Why I Don’t Always Protect My Energy—and What Happens When I Don’t

Energy protection should sharpen your discernment, not make you afraid of being alive.

There was a point early in my spiritual practice where I treated energetic protection almost like preventative maintenance. I had my regular cleanses, my little routines, the things I did because that was simply what I thought I was supposed to do.

There was nothing inherently wrong with that. Ritual can be grounding, repetition can help create intention, and having practices that bring you back to yourself can be useful.

What changed was my relationship with it.

At some point I realised that if I needed to spiritually armour myself every single time I interacted with the world, I was basically teaching myself that the world was something I had to defend myself against.

That started to feel less like discernment and more like hypervigilance.

So these days, I don't always “protect my energy” in the way people normally talk about it. I don't wake up assuming that everybody I meet has attachments, bad intentions, low vibrations or some mysterious energetic sludge waiting to jump onto me. I don't cleanse because the calendar says I should, and I don't automatically blame every headache, bad mood or uncomfortable interaction on somebody else's energy.

I pay attention first… and over time, I've found that discernment protects me far better than fear ever did.

What protection actually looks like for me now

When people hear the phrase energy protection, they tend to imagine crystals, salt, smoke cleansing, protective prayers, visualisation, spiritual baths or some kind of ritual barrier.

Those things can absolutely be part of someone's practice, but my own version has become much more ordinary.

Sometimes protecting myself means writing. Sometimes it means talking to myself until I figure out what I'm actually feeling. Sometimes it means avoiding a particular person, place or situation because I already know how it affects me. Sometimes it means limiting how much access clients have to me, keeping my private life private, or noticing when a conversation is beginning to go sideways and diffusing it before it turns into something I'm carrying around for the rest of the day.

And sometimes it is genuinely just an everything shower. I'm completely serious.

There is something about washing my hair that makes me feel like I've washed an entire week out of my head. The product buildup goes, the sweat goes, whatever has been sitting on my scalp disappears, and mentally I feel lighter too. I come out of the shower energised, refreshed and suddenly wanting to reorganise my whole life at ten o'clock at night, which is deeply inconvenient considering I'm supposed to be winding down.

But that counts to me.

Spiritual hygiene does not always need to look obviously spiritual. Sometimes your ritual really is hot water, shampoo and leaving everybody else's bullshit in the drain.

I don't protect myself before I have information anymore

This is probably the biggest difference between how I practised earlier in my spiritual life and how I practise now. I used to think protection had to come first. Now I prefer to respond to what is actually happening.

When I interact with somebody, I pay attention to the energy of the conversation, their intention, how my body responds, whether I feel open or guarded, and whether their words and behaviour match.

In my work, that matters a lot.

There are clients I feel completely comfortable opening up to. There are others where something in me immediately becomes more cautious. Sometimes I tighten the boundaries of the reading, sometimes I make myself less accessible, and occasionally I reject the client altogether.

That doesn't mean I have decided they're evil or “low vibrational.” I don't think it's my job to spiritually diagnose somebody's soul because I got a weird feeling. It means I noticed something and decided to take that information seriously.

There is a difference.

Complete shielding doesn't make sense for the work I do

My work requires me to be receptive.

I have to listen, observe, interpret, notice patterns and allow information to come through without immediately strangling it with assumptions.

If I go into every interaction thinking, I need to make sure this person's energy cannot reach me, I have already decided that there is something about them I need protecting from. That makes genuine curiosity difficult and if I become too closed off, I risk becoming less intuitive rather than more protected.

So I don't actually want to be impermeable. I want selective permeability.

I want to be able to recognise somebody's emotional state without adopting it, understand what they're carrying without taking responsibility for it, and stay open enough to receive information while still knowing when the door needs to close.

That feels much healthier to me than trying to permanently seal myself inside some imaginary force field.

Sometimes my body reacts before my mind catches up

There have been interactions that have left me feeling physically awful.

Headaches, nausea, excessive sweating, burping far more than I normally do, exhaustion, and that very specific feeling of being “off.” Sometimes I leave certain situations feeling emotionally contaminated, for lack of a better phrase.

