This is my energy story - what's yours?

Have you ever felt a grinding sensation underneath your rib cage, an ache, a pain, or something more subtle, and wondered what it was? Perhaps you think you know: your body reacting to stress, anxiety, or your ‘nerves’? But what if it is something more? What if I told you that this is one of the locations in your body where energy manifests, because you are essentially an energetic being? What if I said this is an area that houses all your dark secrets, your shadow side, the imprints of your parental messages you received as a child, your identity, your personality, your ego, your emotions, and even the feelings and emotions of others around you? What if I told you this feeling was your gut trying to tell you something?  

This is what my book is all about, not the gut as such, but the Solar Plexus, one of the many energy centres located in and around the human body, something many in the West tend to know little or nothing about (though this is slowly changing). However, this is not some new age book about spirituality or energy medicines per se, but instead, is about the intricacies of how these energies could be relatable to the burnout process experienced by so many empathic professionals working on the front line in healthcare settings every day.  It is about how their bodies react and absorb the negative energies from the poorly people they interact with everyday, and how this affects their health in that moment and even potentially longer term.  

I write here about a particular type of professional, not only one that cares for patients, but one that takes on the troubles and worries of others, as if they were their own.  This type of person is best described in spiritual terms as an 'Empath' who tends to store the emotions, or more accurately, the energy, of those they treat, in their solar plexus, as well as in other areas of their energy body. Therefore, potentially carrying their patients anxieties and pain around with them all day long, often unknowingly in fact. These energies often lingering in their own energy fields, long after they leave work and have seemingly "switched off" mentally from their working day. 

Empaths are highly sensitive individuals who often go above and beyond to care and support others, but because they empathise so much, they can end up absorbing peoples feelings and emotions and, sometimes, even mistake them for their own. Loving and kind individuals, traits clearly valued and needed in healthcare staff, their downfall is in their difficulty in dispelling these energies and emotions picked up throughout their working days and in their personal lives. This accumulation of negative energies means empaths are more likely to suffer from fatigue, unexplained pain and suffering often leading to burnout.

In 'Solar Plexus Nation', I explore my own personal experiences of burning out during the Covid-19 pandemic as a healthcare professional. I highlight the importance of having empaths as part of any healthcare workforce, because of their innate and valuable skillset, allowing them to serve and heal people on a deeper level, at the same time, warning of their susceptibility to burnout. I suggest, empaths require additional and deeper energetic support with regular access to clinical supervision, as well as, to other wellbeing tools and holistic therapies to keep themselves energetically healthy.  I use my own experience of being an empath working as a Social Prescribing Link Worker in 2 local GP surgeries during the lockdown to exemplify what can happen when you work with ill patients every day, especially when you have no access to clinical supervision to off load and recharge your batteries. I talk about how I believe it was this lack of support that contributed to me developing Fibromyalgia, a condition where pain pulsates throughout multiple areas of the body. The energies I felt ultimately led to my body and mind shutting down and finding myself incapable of doing the basic activities in life. I truly believe now that it was because of not realising my empathic nature that this happened to me and I believe this continues to happen for many people working in the healthcare sector today. This is partly why I wanted to write this book, to bring attention to the phenomenon.

Though this might sound like all doom and gloom to some, the second half of the book takes an unexpected turn, as I describe how learning energy healing practices to overcome the symptoms the medical community couldn’t seem to help me with, led to a whole other path opening up to me. Onto a spiritual plane of realisation of my true energetic and natural existence in the world. One full of wonder and possibilities, previously unthought of on my part, opening my eyes to new opportunities and new ways of being in the world.  Researching into this type of energy in more detail, it became a sort of spiritual quest of sorts, discovering energy as a means of communication, expression and even meaning- making in a world that previously felt stifled, dull, mundane and even painful. 

Discovering and understanding how to use this energy became a way of navigating my way in a new world, I suppose, and I felt blessed to be on this journey of discovery. However, spiritual awakenings was never the focus or the reason for writing the book, as I mention above. I am quite aware that there have been many books before covering such topics, so that was never my agenda, nor was some deep exploration of spirituality or Fibromyalgia or a summary of the benefits of energy medicines. Instead, I want you to know, this book comes from a pure urge to share my story. Not because I have some exciting, jaw dropping event that needs documenting to change all of humanity, but that I feel it was significant enough, to put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard rather, for me to process therapeutically what happened to me and to see whether others resonate with some of these experiences.  Nevertheless, I hope my story, combined with evidence gathered from researching the transdisciplinary subject area of energy, or what is more recently being coined the ‘Biofield’, goes some way to creating the change needed in the healthcare systems to help empaths succeed and prosper longer term in this challenging but most rewarding and fulfilling line of work, instead of being left to burnout and change careers. But most of all, I hope this book contributes to the widening scientific and spiritual discussions focused around seeing humans more as energy beings, to lead to the reviewing of current practices in healthcare and to the implementation more widely of alternative energy practices, such as is becoming more commonly seen in hospitals for example, in the UK, with reiki practitioners assisting cancer and surgery patients. More research needs to take place into the benefits of such energy interventions so that professionals, and especially empathic professionals like me, are able to have access to the same energy therapies to allow them to stay healthy and continue this important work. 

I hope you enjoy reading my energy story and I look forward to hearing yours, so please get in touch and share your thoughts and comments, I'd love to hear from you 💕

For more information on my book launch, my work, or simply to get in touch, please click the link here 🙏 charlotte.brady.jones | Instagram, Facebook | Linktree