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Community Corner

Faucets and Drains

Martinez author Tamara Gerlach kicks off her bi-weekly column with a suggestion to cultivate faucets and avoid drains in your life.

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each

other?”
–George Eliot

Some people and things in our lives are faucets. Others are drains.

Faucets are the people and things that inspire us, give us energy, and make us feel alive. They can be anything: from a relationship that stretches and grows us to activities like walking in nature, playing guitar, or kickboxing.

Drains, on the other hand, are those people and things that lower our vibration, bring us down, and make us feel stuck. These can include relationships with toxic people; perhaps those who have bomber attitudes, like to gossip, or are constantly taking from us without giving anything in return. Drains could also be activities such as unfulfilling work or not taking care of our body and mind.

Here’s the fun part:
Take a moment to write down five things and five people who are faucets in your life. Once you have that list of 5 people and 5 things, next to each item describe how it acts as a faucet in your life. Why does it make you feel so good? For me a faucet is cuddling with Ron, because I feel safe and loved. Walking in nature is another of my faucets because there I feel healthy and connected. My work is also a faucet because when I am writing, coaching, or speaking, I am fulfilling my life purpose and I feel very well-used.

The point is to spend as much time as possible with those people and doing those things that give us the most energy. Jim Rohn once said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” The same applies to our activities…make sure you are averaging up.

Next, we want to take a look at our drains and write down five people and things that drain you; if you can't come up with five that's okay, just write down as many as you can. Hopefully it will be a challenge to come up with five!

Once again, consider: How are they draining you? What joy or freedom is being taking away? An example of this for me is hanging out with people who have a bomber attitude, because I feel them bringing me to a lower level of consciousness and I feel disconnected. Or, not getting enough sleep, because then I feel foggy and irritable.

Wherever possible, completely stop your drains. It may be something simple like fixing a broken door that annoys you, or pulling some weeds; just do it and you’ll stop draining that energy. Sometimes we are drained by relationships with our  family or coworkers. In those cases, we may not be able to completely cut them out of our lives, but we can limit our time with people who are draining us. Once we are conscious of them, we can change how we react to them by not allowing them to drain our energy… but THAT is an article of its own. It doesn’t mean we don’t love them, it just means we aren’t willing to get caught up in the drama. A friend taught me to say “I’m gonna love ya…from over here.”

You can have a lot of fun discovering more faucets in your life and getting rid of your drains, and your life will just continue to get better.

So, turn up your light and get out there and share it!

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