also a sense of shame. I looked back at who I had been and how I’d behaved all the years prior to my belongingness transformation. I had thought I was a lot of good things. I thought I was strong, defiant, a champion of the underdog, a righter of wrongs. I demanded respect and felt entitled in relationships. I thought my quick temper and controlling behaviors were endearing personality quirks. Where I grew up, that was the kind of behaviour we bragged about. I did not see what a weak, scared bully I was, trying to get what I wanted.

I had a childhood much like most people have, I assume. I lived in a perpetual state of Us vs Them. Mom vs Dad. Me vs My Brother. Rich vs Poor. Man vs Woman. Authority vs Civilian. Teacher vs Student. Me vs You, and so on. It never ends. I was taught to see differences more than similarities. Our separateness was an undisputed, unquestioned fact. Sunday school didn’t teach me any different. Survival in my world required knowing who the enemy was at all times, and that friends could turn into enemies when we least expect it. In my neighbourhood, we did not gaze lovingly on our fellow man.

As a teenager, I began my search for “the one” I could belong to. I had my heart broken many times over. I gave sex in return for love and love in return for sex. My friends called me “Mom” because I had a license and a car, and I was there to save them any time they needed me. Even at that age, I knew my calling was to help people. I just didn’t know how to help in a meaningful way. I couldn’t even help myself.

I’d carried the labels I inherited from my parents like badges of both honour and shame: poor kid, welfare mother, biker family, raised to be a fighter, daughter of a convict, and so on. If you knew me then, you can probably think of a few more. To make high school easier, I used my mother’s maiden name so that teachers wouldn’t know who my family was. But disguising my family name didn’t hide the hot mess that I was. Still, I was a hot mess on the honour-roll, taking International Baccalaureate courses. Some teachers thought I had “potential.” That word scared the fuck out of me. It meant “expectations” and “letting others down.”

When I became a young adult, my labels expanded. I went to university straight out of high school and became a “feminist.” I began to view myself as a “Dancer” at the nightclub every single night. Then I took my love of dancing to the big city and became a “Stripper.” Soon after, to defend the industry I loved, I became a “Sex Worker Activist.” Later I briefly became a “Christian,” and then an “Anarchist.” I became the biggest label of all, “Mother” and the hardest one of all for me, “Wife.” When I suffered a devastating pharmaceutical injury, I became a “Vaccine Awareness Advocate.” These were words I used to identify who I was as a person. My selfhood depended on how I separated myself from others.

Have you heard the saying that if you’re not getting better, then you’re getting worse, because you’ll never stay the same? Years after I learned about and taught love energy to my children, my feeling of separateness was still strong, maybe even stronger. The idea of connectedness was there. Love for my fellow living beings was there. I knew that science proved our energetic connection to be true. But life - and ego - have a way of making us forget that we are connected.

I spent several years in a broken marriage while I was chronically ill and disabled. Those years were excruciating emotionally and mentally. I wanted to die more than I wanted to live but my children gave me strength. I was determined to live for them, no matter how much suffering I had to endure. When I finally separated from my husband, I was touch-starved, ashamed of my scarred body from multiple surgeries, suffering from PTSD, and desperately prepared to provide for my children no matter what it took. It was me and them against the world.

Suffering, pain, hopelessness, shame; these and many other feelings contributed to my feelings of isolation. The life-transforming epiphany I experienced by reading Wayne Dyer was significant and it changed the way I thought permanently. But finding my belongingness was a process that only began with that book. The massive suffering I endured was softened by what I’d learned from Dr. Dyer but my feeling of separateness had only been amplified.

It was in 2018, when I began my intimacy work, that I started to truly understand the power of love energy. Clients came to me in varying degrees of “separateness.” I attempted to make them feel connected by practicing the art of intimacy. I usually had one hour with each of them. A small amount of time in which to make them feel seen, appreciated, desired, loved, cherished, and respected. I used various connection techniques that came naturally to me, including attention, body language, nonjudgement, and caring touch. I intentionally surrounded each client with love energy. During COVID, my business was booming. People were starved for the services I provided. Intimacy is a need, not a want.

I became fascinated with building intimacy with strangers. Could I build intimacy online? I found that I could. Could I build intimacy with the grocery store clerk, or the person sitting next to me in the waiting room? Surprisingly, yes. How about the disgruntled customer at the post office? Or the tired mom in the parking lot? Or the homeless person standing outside Starbucks? Yes, yes, and yes! The skills and practice I got spreading intimacy to strangers made my personal relationships stronger too. It became natural for me to envelop every person I met with love energy.

