Art Journaling Energy Drain

This week's Positively Creative Art Journaling lesson is about how to deal with those things that sap your energy. Boy, am I familiar with this topic. I had to come to terms with some serious drain on my energies back in 2010, the sort that left me angry, resentful, toxic, eating myself up. I got on top of it over time through my studies with a local yoga teacher, although I can still backslide if I'm not careful. More recently, it's been health issues causing energy drains. This has been a bit harder to deal with since it is something a bit out of my control. Still, my yoga teachings have stood me in good stead, although I still have times of frustration. Finding ways to cope with people and things you know drain your energy is well worth one's time - no matter how we may do our best to avoid known energy drains, we can't totally eliminate them from our lives.

I liked this lesson, which started with journaling on the unpainted spread about what drains you and how that makes you feel. Yeah, get it out! Then paint right over it because we're not going to dwell on that. We're going to dwell instead, journal on the painted page how to avoid letting people or situations drain the energy out of you. I first ran across this technique of freeing oneself from negative thoughts at a church camp I'd been asked to counsel at. I really knew nothing about counseling high school kids, but was assured I'd be teamed with someone who did, and it was a great experience. One night as we sat around a campfire, the kids were asked to write down essentially what they felt were their sins. I wasn't sure where this was going, and was surprised when the kids were then told to toss their lists into the fire. Poof - sins gone as if they'd never happened, a powerful visual of the intangible idea of Christ's forgiveness. Since then, I've run across this same idea in non-secular applications, a way to let go of the past and forgive oneself. 

Here, there's really nothing to forgive, and some of those thoughts about what drains me peek through the paint (not as vividly as the camera picked up), reminding me to stay a bit on guard for their possible return. But keeping them in check are my thoughts about how to counter them, which called out for a few cutouts from magazines to augment them.

What drains your energy? What tricks have you come up with to cope?