How is your energy?

This week I had a conversation with a client that has stayed with me in the following days.

In lockdown life, we are all living in close quarters with ourselves or with others.

I have spoken to friends with families and friends who live alone, and there is no doubt that there are challenges for all parties.

For many of us living with others, we miss solitude, and for those who live alone, they miss the company of others.

One of the common challenges for us all is the challenge of energy.

I don’t mean low energy or lack of motivation, though this is a challenge for most of us during these COVID times.

I mean a lack of diverse energy, an energy that somehow bonds us to each other and ourselves.

Pre- COVID my husband would leave the house every day and return with his energy, but also the energy that’s fuelled from the people he connected with that day.

My children would go to school and return, fuelled by the people they had connected with that day.

And for me, I would be travelling and speaking, gaining energy from the people I work with and even on my crafted introvert days, I might write in a café and have conversations with strangers and bring that energy back into the home.

So much energy would come back into the home at the end of every day, each of us nourished, affirmed, stretched and connected in some way.

We would bring that energy together into the home, share it, play with it, inhale it and then exhale it as the evening took hold.

The next day we would all go and gather more energy and give more energy.

And now?

And now we have had the same energy in the home every day, and we have had for most of the last six months.

Even though we have ways of generating energy among the four of us, the energy stores are depleting.

There is a dullness to the energy we have because of the lack of diverse energy we are experiencing.

When we went into lockdown in March, I wrote on our kitchen blackboard, ‘Be kind’, because I knew that we would have to give each other a little more slack as we all came to terms with a new way of living.

In lockdown 2.0 (is it now 2.5 or 3.0, I’m not sure anymore), I wrote on the board, ‘Be kinder still’.

Because if energy stores are depleting, we can’t allow the kindness to become depleted as well.

In a coaching session, I might talk with a client about life energy; I might ask, “What do you have the energy for? We only have a certain amount of energy, where do you want to spend yours?”

This is magnified in the world right now, when many of our energy stores are depleting.

Personally, I want to spend the energy I have to fill my cup, so that I can be of service in a meaningful way, and I want to spend my energy to ‘Be kinder still’.

In times like these, regardless of the level of restriction you have in your life right now, the kindness that is focused towards the self is going to build your energy enough to be kind to others.

In the words of Buddha:

“As the rain falls on the just and unjust alike, let your heart be untroubled by judgments and let your kindness rain down on all.”

Wishing you a weekend full of kindness.

Kemi    xxx