My intimacies were not always appreciated. I was rejected, ignored, scoffed at, and eye-rolled at countless times (and I continue to be), but those people’s reactions are a reflection of their feelings of separateness. Their negative responses have nothing to do with me. I don’t let them stifle my glorious, intentional, energetic flow.

My intimacy work has led me to study and fall in love with Nondual Shaiva Tantra, a spiritual belief that sees the whole of existence as one energetic entity. In other words, everything, not just everyone, is connected. I imagine a large blob of invisible substance. It is inside and outside of us. It encompasses everything around us. It does not judge whether anything is good or bad, it just is. A part of the whole, as we all are.

Existential Kink, a book and healing modality practiced by Dr. Caroline Elliot, takes this idea further by helping us expose the unconscious, darkest layers of who we are; identifying those taboo aspects of ourselves as equal parts of the whole. The parts of ourselves that we unconsciously suppress are given permission to turn us on. I must admit, it is very kinky!

I felt a paradigm shift when I read: “Every person in your sleeping dreams is YOU.” It made sense after I thought about it, of course. Every familiar person or stranger, every monster or hero, every animal or symbol in my sleeping dream is ME. Of course it’s me! My mind creates my sleeping dreams, so they can’t be anyone but me. That realization rocked my world. It helped me understand how my waking life is also a dream.

Pre-ostomy surgery tummy.

Nothing and no one in my life escapes being a perception of my own imagination. Johnny is not the same person in your life (mind) that Johnny is in my life (mind). In other words, every person we know is a character we’ve created in our own personal waking dreams. The reason this is relevant is because when we are roused from our waking dreams, we able to more easily see our connectedness. Our separation is truly in our minds.

There is an awareness meditation that I learned from Christopher Wallace, author of “Tantra Illuminated.” I will attempt to summarize it for you in my own words. Start by sitting quietly and comfortably in silence with your eyes closed. First, become aware of your breathing, any sensations you feel inside or outside of your body, like whether you are cold or tired. Sit with that awareness for several minutes. Take it in. Now, expand your awareness further, outside of your body to the room you’re in. What can you feel, smell, hear? Engage your five senses and become aware of everything that surrounds you. Spread your awareness to all the rooms of your home. Feel their existence in your awareness. Once, you feel fully aware of your personal surroundings, expand your awareness outside the confines of your home, beyond the walls and ceiling to the outdoors. Become aware of the streets, cars, homes, and people in your neighbourhood. Spread out further and become aware of the mountains, skies, lakes, and oceans. Take it in. Does it feel like … LOVE ENERGY?

Feel the expansiveness of your awareness. Let it expand as fully as possible. Can you sense that there is more out there that you don’t fully understand or cannot explain? Sit in this expansive awareness and reflect upon your immersement in it. Now, ask yourself - does this awareness belong to you? If not, who else does it belong to? The truth is, we are all connected to and enveloped by an infinite, powerful awareness. Some might say, it is the core of who we truly are. And as “Awareness,” we are capable of seeing the big picture of our lives.

When I did the awareness meditation, I was amazed at the size of my… OUR awareness. After that, I didn’t just believe in our connectedness and feel it when I spread my intimacies. I realized it is available to me at any moment because it is ever-present. Now, I do the awareness meditation at will, whenever I want to remind myself that I am not alone. Each one of us is a light in the plasma of awareness, blinking at each other like lighthouses calling each other home.

It reminds me of the gospel song that goes, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” Knowing I am connected gives me the courage to shine my brightest, sending out love energy – or throwing LOVE BALLS, if you will – at everyone who falls across my path. I can sense the power of my love energy when I walk into a room and watch people’s faces transform from misery to happiness. Strangers engage me in long conversations and some even admit that they want to spend time in the light of my shine a little longer.

It's not MY shine. It’s OURS. We are all connected. We all have the power to send love energy to those around us. Science proves it, that’s true. But the evidence is in the action. Expand your awareness and feel it. Spread your intimacies to strangers and see how it makes you feel. Isn’t it amazing? Doesn’t it make you want to hug every person you see?

Now, you know what it’s like to be me.

Love Annie xoxo

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