caution to the winds

I'm usually very careful about the energy that I emit in this blog, and try my best to keep it to the positive. In this busy swirl of a life, that can be a challenge of course. But it can be a gift to find the upside in everything. And often it's a teaching that comes full circle back to the teacher.
That being said, today I'm going with the strange energy that is in my body today. It's not exactly negative, but it's definitely not feeling positive either. For days now, I've felt on the verge of tears for no real reason -- not even hormones. And though we only had a single day at home this week, which could be the reason, I sense that something larger or more important is lurking.

I'm going to backtrack a bit, to the day I left Omega more than 2 weeks ago. More than anything, I didn't want to leave. I was having such a great time with my friend and yoga guru Lori, and her friend Sophia -- I just didn't want it to end. But knowing that ending was inevitable the three of us hiked up to the woods behind the Sanctuary and Hill House on the Omega Campus, and completed ourselves and our time together with three closing primal screams to match the three we'd reveled in a few days earlier.
After our scream we went to a workshop in Hillhouse, which is a sort of staff sanctuary at Omega. It was a version of Brett Bevell's Shamanic Colonic, which included a yogic rune pose, an ancient Egyptian chant, and Vortex Healing.
Brett doesn't talk a lot about what he's doing. He explains enough to make everyone comfortable and then just does it. And that adds to the magic and mystery. As a yoga teacher recently said after a class: a professor only tells you what you need to know, a grad student tells you everything.

After the Vortex Healing I felt completely ready to leave Omega, in fact happily anxious to be on my way. And that was quite a relief, because I'd been carrying a kind of sadness all morning in anticipation of making the break.
Fast forward to a week later, where I am sitting on the floor at the Ananda Ashram for a Krishna Das kirtan, and I feel as though a dark black energy is sucking the life force out of my spine. I attribute it to a woman who is sitting behind me, and not at all respecting my personal space. Everyone is kind of crammed into the room and it's close quarters, but there are ways of being mindful of one another's space, and for the most part everyone else is. I feel so assaulted and vulnerable that I put my hands protectively at the base of my spine as a shield.
I've all but forgotten about the encounter, until another two weeks later when I am walking down the street and feel the same energy again, though not quite as dark feeling, and more of a swoosh. That was today.
For the last week in general, I've been increasingly aware of energy patterns, how our individual energies impact others. Larry and I had a short conversation with Shozeki Shihan Renzie Hanhman about ETF while Larry was dealing with a definite energy deficit at our dojo's 30th anniversary tournament.
And I'm in the midst of The Energies of Love by Donna Eden and David Feinstein.
I'm having little auguries every day. The first of which had to do with how we create an energy suck on others when we don't take care of ourselves and deplete our energy reserves. There's a certain point at which you can't fill back up until you've done something restorative for yourself. Time alone. Quiet. A massage.
It's helping me to understand how and why some people are just succubi.
So, while I have nothing particularly definitive to say about energy -- I am explorating it in ways I haven't been quite so open to before. And that reminds me of something Pat the devic gardener at Omega told me while we chatted one particularly gorgeous morning. And that was that sometimes we meet someone just so that when the time is right, we can really meet. That's as true of ideas as it is with people.