Do You Have Energy Blockages? Stop Living in the Past

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Untethered Soul" by Michael A. Singer. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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What are energy blockages? What are the signs that your spiritual energy is blocked? And more importantly, what can you do to unblock it?

Energy blockages are knots in your spiritual energy that form as a result of past trauma, preventing your energy from flowing freely. Once an energy block is established, your present life experience will always be polluted by the past until you release the block and allow the free flow of experience through your consciousness again.

Keep reading ot learn about energy blockages and what to do to release them.

What Are Energy Blockages?

The yogic concept of Samskaras provides a useful handle for understanding energy blockages. Like the orbital energy patterns of atoms and planets, Samskaras are stable cycles of blocked energy patterns. Over the course of your life, you’ve stored many of these in your heart charka. Here’s how Samskaras occur:

  • When an energy blockage happens, you initially try to process it through your mind, but this fails, as the only way to resolve a block is to release it.
  • When you can’t resolve your energy blockages in your mind, they move to your heart, where they generate emotions.
  • When you resist the blockage in your heart, your heart puts it in deep storage, where it becomes a Samskara, an “impression” from the past that runs your life. 
  • A stored Samskara becomes a trigger that makes your heart open and close on autopilot. Whenever you encounter something that resonates with its energy—for instance, if you drive past another blue mustang like your girlfriend’s—this disturbs your heart. You were fine, but suddenly you feel moody and irritated. Your heart flow is still being affected in the present by something that happened in the past.

What Energy Blockages Do

Energy blockages make you hypersensitive to imagined injuries. Consider your survival instinct, for example. Despite its evolutionary shift from bodily to psychological protection, this energy pattern still produces the same physical response. When our ideas or identities are attacked, we experience the same fear, the same adrenalized fight-or-flight reaction. This protective response is tremendously unbalanced; we worry about insubstantial non-threats such as what people will think of us or how we sounded to them. We’re like psychological hypochondriacs.

Releasing Trapped Energy

The key to keeping your inner energy flowing lies in relaxing and releasing: letting go of the old, stored energies whenever they come up in the course of daily life. 

  • First, notice your energy flow starting to tighten into anger, jealousy, or whatever it is.
  • Second, relax and remember yourself as the self, as the objective witness of the disturbance. Remember that your spiritual heart isn’t you. Rather, you’re the one who experiences your heart.
  • Third, use the opportunity to release the negative energy through non-reactiveness. Just let it flow through you and out of you.

Cultivate this process of spiritual purging and cleansing until it becomes your automatic, default approach. Learn to let your entire psyche surface. Accept anything that wants to present itself, no matter how unpleasant it feels at first. It might be helpful to initially practice this discipline with small upsets, like accidentally locking your keys in your car. Then progress to bigger ones like broken relationships and the death of loved ones.

Do You Have Energy Blockages? Stop Living in the Past

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  • How to find your true self instead of your false identities
  • Why getting lost in the moment is important
  • Why death is the greatest spiritual teacher about life

Darya Sinusoid

Darya’s love for reading started with fantasy novels (The LOTR trilogy is still her all-time-favorite). Growing up, however, she found herself transitioning to non-fiction, psychological, and self-help books. She has a degree in Psychology and a deep passion for the subject. She likes reading research-informed books that distill the workings of the human brain/mind/consciousness and thinking of ways to apply the insights to her own life. Some of her favorites include Thinking, Fast and Slow, How We Decide, and The Wisdom of the Enneagram.

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