Everyone Needs a Forcefield Now and Then

Call it survival instinct based on our ability to read body language, call it a cognitive skill, call it intuition, whatever, we all have a sense of danger and when something is just not right. Yet, how many times have we been burned when we knew better than to touch the flame? Sometimes we're just not totally clear on situations and we read it poorly. Sometimes we ignore our own instinct to quit while we're ahead.

I've been working with the public for a really long time. Like, more than a decade. I've got a pretty well developed sense of the creepy. I've been hit on by so many creepy men I stopped counting a long time ago. I can usually hold my own (see post from September 15, 2008). I usually put a wall up pretty quickly and squirrel around the situation. I'm pretty squirmy. But every once in a while, you end up giving people the benefit of the doubt, you trust that their intentions are straight and BAM, you end in a place you don't want to be looking for the emergency exit. Teleportation, a great super power to have at those exact moments.

Yeah, like when the older "yogi" whose wife is on vacation befriends you to "talk about his daughter" then starts talking to you about poly-amory, you 1.Puke a little in your mouth and 2. Start looking for a way out.

What I've been developing for the past few years, however, is a sense of openness, of wonder, and of connection with the world. I should've remembered what my teacher Jane House said when she talked about the danger of being so open when we're walking around out in the world. You don't really want to do a chalk load of heart-openers then walk out into Hunter's Point with no protection for your mind or body. The truth is, boundaries are essential and developing a well-built but spacious container with a healthy and protective outer wall will not only keep you sane, it'll help you flourish.

While Sue Storm (a.k.a. Invisible Girl/Woman) had to absorb cosmic rays in order to develop her powers of invisibility and used psionic waves to create force fields, I really believe that anyone can do it. You see it all the time; we all do it all the time. We sense when people have really strong or large personal space issues; we can certainly repel other people with our own discomfort or dislike. We can make ourselves really small and walk around without anyone truly seeing us. The question, of course, is how to control these powers so that they serve us in the best way. We certainly don't always want to be invisible and it'd be a lonely life if we kept up the forcefield all the time.

So I suppose it's all about being conscious of how you're using your superpowers. I've been distinctly working on how to make my energy bigger, on how to be able to direct it outwards, so as to better serve my community. Maybe it's time that I re-establish my invisibility cloak and control over my forcefield. God knows, you need it as much in yoga studios as you do in restaurants.