The “Double Energy Lock”–A Price We Pay for Emotional Avoidance

The double energy lock is a way of looking at how resisting and avoiding our emotions saps our energy. Let’s say you have 100 units of energy. That’s all you have. This is your vital life force. It can go into physical movement, thinking, feeling, imagining, or any human activity you can imagine.

Let’s say five of those units are being expressed as an emotion you would prefer not to have, let’s say that emotion is shame. You don’t want to feel shame so you try not to feel it. Resisting the feeling of shame also takes energy; let’s say five units. So, feeling shame takes energy and avoiding or suppressing shame also takes energy.

That’s the ‘double energy lock’ that most humans are putting their energy into on a regular and habitual basis. Shame (or whatever emotion you resist) is arising and you assume that’s a problem. What if it isn’t a problem; what if it’s a chance to clear something negative on multiple levels.

The way this should work:

You notice yourself feeling an emotion you don’t prefer. You accept that this emotion is there for a reason and accept that you are an evolving being and part of your personal evolution is that ‘issues’ come up to either show you that you are thinking or acting in-authentically. You are having this ‘negative’ emotion because your higher self/inner wisdom is showing you that you are not being authentic.

Not being authentic leads to suffering. Your higher self wants to help you reach ‘its’ level. You can’t do that lugging around heavy things like shame, guilt or murderous rage any more than you can achieve maximum height in a hot air balloon with a ton of extra weight.

So, your higher self uses the negative emotion as a sign. You locate the idea, belief or action that is weighing you down and you let it go. Now you are dedicating those energy ‘units’ to the real you. As a result, intuition, creativity and general energy levels rise. You become more ‘magical’ because you are not using your vital life force to feed emotional junk. With this extra energy, more is sensed and experienced.

The way most people are doing it:

You feel a negative emotion, usually connected to a false, negative self-image, and fear that it is true. You suppress it. It stays hidden, but not really. It actually just becomes the kind of infection that activates when your emotional immune system is weakened. You expend vast amounts of life-force energy to hold the monster that you’ve made this emotion into, down and end up thinking that the monster is you.

That creates a bigger monster, even if the monster is really just an illusion. You get less flexible in body, mind and spirit. You inflict this suffering on others in thousands of ways, big and small. You are a fake because you fear that deep down you are bad, not good enough, or just screwed up. Your fake persona draws inauthentic people into your life. In-authenticity begets more in-authenticity. Now it feels ‘too late’ to get out because you know there is just more stuff that you will have to face and heal. More and more of your energy goes into feeding the monster, an unsustainable status quo. You pass your patterns to the next generation. You die without ever having experienced the magnificence of your true self.

What’s the alternative?

What lies beyond this paradigm: Now that you are willing to feel whatever feelings your body/mind generates, you are able to feel more. At first it may be a little overwhelming. Soon you start to notice that your sensitivity to feeling becomes very acute. You are like the smoker, who after decades of smoking, quits and finds foods tasting amazing. Now you are able to surf the waves of emotion and realize that everything is feeling. Since you are now open to feeling any feeling, you are able to experience subtle sensations that you have been missing, probably since childhood.

As your avoidance of ‘negative’ emotions wanes, you experience the subtle delights of feelings you have long been numb to. You also start to realize that your intuition becomes something that you can rely on more and more. This taps you into a subjective experience of life that is rich and profound, an experience that you had been tragically missing out on for years.