Embracing the Invisible Forces

by Melissa Moore

I have always been the type of person who walks into a room and feels every imaginable emotion emanating from whoever is in it. I used to make myself responsible for the negative vibes, but I’ve trained myself not to do that anymore. Chögram Trungpa used to say, “Whatever is the room, that’s your mind.” By that, he meant that we are not separate but interdependent. Trungpa was pointing to the non-dual nature of energetic exchange.

These vibes, or unseen emotional energies, are sometimes strong invisible forces. When unchecked, they tend to rule us and often determine how we experience our relationships. When we learn to attune to these invisible energies through the process of exchange, we learn to navigate our worlds more skillfully in communication and community. Humans are adept at experiencing nonverbal invisible energies around us, but we are not always skilled at interpreting those experiences. 

In Karuna Training, we call that human capacity to feel the energy of others and environments an ‘exchange.’  Exchange is happening constantly, but not necessarily consciously. For example, when we walk into a restaurant, there are discernable vibes that emulate some kind of energy; foreboding, hurried, and or chaotic  - we can feel that energy. 

We exchange with people, places, and sometimes entire communities. I remember entering the San Francisco Zen Center for the first time in 1989, and my exchange was instantly a slowed-down mind. If someone is next to us, steps off the curb, and is almost hit by a bus, we feel that close call in our bodies. Regardless of their communication, we can detect their mood when we have phone calls with our mothers or friends. Often, we begin to make things up about what they are feeling instead of asking them what is going on. That tendency to assume what another is feeling based on our reaction is called a projection. Learning to tune in consciously to our exchanges with others is a path of skillful communication and watering the seeds of a compassionate heart.  

Think about it… when we come into a space with someone we know well,  someone with whom we have a well-honed communication pattern, we instantly feel that person’s demeanor without words. If we sense something negative and seemingly familiar, we instantly project on the other thoughts like, ‘They’re mad at me again,’ or ‘They don’t approve,’ ‘They don’t  like me.” Even though we may be accurate in our projections, we might not check them verbally; instead, we can make assumptions and project those onto the relationship with the other person. Entire relationships are driven non-verbally, each person rebounding off one another's projections. 

We often act and make decisions about ourselves and others based on invisible emotional energies—mostly unspoken feelings that lead to interpretations out of pieced-together notions about another person or a group. At the first opening circle of Karuna Training, I often say, 

‘every important relationship we’ve ever had is in the room because we are in the room.’ Then I ask the new cohort to look around the room and notice that they’ve already decided who they like and don’t like and whether they are conscious of it. The tendency to accept and reject others from our well-honed relationship with invisible energies is usually unconscious.  These unconscious internal decisions, nevertheless, drive how that relationship will go in the future. 

In Karuna Training, we study the Five Buddha families in community retreat settings to become familiar with and befriend our energetic tendencies. The Buddha Family Mandala is an ancient Tibetan Mandala that compartmentalizes the energetic invisible world into five familiar styles of energy. Through practicing with the Five Buddha Families, we become familiar with energetic styles and the propensities they engender. Our energetic styles include both a wisdom manifestation and a confused one. 

Emotional energy works on a continuum, with the understanding that the manifestation of confusion and wisdom are inseparable.  Take, for example, the Buddha Buddha Family energy, which is connected with the element of space. Here, the energetic emanation of Buddha can be spacious, open, accommodating, and skillful –  allowing for everything to arise as it should in its own time and place. The Buddha family energy also employs space to cover over reality, ignore space, check out, and dissociate from whatever is happening in the room. Many of us have mastered the ability to disappear in plain sight. 

The point is to learn to honor and embrace the energetic invisible forces at play – and to accept reality as it is versus fighting with reality in how we want it to be. To accomplish this, we must befriend invisible energies in a tall order because we are prone to our propensities; our habitual tendencies of the mind are to experience all of reality as solid, lasting, and independent. For example, suppose we deny our age and pretend we are younger than we are. In that case, aging and slowing down are inconvenient and inhospitable to our projected reality of remaining young.

Studying and practicing with the guidance and wisdom of the Five Buddhas trains us to trust in the basic sanity of existence—to accept ourselves and others as we are and to live life on life’s terms rather than the self-imposed reality we constantly seek and project. 

During the in-person weekend retreat at Drala Mt. Center, “Embracing the Invisible Forces,” which will be held March 14 - 16, we will take an experiential tour of the Five Buddha Families and learn contemplative approaches to working with these energies as they arise in ourselves and others.

Please join us for a romping weekend of invoking the sacred invisible forces and turning our awareness to things as they are.