Practise

Every day again we are working with our energy balance, consciously or unconsciously. Dealing with gravity and sensing the atmosphere in our surroundings, are examples of forms of energy we work with. You will experience yourself in our sessions that you cannot only sense energy. It is also possible to work with it, directly or indirectly. You will find out quickly that this is nothing mysterious or airy fairy, it is as concrete as working with gravity.

With the practical tools you receive in our session that help you to perceive your energy balance and work with it, you will have your own personal toolbox on how to influence your life and how you feel quickly and yourself. On this page you will find some simple and practical tricks and tools that can help you to restore the balance in your life in an easy and accessible way. Here I gathered some of the most effective and powerful tools I encountered and also use myself on a regular basis.

This ‘toolbox’ has practical methods to ground, relax, strengthen, protect against energy loss, untangle, connect and reset yourself. Maybe not every exercise will resonate with you. Test them and find out if they work for you!

Land in your body

A lot of people lost touch with their bodies and nature. An important reason for that is that ratio and knowledge are valued highly nowadays, not only when it comes to work. Therefore a lot of people spend a big amount of time ‘in the head’. The rest of the body isn’t just a vehicle to get (left side of the) brain to the meeting or computer screen though. People are often so out of touch with their body that they literally aren’t ‘seen’ by the world around them. A grounded person is noticed when entering the room, even without having to do or say anything.

Energy is moving upwards during the day, just like the sun and temperature do. In the late afternoon and evening also the energy goes down again. A continuous repeating cycle of yin and yang that you see everywhere in nature. Because we are so focus on our head nowadays, the descending of the energy happens less or not at all anymore and with that we lose contact with our bodies more and more. Before people were also during the day in contact with the earth or their bodies, because they lived more in touch with nature. Therefore grounding isn’t mentioned so much in old spiritual texts or teachings. And until before the industrial and especially digital revolution, even during their work. Just think of farmers and people that did mainly physical work back then.

We are completely dependend on nature and the earth to stay alive and to lose and neutralise our stress, but are strongly disconnected from it nowadays. Also there we made the transition from body to head. The necessity of being where we are, touching down, being more in touch with the body and earth we live on, is bigger than ever. This is also called grounding.

This connection with our body is important to get things moving or done and to feel what is going on. Most of our communication is non-verbal and your body provides you with clear signals if something is or isn’t right in your life. They call it ‘gut feeling’ for a reason. Your body also tells you where your limits and boundaries are, physically as well as mentally. When you’re not enough in touch with your body, it easily leads to tension and problems in your physique. Signals that often are overruled by the ‘head’ for a long time. There is nothing wrong with ratio and thinking of course, as long as it’s a means to and end and used when needed. When they suppress or limit your intuition and bodily signals, it will lead to problems. Also we need a strong fundament to stand strong and stable in life and just like a tree we need good roots to be able to grow high into the sky.

Your so called ‘grounding’ has to do with being in touch with your body. This grounding exercise can help you with that. In it you open up to the energy of the earth that supports you and universe above you to restore your balance. Both are able to nourish us. The sky above us brings us oxygen and provides all that lives on the earth of sunlight. The earth under us supports us all and feeds us directly and indirectly through food and fertility. This applies for everybody, independent of race, skin color, religion, sexual orientation or political ideas. Energy also doesn’t discriminate and works for everybody. How big your problems might seem, you are only a small part of the whole mechanism and you can easily recharge to the energy of nature. The grounding energy of the earth also is calming and balancing, so it is perfect as a means to relax. Regularly doing this exercise will help you to connect better with your body and will give you a stronger basis.

Another way to ground is simply walking barefoot directly on the surface of the earth like grass or soil. Try it and see how it feels. Even touching a tree with your hand can make you more aware of the contact with the earth below through the soles of your feet (also in your shoes). Again, give it a try. And if you want to know more, check out ‘earthing’ online.

Contact with the earth below you, in the traditional Chinese medicine mainly happens through one specific point under the foot, also known as ‘Yongquan’ or acupuncture point ‘kidney 1’. Under both names you can find it’s location on the internet. Massaging this point, located at the front of the sole of the foot, helps you to ground better and land more in your body. Use the top of your thumb for this and massage deeply. You can even mentally it open this area to the earth energy and take it in through here, just like a tree takes in nutrition through the roots. Try it and see what works for you.

Find the relaxation within yourself

In our society in which we have full schedules and there is always something to keep us busy, as well the body as mind can easily get overstimulated. Meditation is an excellent tool to relax. Also the body can be used for that. Body and mind are closely connected and if one comes to rest, the other one tends to follow.

