Energy thieves:
According to Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, there is series of elements that can running out a person’s vital energy called energy thieves. These can be other people; situations or things you do without realizing.
It’s not necessary to practice that faith or become a monk to learn the Master’s and be aware of those energy thieves to be able to identify them and keep oneself away from them to avoid the damage they are making.
1. Avoid toxic people
Dalai Lama says:
“Let go people who only come to share complaints, problems, terrible stories, fear and judgments about others. If someone is looking for a container to put his or her garbage into, try it isn’t your mind”. (Dalai Lama)
The first thing we should avoid is toxic people, they are the most important energy thieves. They are people who steal your energy from you, are always complaining, see everything negative, criticizes workmates and friends, don’t assess all the good things they have…
It’s like they invaded our vital space and suffocated us. When you are with a toxic person, you know it because he or she leaves you exhausted. There is a phrase that says: you’re the sum of the 5 people who you spend most of your time with.
2. Worries about money
Other of the biggest energy thieves. It seems that everything goes around money. Dalai Lama advises:
“Pay your bills on time. At the same time ask those who owe you money to give it back to you or choose let it go if it is impossible to ask for that money back. Debts don’t expire over time. Although laws protect you, be responsible, the best thing is to make a period coin by coin than losing your precious energy and your word instead”.
3. Learn to say no
The third advice that Dalai Lama gives us is:
Fulfil your promises. If you haven’t fulfilled, ask yourself why you have resistance. You always have the right to change your opinion, to apologize, to compensate, to renegotiate and to offer another alternative towards an unfulfilled promise; although not as usual. The easiest way to avoid not fulfilling something you don’t want to do is by saying NO from the beginning.
Other thing that steal a lot of energy from us is those things that we promise to do but we don’t really want to carry out.
What Dalai Lama means is that if you say yes to something, then you cannot spend your time worrying about it, getting angry with yourself for having said yes, or looking for excuses to escape. This steals a lot of energy from you.
4. Do what you like the most
Another advice that Dalai Lama gives us is to learn to delegate:
“Eliminate and delegate those tasks that you prefer not doing as much as possible and dedicate your time to doing the ones you do enjoy”
Life is for doing the things we like. There are things we have to do out of obligation, but insofar as it is possible, we have to dedicate time to doing things which we are happy with.
5. Rest
Dalai Lama advises:
Allow yourself to rest if you are in a moment in which you need it and to act if you’re in a moment for opportunity. Nature has rhythms and your life, too. Not acting in the right time takes energy away from you, and not stopping when you need it too.
Knowing how to distinguish when it is necessary to rest and when it is the moment to act will let you have the necessary strength to keep going. Being exhausted and not taking the time to stop or, otherwise, not taking opportunities when they appear is also part of the energy thieves.
6. Order your life
The order in the outside affects the order inside a lot. It is said that you can know how it’s a person’s mind by opening his or her closet.
As Dalai Lama says:
Throw away, lift and organize, nothing takes more energy from you than a messy space and full of things from the past that you don’t need anymore.
If the things around us are messy, it will be unlikely for us to have balance. Some of the things that are messy may not be necessary anymore and belong to the past and consequently, it will be necessary to eliminate them to be able to see towards the future.
7. Take care of yourself: health is the most important thing
The seventh advice that Dalai Lama gives is to take care of ourselves:
Prioritize your health; without your body working fully, you cannot do much.
Eat well, practice sports, rest, share with those we like are some of the measures we should take to take care of our health. It’s worthless having a lot of money and being successful if our body isn’t well.
8. Face toxic situations
As Dalai Lama says:
Face the toxic situations that you are going through, from rescuing a friend or a family member, to tolerating negative actions of a partner; and take the necessary action. Resigning yourself to a situation and feeling that you don’t have control only will drain you.
If we don’t face the complex situations and just avoid them, we’ll just be feeding our stress and putting on risk our stability. If it’s a toxic person who is hurting us, we cannot stop taking the necessary actions to move them away to avoid falling into controversy.
9. Accept what you cannot change
In Dalai Lama’s words:
Accept. It isn’t resignation, but nothing makes you lose more energy than resisting and fighting against a situation you cannot change.
Another enemy of emotional stability is not accepting things since this will only take us to an apparent balance. There shouldn’t be ghosts from the past that will end up becoming the worst nightmares over time.
10. Forgive
Dalai Lama says:
Forgive, let go a situation that is causing you pain, you can always choose to leave aside the pain to remember.
Keeping resentment and not forgiving will prevent us from getting ahead. If we have good doses of love in our lives, forgiveness will abound. Keeping our hearts poisoned will just make our positive side decrease little by little and make us turn into insensitive and grey people.