Now, within my spiritual framework, I do believe people can affect one another energetically but I also think this is where spiritual people need to be careful.

A bodily reaction can tell you that something is happening without automatically telling you why.

Maybe my nervous system is responding to the person. Maybe I'm overstimulated or the interaction reminds me of something unresolved. Maybe I haven't eaten, or more often than not, I'm exhausted. Maybe I drank enough caffeine to power a small village.

And sometimes, yes, the experience feels energetically significant to me.

The important thing is that I don't leap straight from my body reacted to this person put something on me.

That's not discernment. That's a conclusion.

I have blamed “energy” when the problem was actually me

This is one of the more humbling parts of intuitive work.

There have been times when I thought something felt energetically wrong, only to realise later that I was simply dysregulated.

I once caught myself projecting onto a situation I was reading because it hit too close to something I had experienced personally. I had to stop myself and check what was actually happening… And when I did, the answer was painfully obvious.

I hadn't slept properly, I hadn't eaten enough, I was running on coffee and fumes, and my emotional regulation was barely hanging together - yet somehow I expected my intuition to operate like a perfectly tuned radio.

Please.

That experience reminded me that I do not do well with “pushing through” energetic work just because I technically can. If I'm not clear, I'm not clear. More effort does not automatically create more accuracy.

Sometimes stopping is the most responsible thing I can do.

Not everybody who drains you is an energy vampire

This is one phrase I think spiritual spaces need to use a little more carefully.

Sometimes someone really does leave you feeling depleted but - that doesn't automatically mean they're performing some dark energetic harvest.

Sometimes they talk too much. Sometimes they complain constantly. Sometimes you simply don't like them. Sometimes they're going through something heavy and you don't currently have the capacity to hold space for it.

And sometimes you keep saying yes when you mean no. That's the part people don't always want to talk about. Sometimes you leave an interaction feeling drained because you gave somebody two hours of access when you realistically had twenty minutes available. Then you say, God, they're such an energy vampire.

Maybe.

Or maybe you left the tap running.

That distinction matters because if I blame everything on another person's energy, I never have to examine my own boundaries. I don't have to ask why I stayed, why I kept answering the phone, why I didn't speak up, why I ignored the moment I had already reached capacity.

“Bad energy” can become a very convenient way of avoiding responsibility for the access we keep granting.

Ignoring discernment can have real consequences

This is where I become much less casual about the topic. I don't believe we should be terrified of other people's energy, but I do know what it has cost me when I've ignored my first instinct. There have been situations where my entire system told me something was wrong and I rationalised it away.

Sometimes I wanted to be understanding, so I wanted more information. Sometimes I wanted to believe the best. Sometimes I simply wanted what I wanted badly enough that my own discernment became inconvenient… And one of those situations left me with a permanent physical health consequence.

I ignored my instincts in a relationship, didn't protect myself in a very literal sense, and contracted something I will now carry for life.

That taught me something no cleansing ritual ever could.

Protection is not always spiritual. Sometimes it’s medical, emotional, sometimes it’s financial. Sometimes it is locking the door, using barrier protection, asking for something in writing, leaving the situation, or simply saying no.

Calling everything “energy” can actually make us less protected because it distracts us from the practical boundary the situation requires. Sometimes you don't need a stronger aura - you need a condom, a contract or the word no.

I stopped putting spiritual hygiene on a timetable

Earlier in my practice, I cleansed regularly because I believed that was what I was supposed to do. Eventually it started feeling procedural.

It's Thursday, therefore I need to do this ritual…. But I'm not the same every Thursday.

My workload, emotional state and even my home doesn't feel the same. The people I've interacted with aren't the same. So why was I treating spiritual care like bin collection?

These days I'm much more fluid with it. Sometimes I wake up and everything feels fine, so I leave it alone. Other times I've had several emotionally intense readings, my environment feels heavy, my head feels cluttered and I know I need a reset.

The practice became more meaningful when I stopped doing it out of fear. I wasn't cleansing because something terrible would happen if I didn't. I was cleansing because I genuinely felt like I needed to come back to myself.

That shift made the whole thing healthier.

