sometimes healing is simple
sometimes energy healing is simple – we stop feeling flow or ease in a human life, and it turns out energy that wasn’t ours has gotten stuck.
we may or may not be consciously aware this is happening, but the result is the same – flow goes kerplonk.
tending this is actually straightforward: whatever isn’t yours simply needs to be removed so joy can flow again.
when weather begins to change
there are all kinds of seasons in a woman’s life when her spirit quietly rearranges the weather. some are big and dramatic and can’t be missed, some are more subtle.
in the subtle times, the sun still rises, the kettle still sings in the kitchen, the cat sits patiently at the door, and familiar paths unfurl through the days. everything looks exactly as it should from the outside, but somewhere inside an unseen current has shifted, the way a deep-water tide beyond the horizon turns in a new direction.
long before the shoreline changes, the waters inside us already know.
if you’ve experienced a big unsettling life event, it may feel obvious that vestigial energy could be hanging around and interrupting flow – energy someone threw at you in anger or fear, or energy that got stuck because the experience itself was so powerful. if that’s been happening for you – big heart hug. in those moments the need for clearing intrusive or non-native energy is pretty clear, so you can return to feeling sovereign and intact.
sometimes, though, nothing obvious has happened and our lives still begin to feel slightly off-kilter. our daily structures remain in place – relating, sacred work, the small rituals that bring us joy – and still, something underneath has begun changing its tone.
this is when we raise our heads and say: something feels strange. something isn’t flowing the way it should.
how to tell when something isn’t yours
another way to recognize energy that isn’t yours is when thoughts return again and again to a person or situation, and you feel like you ‘just can’t get over it.’ you’re wise enough to notice when heaviness settles into your life or rests quietly on your heart, and you can trust that knowing. your inner compass is quieter than the world, but it is rarely wrong.
even the most brilliant and capable woman can find herself pausing in the middle of a day wondering why the current of her life suddenly feels tangled, as though an unseen branch has fallen quietly across her river.
if you’ve lived long enough to move through a few real initiations – and if you found your way here, my guess is you have – you’ll recognize the feeling I’m describing.
life brings us through passages. sometimes they’re expansive and beautiful and need little tending at all, just encouragement and sunlight. other times the ground shakes beneath our feet and we find ourselves navigating conflict, illness, grief, difficult encounters, or the strange aftermath of something that mattered more than we realized at the time.
when powerful experiences move through a life, they leave traces behind.
many of those traces belong to us, and carry gifts – deeper compassion after heartbreak, steadiness after surviving something rugged, or the quiet wisdom that comes from understanding that human beings are complicated creatures doing the best we can in a complicated world.
sometimes, though, quietly and without ceremony, something else lingers as well.
how energy that doesn’t belong shows up
every now and again (for reasons that can be simple or complex), energy that doesn’t belong to us finds its way into our field and begins causing difficulty.
maybe you had an interaction with someone who was carrying more anger or fear than they knew what to do with, and some of that brushed against your day and stayed when it shouldn’t have. maybe you moved through an initiation that required extraordinary resilience and the energetic debris of that storm never quite cleared. sometimes repeated worry – the way the mind walks the same rutted path again and again – gathers into a density that begins living beside us like weather that refuses to move on.
things can get groovier than that in the unseen world – a conversation for another day – but even in the ordinary complexity of life it’s possible to accumulate energies that aren’t our own and that begin acting like ballast.
however it happens, the experience is recognizable.
something feels sticky, uneasy, or quietly off. heaviness moves through you that doesn’t quite feel like yours, or weariness settles in that doesn’t make much sense when you step back and look at what’s actually happening in your life.
these are signposts saying: hey there, beloved – something may be hanging out in your field that doesn’t belong to you, and it’s time to tend to it.
energetic hygiene
one way to think about this is that the unseen world often mirrors the seen one.
at the end of a human day you bathe. you take a shower not because there’s anything wrong, but because you’ve accumulated the ordinary grit and residue of living. you cleanse and refresh your body so you can move forward feeling clear and radiant again.
energetically, we need the same kind of tending.
extraction is simply the removal of unseen energy that doesn’t belong and causes difficulty in a human life – in many ways as simple as cleansing the physical body so you feel clean, tidy, and intact.
the splinter metaphor
the easiest way to understand extraction is through a simple physical metaphor:
imagine you’ve got a big hairy splinter lodged in your hand (ouch!). no matter how strong or healthy your body is, it’s going to struggle to heal while that splinter remains firmly embedded in your skin. surrounding tissue becomes irritated, the wound lingers longer than it should, and the body quietly waits for the moment when the intrusion is removed so its natural intelligence can restore balance.
and when that splinter finally comes out, something wondrous happens, although we rarely take time to marvel at it.
the body remembers what it has known all along, that subtle intelligence within us that knows how to return to wholeness.
how extraction works
energetic extraction works in exactly the same way, except now we’re talking about your unseen energy field rather than your physical body. and that energy field influences clarity, ease, flow, and your sense of being you.
in healing sessions, I enter a state of listening and connection with helping spirits, who are loving, playful, compassionate, wise, and kind. when invited, they can help locate energy that doesn’t belong in your field and gently remove it so your system can return to coherence.
this work isn’t dramatic or intense – in many ways it’s simply practical and effective.
simply, nothing belongs in your energy field except what’s truly yours, or what you consciously welcome.
the feeling of relief
most women describe feeling relief after an extraction, as though something that had been quietly interfering with the current of their life has finally been lifted away. thoughts grow clearer, emotional weather begins to shift, and the simple feeling of being yourself again returns like sunlight breaking through clouds.
you might think of extraction in the unseen world as the energetic equivalent of removing that stubborn splinter. once the thing that doesn’t belong is gone, your system knows how to restore itself.
filling the newly open space
nature abhors a vacuum, so healing doesn’t end with extraction.
whenever helping spirits clear something away that doesn’t belong, they also invite blessings, vitality, strength, and protection to fill the newly opened place. the intention is always the same: that you return to balance, clarity, and flow – capable not just of enduring a human life, but of enjoying it.
the ‘filling in’ feels a bit like a bubble bath at the end of a long day at work, restorative, restful, and sweet.
the road clears
this is one of the quiet ways healing happens here, for women moving through thresholds and welcoming joy home again.
when the path of a life begins to feel tangled, it isn’t always because you’ve lost your way.
sometimes it’s simply because something that never belonged to you has been standing quietly in the middle of the road, waiting to be lifted away so the journey can continue.
the road was always yours to walk.
with heart,
anna
ps – if this story met you somewhere tender, you’re warmly invited to join the dreaming otter email list, at the bottom of this page. from time to time I send out new writings – small lanterns for the path.
