How to Protect Your Energy From People, Places, and Situations

This is a segment from my guide about protecting your energy. If you’re not a member, you can read the full guide here.

Learning how to protect your energy is more about regulating your internal ecosystem rather than relying solely on external tools or techniques.

When you harmonize your body and mind, your spiritual boundaries naturally become impermeable.

And that might surprise you because the idea of protecting your energy has become somewhat… sensationalized by New-Age Spirituality, where everything has to be dramatic.

But the truth is far more boring, unfortunately.

While I do believe there is a spiritual side to it too, keeping your energy strong is much more involved with your mental and emotional health than you’ve probably been led to believe.

Now, spiritual (or energetic) protection makes a whole lot more sense to me, and I’m going to share that perspective with you here.

What is Energetic Protection?

Over the years, quite a few people have asked me how they can protect themselves energetically. Not just one or two… but dozens.

I’ve had people reach out via social media, comment on articles, book calls with me to express their concerns, and I’ve also had some good chats with people who follow different religions and traditions, which have helped me gain perspective.

One side of the spectrum can get pretty dark, to be honest.

Some of the people I’ve spoken with believe they are genuinely under spiritual attack, almost like having a hit placed on them. A surprising number of people also believe they have an entity attachment.

Then you have the other side. People feeling drained after doing heavy inner work, or just naturally feeling quite low for no apparent reason.

While I do believe in predatory entities, dense energies that can stick to you if you’re not careful, even black magic and the like… I’ve noticed that most people who need to protect their energy usually have something else going on.

With that said, it’s seldom people who are grounded, centered, and harmonized that feel they’re taking on unwanted baggage.

This is very telling.

Not to discount anyone’s experiences. As I said, I firmly believe in real, tangible entities and energies that can cause harm. I also know for a fact that we can soak up the energy around us without discerning if it’s good for us or not.

But the boundaries between physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health are thinner than they seem, and this is something that doesn’t get much acknowledgement.

So, in search of answers, I got to work and sought advice from some good teachers in my life, continued to seek understanding from different traditions, and connected some important dots.

How I Understand Energetic Protection Now

When you’re balanced on all levels, this naturally reflects in your energy too. When you’re imbalanced, your energy becomes scattered, making you permeable to external influence.

What I’ve noticed is that people love to treat the spiritual body as an isolated thing.

They want to know the best protective stones and might use every trick in the book, yet many of these people are deeply emotionally dysregulated.

Many are working too hard and burnt out.

Many are ungrounded, or caught in ego, or carry deep trauma that still needs to be addressed. They then wonder why their obsidian necklace isn’t creating a protective bubble around them.

This starts to make more sense when you look at yourself as an ecosystem. The way I understand it, we each have 4 primary bodies, including the:

• The Physical Body: Your biological anchor to the present moment, governed heavily by physical wellness and your central nervous system.
• The Mental Body: The psychological framework made up of your conscious thoughts, deeply held core beliefs, and where you direct your daily focus.
• The Emotional Body: The intuitive space where you actively process your feelings, build relational boundaries, and store unresolved trauma.
• The Spiritual/energy Body: Your overarching state of consciousness and the subtle energetic container that naturally thrives when the other three bodies are completely aligned.

Focusing just on the spiritual stuff is like sealing up the front door when the entire wall behind you has fallen. You’re neglecting your biggest vulnerability, so anything can walk right on in.

Imbalance is the Cause of Energetic Vulnerability

Based on my time working with Ayahuasca healers, I’ve come to understand their point of view when it comes to wellness and illness, and it makes a lot of sense.

According to Vegetalistas (traditional plant healers) in the Amazon, physical or mental illness is the direct result of an energetic intrusion that slips in when your system is out of balance.

When all of these bodies are healthy and working cohesively with one another, your ecosystem is in balance. Nothing can really affect you because there are no cracks. But when one of these bodies stops functioning correctly, the entire ecosystem falls out of alignment.

This is why the healers perceive illness (whether it’s physical, mental, emotional, or energetic) to be a manifestation of imbalance. It’s like a piece of you isn’t fitting correctly, and therefore failing to create a watertight seal for your energetic body, leading to energetic intrusions.

And that’s why they work with medicine such as Ayahuasca to heal the imbalance, and therefore the manifestation.

But you don’t need to look to the jungle to validate this. Clinical research in psychoneuroimmunology demonstrates that chronic emotional stress and physical burnout severely degrade your central nervous system.

Likewise, emotional trauma can lead to both mental health and physical health issues when not addressed.

PubMed/NCBI also shows us that severe psychological stress directly dysregulates autonomic nervous system function, making individuals significantly more susceptible to feeling overwhelmed by environmental inputs. It’s all connected.

When your physical and emotional bodies are exhausted, your spiritual body loses its vitality, meaning your energy field becomes:

• Scattered and therefore porous
• Highly susceptible to absorbing heavy static

This is why people who are working through heavy trauma, or people who are navigating severe burnout, pulling grueling work weeks, or dealing with chronic anxiety, so often feel like they are constantly absorbing the heavy energy around them.

It’s because… well, they are! Their energetic shield is running low on battery, meaning they’re more susceptible to the energetic influences around them.

You’ve probably felt this way at times too. When life starts piling up, and the baggage gets heavy, your vibration drops, your tolerance drops, and everything seems to get to you.

All of your internal resources are tied up just trying to keep your head above water. When your nervous system is completely exhausted, you have nothing left in the tank to defend your boundaries, and your energetic front door is left hanging wide open.

This is also why people who are already in a low state are usually the ones who have issues with energetic boundaries. They’re not doing anything wrong, but their defences are lowered, so external energies and forces have more influence.

How Spiritual Boundaries Work

Have you ever walked into a room, felt someone else’s foul mood or bad attitude, and within 10 minutes you felt angry, anxious, or exhausted for no reason?

That’s because you’re absorbing their energy… It works like this:

• Weak spiritual boundaries: You act like a sponge. You absorb everybody’s stress, drama, and bad vibes, and you take it home with you.
• Strong spiritual boundaries: You act like a raincoat. You see the rain falling, but it doesn’t get you wet. You can be around a stressed-out boss or a chaotic family member without letting their mess ruin your day.

Imagine your mind and energy are a house.

If your house has broken windows and wide-open doors (meaning: you’re sleep-deprived, constantly doom-scrolling, holding onto resentment, or letting people walk all over you), any bad weather outside blows right in.

Buying a protective crystal is like hanging a little lucky charm on a door that is hanging off its hinges. It won’t stop the wind.

When you fix the house by getting enough sleep, calming your nervous system, stop consuming outrage online, and saying no to people who drain you, the doors shut naturally.

I know some very skilled healers and spiritual leaders who have been targets of spiritual attack. But you know what?

There was always a vulnerability. Regardless of how skilled or knowledgeable they were, there was something behind the surface I could see.

So, if this is a worry, I deeply encourage you to look at any aspects of your life that are out of alignment.