Have you ever noticed that you seem to attract the same relationship pattern, over and over, with different people? Or that a particular part of your body seems to be the place stress is held — the same shoulder, stomach, or lower back pain? Or that in some situations you feel literally invisible? What if all of that isn’t random? What if it’s actually revealing something about your energy field? And what if understanding and uncovering the way your field is attracting your reality, is the ultimate key to personal empowerment? Welcome back. I’m ionsul ferrin, and if this is your first time here — this podcast lives at the intersection of healing, embodiment, and ancestral knowing. It’s for the empaths and intuitives who know that they can create their own reality, if they could just find the tools that actually work. We started this particular series in episode 6 by asking what energy actually is. Then last week we went into emotional literacy and why so many of us are trained out of feeling our own emotions. Today, I’m going to connect the dots and explain how energy, emotions, and the ways we manifest are all connected. As I said in episode 6, “energy” is the catch-all term our culture has given everything that’s non-visible about us. We can also call it our biofield, the subtle body, pranic body, meridians, chi, the light body, life force, or aura. Call it whatever resonates for you, but today I’m going to use the term energy field. And I’m going to be using a model that gives me a clearer way to understand my own patterns and distortions — what my NIASZIIH teacher calls “a simple sphere,” and what several other modalities refer to as the tube torus. You may have seen an image of a grid or energy lines in a kind of donut shape around a person. This is what’s referred to as the tube torus. For the sake of argument, let’s say that when we’re born, that spherical, tube torus shape is smooth and uninterrupted. It’s a coherent field where energy is flowing evenly in all directions. In this episode, we’re going to talk about what happens to that shape over the course of a life that includes stress, injury, and trauma. We’re going to touch on the reality that none of us have an energy field that’s a perfect sphere or tube torus, because we’ve all had traumatic experiences great and small. This is one of those frameworks that, once you see it, you can’t un-see it. So by the end of this episode, I’m hoping you’ll have a new lens for understanding why you do the things you do, and how to start healing your energy field so that you’re set free from the same old patterns of disruption and distortion that are causing you to suffer. This is a super exciting topic for me, so let’s get into it. A Simple Sphere Let’s start with what your energetic system theoretically looks like before anything happens to it. Picture a perfect sphere. Symmetrical, whole, energy flowing evenly in every direction — in through the top, down through the center, out through the bottom, and back around again, like a doughnut-shaped current wrapping the whole form. That circulating, self-contained shape is called a tube torus, and it shows up as a model of the way energy flows in a lot of different disciplines from physics to biology, for example — the shape of the magnetic field around the earth. For our purposes, think of the tube torus as your original blueprint. Before conditioning. Before trauma. Before anyone told you who or how to be. Energy moving smoothly, in a complete, unbroken sphere that surrounds your physical body. Now, here’s the challenge, though. That sphere doesn’t stay in tact. Ever. For anyone. Life happens. And the impact is not abstract. It’s precise, and we can track it. How Trauma Reshapes the Energy Body Every difficult experience — a wound that didn’t get to heal fully, a relationship rupture, a moment where you weren’t safe, seen, or supported — doesn’t just pass through you and disappear. It leaves a mark. The founder of Somatic Experiencing, Peter Levine has my favorite quote about trauma. He says that trauma is not what happens to us, it’s “what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.” Let me say that again. Trauma is not what happens to us. It’s what we hold inside as a result of what happened to us. And what we’re holding actually changes the shape of our energy field. We could think of it as dents, holes, ruptures, or weak spots where the energy doesn’t flow freely. Sometimes those patterns cause our energy field to be shrunken down inside our physical bodies. Sometimes they cause us to be so diffuse and expanded that we have trouble having a sense of self and boundaries at all. In a way, these are all metaphors. I personally can’t see physical energy fields. If you can, I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments. But I can sense the way energy is or isn’t moving in myself, and in clients, and I think these are accurate ways of pointing to what many energy healers can sense. There’s also two very broad ways I would say most empaths and intuitives in particular tend to distort their own energy field. The first is collapse. This is when the field pulls inward — shrinking, contracting, making itself smaller or even attempting to be invisible. You’ve felt this if you’ve ever noticed yourself being quiet in a group, physically curling inward, going along with something because objecting felt too confrontational, or feeling like you generally have a hard time taking up space. The other broad pattern is to overexert. This is kind of the equal and opposite move — your energy field diffuses outward in over-giving, overcompensating, or overfunctioning for others’ benefit. You’ve felt this if you’ve ever been so burned out that you just needed to isolate yourself for a while in order to recover and feel like you can be around people again. Most empaths and intuitives that I’ve witnessed tend to do both, depending on the situation. And I include myself in that. But I hope you understand that neither of these tendencies is a “flaw.” Both of them are intelligent adaptations. Any unconscious pattern, painful though it might be, is your system doing exactly what it’s supposed to do — protecting yourself the best way it knows how. The problem isn’t that you have a distortion to your energy field. The problem is that, like a lot of survival strategies, what used to keep you safe, is now making you suffer unnecessarily. Reading the Distortion So — how can you actually read the distortions in your own energy field and start to work with them? Well, first of all, it’s important that we don’t take on any shame about the fact that the distortions exist. Because we ALL have them. We all have energy fields that are distorted in some way. You, me, the most self-proclaimed enlightened guru. Anyone who claims to be without any distortion is probably the most distorted of all! (I can think of a cult leader or two who fits that bill, can’t you?) But getting a read on our specific distortions is my favorite part, because the answers are everywhere. And once we know how to read them, we can start making more conscious choices so they’re no longer running our lives, or ruining our health. Here are some things to look at. And as I list these, I really invite you to put on your witness hat. Try to see how these may apply to you, but don’t feel bad about it. One of the primary ways we uphold negative patterns in ourselves is through self-judgment. So there’s an important line to walk between raising self-awareness, and not using that awareness to condemn or shame ourselves. Ok, I’m giving you a moment to put your witness hat on. Ready? Here’s what to consider: * Physical disease and injury. The body often holds distortion in a very literal, physically locatable way. That spot in your back that aches when you feel unsupported. The stomach that knots every time you judge yourself. Chronic pain or tension or especially numbness in a specific place can be a direct clue to where a distortion lives, as is chronic illness. * Relationship patterns. If you keep encountering the same dynamic with different people — the same kind of unavailable partner, the same kind of conflict, the same feeling of being unseen or unmet — that’s never a coincidence. It’s your field attracting situations it’s a match to. * Mental health struggles. Anxiety, depression, and other patterns of mental-emotional distress are a sort of fingerprint of your energy field. For example, depression usually points to a deeply collapsed, inward drawn energy field that lacks enough self-expression. While anxiety usually indicates energy being stuck in the head, without equal balance of energy flowing down and in. * Alignment and posture. The literal way you hold your body — rounded shoulders, a caved chest, a tight pelvis — these can all be a physical readout of energetic patterns that have been running so long they’ve become structural. Now, obviously, I’m just barely touching the surface of all of these. Getting into detail is way beyond the purview of one podcast episode, but if you’re hungry for a much deeper dive, you can check out my online course called SOVEREIGN: Energetic Mastery (and Radical Intimacy) for Empaths and Intuitives. But for now, please know that none of this is meant to diagnose you or tell you something is wrong with you. It’s meant to encourage your curiosity. Every one of us is so unique. We say over and over in NIASZIIH that “there is no one-to-one.” Meaning, what one distortion might indicate for one person can be totally different for someone else. Maybe I have a tense right shoulder because of bracing from abuse in childhood. But maybe you have a tense right shoulder because of a sports injury. All our distortions, and what they indicate, is specific to each of us.