Physical relaxation is easy to achieve by breathing with the belly. When you’re restless or stressed your breathing automatically goes to higher in your chest. By breathing towards the belly, the breath is deepened and with that it is almost impossible to be or stay stressed or tensed. That deep breathing relaxes you is one of the main reasons why smoking has a relaxing effect (but for the rest is of course killing for your energy). Breathing through the belly also increases oxygen intake, lowers blood pressure and heartrate and lowers stress levels. Belly breathing is thereby our natural way of breathing. Just observe how babies breathe. Most adults breathe high in the chest and are unable to bring it down to the belly area. Relearning how to breath to the belly brings us back to our basis. Click on the picture here to see the video.

A Chinese master once learned me a simple method to reestablish that. Lie down on your right side with the knees slightly pulled up. Put your left hand under your neck with the fingertips on the back of your spine in the neck and hereby rest the thumb next to the hand. Then put the right arm underneath your left arm around your chest. The hand is placed behind the left armpit and you kind of embrace yourself in this posture. Make sure your ellbows are close to your chest and rest on the floor and then let the surface below fully support your bodyweight. You will notice that your breathing automatically goes towards the belly this way. When you do this super simple exercise on a regular basis, like before going to sleep, you will notice that your body remembers the belly breathing and will make it the standard way of breathing again. That will bring you also more relaxation during the day and will help you to fall asleep quicker and more easily.

Too much mental tension is not just noticeable in your breathing. It is also detectable in other parts of the body and then mainly in the hands and face. Both have a high concentration of nerves and are therefore strongly represented in the so called sensomotorical cortex in the brain. If you look for a picture of the ‘homunculus’, you’ll see how big the different parts of the body are represented in our brain. The hands and face are very big here. Hands contain a lot of nerves because touching is mainly done by our fingers, because our fingertips have a lot more density in nerves than let’s say our elbow. Our face has more nervous density because our other senses are located here.

If you are mentally stressed, it often leads to tension or stiffness in the fingers, around the nose, in your jaws or round the eyes. Also the tongue is an important indicator. By relaxing them consciously, it often brings mental relaxation as well. Use this multiple times a day and especially when you feel stressed or tense. Also consciously relax the hands and fingers, jaws, forehead, eyes, tongue and cheeks when you go into the position for the belly breathing and it will strengthen it’s effect.

Get physically into top shape

My daily morning ritual consists of meditation and this exercise. As a physiotherapist and a former fitness instructor, I never encountered a completer exercise to make the body fitter and more balanced. It strengthens your endurance as well as almost all areas of the body and you can emphasise a bit more the arms, trunk or legs if you wish.

I encountered the exercise in Tibetan Buddhism where, known under the name prostration, it is used in combination with a meditation and mantra. For many centuries already it is used to make the body a ‘loyal servant instead of cruel master’. Also it opens the central energy canals in the body. More than a smooth floor surface, a pillow for under the knees and two small towels for the hands is not necessary.

Curious? Click on the picture on the right to see the exercise that I made into a slightly adjusted version of the original prostration. De main focus points are that you completely stretch out on the floor, the tops of your fingers and toes touch each other and the forehead, hands, knees and feet rest flat on the floor. How you get from standing to stretched out on the floor is not very important, though it is good to move symmetrically towards landing on the knees, sliding over the hands forward and getting up again. This way both sides and the energy tracks of the body are strengthened equally. I do almost every morning fifty of these and this way start each day fresh and fit.

Good luck with the muscle ache the first few days.

Make sure you have optimal fuel

Nutrition is the fuel that you put into your system. It is the basis of what your constantly renewing cells are made of. There is a lot of discussion about what is healthy and benefical for a human body and that differs per person.

What I think is universal and applies for all is:

• Eat plant-based. All experts agree that plant-based food is healthy and isn’t likely to lead to healthproblems.
• Eat vegan. Wheter you do it for your own health, the prevention of animal suffering of the environment and lowering the ecological footprint, leaving the consumption of animal products out of your diet has almost only positive effects if you look at it from a larger perspective.
• Eat natural. The wrapping and packaging of nature is very advanced and for example has fibers there where there is sugar so the intake into the blood is more gradual. All that is packed in plastig is often not o natural anymore and ‘enriched’ with sugar and other additives to make you consume more.
• Intermittent fasting. Make sure you have resting periods between your consumption moments and a long break of at least 12 hours every day (which is pretty easy to achieve if you combine that with the hours you sleep at night). A third of what we eat during the day we do outside of our meals and this way our system hardly get a break and this leads to continuous low level inflammation.
• Move before you eat. This is how our system knows it because in the era before supermarkets and refrigerators, when we had to search and gather (or hunt) our food, we always had physical activity before we ate. Especially for people with diabetis this is very important because it has a lot of benefits for the insuline rates.

I dove in to this subject quite a bit, but for this subject I refer to the real experts. Myself I am a fan of the approach of Richard de Leth and his company Oersterk.

