Driving the other day I pulled into a line of slow moving traffic. Wondering what the hold up was, it wasn’t until we turned a corner that I saw, six cars ahead, two people wobbling away on their red-plated scooter. As they wavered and swayed, their blinker on continual tick, I got the sense that everyone was doing their best to support them. Nobody tried to squeeze by and overtake, were riding on their bumper, or honking. I got the distinct feeling that the drivers in front of me were acting as a shield, a protective barrier somehow, creating room and safe passage for these unsteady adventurers.

As they teetered towards a roundabout (a notorious challenge) their helmets swivelling left and right in confusion, drifting between lanes, the collective positive vibe emanating from each of the cars following this drama of building tension, was almost palpable. I could visualise the thought bubbles from each window: ‘that’s it, stay upright’, ‘you can do it’, ‘take your time, round you go!’ making a protective force-field of well-wishing that encapsulated them. Sure enough, round they wobbled and on, oblivious, as I turned off the other way.

Could that all have just been my imagination? Yes. But our thoughts, positive or negative, can have a direct affect on us, and our physical world.

During a lecture, this idea was demonstrated on a volunteer through a Kinesiology-style muscle strength test. When the volunteer was asked to think positive thoughts about himself, we was able to resist strongly. When asked to think negative things, he seemed weaker as he could not resist to the same degree.

What was even more interesting was after he was asked to leave the room and the lecturer devised secret signals with the remaining audience, one asking them to think positive thoughts about the volunteer, another to think negative ones. When he returned he was asked to do the resistance test again while the audience was covertly cued to think about him one way or the other. The results were that the man’s resistance was increased when surrounded by positive thoughts and weakened by the unknown negativity directed at him — irrespective of whether he was thinking positively or negatively about himself.

Quantum Physics tells us that everything in the universe, at a subatomic level, is made up of energy and vibration. I don’t pretend to understand the details, as it somewhat blows my mind, but I understand that we are all vibrating at different frequencies. Rather out of my realm of coaching, this is more the fundamental basis of therapies and energy work like Reiki and Qi Gong etc. But I find it fascinating that our emotions and thoughts have different vibrations and every thought sends reverberations through our bodies and out into the world around us. We can change our vibrations and pick up the vibrations around us. What thoughts are we having on a regular basis, and how are they affecting us and others?

What we put out, comes back to us. Dr. Henry Grayson, author and integrative mindbody/spirit psychotherapist has done extensive research into neuro vibrations and energy psychology. One of his early, personal experiments he tells of, he tried on his wife. Unbeknown to her, for a week he thought only negative thoughts about her during the day. He reported that immediately upon arriving home in the evening, she was very negative towards him. The following week he repeated the trial, but this time only thinking loving thoughts about his wife. Those evenings he came home to find her filled with a great sense of love for him. Grayson concluded, “I was receiving back what I was thinking inside.”

This, to me, highlights how closely we are all interconnected and how we can influence those around us, without perhaps even realising it. These ideas echo philosophies of many religions and Eastern spiritual thinking dating back thousands of years. It makes me wonder just how much is going on in our world that we (or science) have not yet discovered. I am reminded of the Aspen Grove, ‘Pando’ in Fishlake National Park in Utah. It is the world’s largest living organism. A colony of trees stemming from one giant root system thought to date back at least 80,000 years. Each tree is individual but connected to the whole. Whom or what are we connected to on an unseen level?

In my yoga class this week, fabulous teacher and spiritual mentor, Kerri Howland, gave us all some homework — to take some time and lie on the ground. Not carpet or concrete … but the actual earth. At the very least to take off our shoes and feel the grass between our toes. Sadly I couldn’t recall the last time I had deliberately done this. Her point was to see how it affected our energy. If we do take on the vibrations of things around us, what will the vibrations of the earth do for us?

I did it straight after class — just to see. And I have done it everyday since. Normally a bit sceptical about things like this, I found it incredibly relaxing (despite the concern of bugs crawling into my hair). I have studied the grass close up and seen teeny tiny flowers I would never have otherwise noticed. Pausing to watch a caterpillar inching it’s way up a leaf and an ant carrying a dead beetle twice its size. Little things that create a whole world I am ordinarily too ‘busy’ to tune into. Such a simple act as lying in the grass has, at the very least, altered my perspective, and who knows, perhaps my vibrational energy too, so I thought I’d invite you too to share the homework.

“Why not help one another on the way? Make it much easier,” sang Bob Marley in his reggae hit, ‘Positive Vibration’. Being mindful of the thoughts and vibrations we create can benefit ourselves and those we are connected to. Let’s get the good vibes out there.

Julia Pitt is a trained Success Coach and certified NLP practitioner on the team at Benedict Associates. For further information contact Julia on (441) 705-7488, www.juliapittcoaching.com.