Protection can become hypervigilance if you're not careful

This is something I wish spiritual spaces discussed more openly.

If you constantly scan everybody around you for attachments, jealousy, evil eye, low vibrations, hidden intentions or psychic attacks, eventually you can become very good at finding evidence that you're under threat.

That doesn't necessarily mean your intuition became stronger, it might mean you trained yourself to expect danger - and once fear starts dressing itself up as intuition, things get messy. Somebody looks at you strangely, so it must be energy, they don't reply, so it must be energy, they disagree with you, so it must be energy, you get a headache after seeing them, and now they definitely did something to you.

At that point you're no longer discerning anything. You're collecting evidence for a verdict you already reached. That isn't protection, that's paranoia with incense.

Openness carries risk

This is the part people don't always like.

If you're genuinely open to life, some things will affect you.

People will disappoint you. Some environments will overwhelm you and of course, some conversations will hurt. You will occasionally misread somebody, you may let somebody too close, or give more than you intended.

But openness also means you can receive things you never expected.

You might discover an unlikely friendship, learn something from someone you initially misjudged, experience a place that changes you, or meet somebody who brings something important into your life for that particular season. The problem with trying to protect your energy from absolutely everything is that you close yourself off from the possibility of anything outside of yourself being useful to you. You can't receive selectively if you never open the door.

Protection should not become spiritual agoraphobia.

These days, I tend to myself first

My approach now is actually pretty simple; I check in with myself before I start giving myself away to everybody else. Before clients, before other people's emotions, before whatever the day wants from me - I pay attention to how I feel. I write if I need to. I talk to myself. I ask my guides, my ancestors and whoever is apparently working overtime to keep me alive to help me move through the day in a way that serves me.

Then I participate in life.

I don't obsess over whether I've completed enough rituals to be allowed outside safely. I trust that if something feels wrong, I have enough relationship with myself to notice - and if and when I don't notice immediately, I'll learn.

Discernment is not omniscience. Being intuitive doesn't mean I'll never misjudge somebody and being spiritual certainly doesn't mean I'll never get hurt. Being protected doesn't mean nothing bad will ever happen… It means I'm increasingly capable of recognising what needs my attention and responding more appropriately when it does.

Sometimes the boundary isn't spiritual at all

Before deciding somebody has affected my energy, I think it's worth asking a few boring questions first.

Have I slept? Have I eaten? Am I overstimulated? Have I been working for too long? Did this interaction remind me of something unresolved? Am I angry because somebody crossed a boundary, or because I never communicated one? Do I actually dislike this person? Am I forcing myself to remain accessible when I want to be left alone? Do I need cleansing - or do I need a Big Mac?

Sometimes both.

The goal isn't to become untouchable

I don't want to become somebody nothing can reach - that doesn't sound enlightened to me. It sounds numb.

I want to remain sensitive enough to experience people deeply without carrying everybody home with me. I want to trust my first instinct without treating every instinct as unquestionable prophecy. I want spiritual practices that bring me back to myself rather than convince me the world is dangerous and I want enough humility to admit that sometimes what I call intuition really is intuition - and sometimes I'm tired, triggered, hungry and overdue an everything shower.

Both pieces of information matter. Maybe that's what energy protection has become for me. Not shielding myself from life, not assuming everybody has access to me,and not treating sensitivity as proof that I'm constantly under attack.

Just knowing myself well enough to notice when something feels different, staying curious long enough to understand why and trusting myself enough to act when the answer becomes clear.

Protection isn't about never being affected. It's about knowing how to come back to yourself after you are.

And yes - sometimes that starts with washing your hair.

If you're struggling to tell the difference

If you've been wondering whether something you're feeling is intuition, projection, overstimulation, an old wound being activated or simply a boundary that needs reinforcing, you don't necessarily need another ritual.

Sometimes you need somewhere to look at the pattern without fear deciding the answer first.

That's often what I help people explore in my readings: not “who has bad energy around me?”, but what are you actually sensing, what keeps repeating, what belongs to you, what doesn't and where do you still have agency?

Because spiritual discernment should make you more capable of participating in your life.

Not more afraid of it.