Guard your energy

Energy is everywhere and not bound to one place. Energy flows and mixes like water and if warm water mingles with cold water, the temperature of the water will drop. In the same way you can lose energy if there are circumstances or an environment where the energy is lower. Everybody knows people that in some way or another can suck all the energy out of you. For this ‘transfer’ that person doesn’t even has to be present for that. Just seeing his or her name in the screen when your phone rings can be enough to make you feel tired and drained. Of course these people aren’t bad people, they are just not in a good place in life. They often don’t even know they are tapping energy from you. To prevent that this process is at your expense and you become an energy supplier for others, it is important to learn how to manage your own energy. Everybody is responsible for their own energy and your energy isn’t something you give away. Like my teacher says: ‘attention you can give without a limit, your energy is yours’.

Just being aware of what is happening in streams of energy in certain situations or interaction with other people. can already help a lot in many cases. It gives you the possibility to make different choices for who you surround yourself with and to what you expose yourself.

It is unpreventable though to never end up in situations where you can lose energy. In those cases there a multiple techniques to prevent being ‘drained’. A very simple one is to pull back your own energy behind your heart. There it is your domain. Retreat ‘yourself’ there whenever you notice you are losing energy to your surroundings. It prevents you from opening up too much in those moments. Also it is useful to ground yourself at the same time and recharge on the energy of the earth below you. You can do that by focusing on the soles of your feet and to let everything that doesn’t belong to you and costs you energy flow down through your body off into the earth. You can even use the point under the feet mentioned at Ground Yourself. In the sessions I give much more options to work with this.

Reconnect with yourself

Sometimes what happens around you can make you lose touch with yourself. That you aren’t able to find the peace, balance and energy in yourself anymore. I have two easy techniques for you to restore this.

In the first part of my meditations I often use the visualisation of a descending circle of light. Imagine that above your head there is a horizontal circle of light that slowly descents around you. On it’s way down it breaks every connection that is still open with the world around you. The lines still open between you and the people you spoke to in person over the phone, mail or app and the lines with the situations you were in that day or before, all of them are loosened up. The circle descends all the way down until all is disconnected. Everything around you comes to rest and you bring your complete focus to yourself and your own body. Do this simple and quick exercise whenever you want or need it. I myself often use it at the end of a working day or before getting into my bed.

Another method that can be effective is letting everything go and behind you whenever you cross a doorstep. Take a doorstep like that of your front door, bedroom or work. Pause just before it and consciously let go of everything that kept you occupied earlier that day. While stepping over it you leave everything behind you and enter the new room free and fresh. I use this method often with the doorstep to my treatment room if I enter just after my new patient, the doorstep of the front door of my house or the one of my bedroom.

Connect with the ones around you

If there is one life changing exercise I know, it is this one. I heard or read about it before, but never really tried it. Since I did, I found how it works instantly and how big the impact of it is. The only thing you have to do is to wish the other person complete happiness and essential in this is that you do that with complete conviction and sincerity.

Try and see what it does for you to open your heart to another person and sincerely wish them all the happiness in the world. You don’t have to do this out loud, silently inside yourself is fine and you can do it with everybody you encounter. I myself often do this on my bike ride to work in the mornings with the people I see on the street.

You can use this exercise with people you know and don’t know and spreading this wish also works very well to connect to people you don’t feel a lot of connection with, feel a distance to or even have difficulties with or dislike. By wishing people sincerely to be happy, a connection on a deeper level occurs because you refer to a communality. Every human being strives for happiness and being free of suffering and does his best to achieve that in life with the best info and capabilities he or she has available. The step towards seeing that the other is for 99,9% equal to you, has the same emotions, hopes and fears and runs into the same things in life, is only a small one after that. This increases the level of understanding towards each other and the willingness to accept and respect each other, beyond the small aspects that make you different.

Try this yourself and experience the effect! For a pre taste you can already close your eyes for a few seconds and wish two people in your life all the good and happiness in the world. Do this for ten seconds and experience what it does for you and how it makes you feel. It might very well be that you catch yourself smiling during the exercise.

If you do this on a regular basis and with several people, that you don’t even have to know, you’ll notice instantly that you become happier and feel lighter. Your problems will become lighter and the world around you a more friendly and nicer place. Try it like me in the morning on the way to work or with the people you meet at work or elsewhere in life. It will have a direct impact on your life.

Empty your head

Sometimes your head seems to overflow after a period of intense work or dealing with all that comes at you. Is there no more room for things and is the head ‘full’. There is a simple breathing technique that can ‘empty’ your head again within a minute. Not empty in the way that you forgot everything and have to start over again, empty in a way that there is new space for things. It reorganises or ‘defragments’ your head.

This method to quickly ‘reset your brain’ is practical and effective and can easily applied, like behind your desk, in a traffic jam or in the toilet. It is important to really take a moment to let it land into your system and by concentrating on the calmness and space it brought you. This way you take it with you into the rest of the day. Click on the logo here and watch the video about the exercise and try it yourself!