How Some People Pollute Your Space — Damaging Your Work, Personality, and Spirit
Can the opposite be true too
I read about biofields when I was around fifteen — extending up to eight feet around me. I imagined this fuzzy boundary around me that was my space — like an invisible second skin.
What if your second skin touches a toxic biofield? Do energy vampires — those who drain your emotional energy in an instant — work this way? Can someone modify the way you see your reality?
In 2009, I learned that the electromagnetic fields — 5000 times more powerful than the brain’s fields — around the heart store information. The heart has 40,000 neurons to learn and remember things. Medicine is changing from molecular interactions to electromagnetic interactions. I remember reading about a man who wanted to play the violin after heart transplant surgery.
I feel uncomfortable when a crude person is around me — someone who doesn’t care how her words or behavior affect me.
In my home or at the office, I have to be alone — at least for some time — before I can enjoy my work.
My space is vital for me to work and enjoy. I imagine it is necessary for everyone. If anybody makes me uncomfortable in my place, I feel angry — whether I show it or not.
Scientists say feelings of anger and hostility cause an inflammatory response in your body. Inflammation is the root cause of all diseases and weakens your immune system.
Personal space: the physical space immediately surrounding someone, into which encroachment can feel threatening or uncomfortable. ~Google dictionary
Someone may invade your space, and they can change the way you think, work, and behave. These are some of the ways people pollute your mental, physical, and spiritual space:
1. Directing your thoughts
Your thoughts arise from your feelings or other thoughts.
You may think peaceful thoughts about things. You may think strongly about lying and cheating. Or racism and social injustice.
You may want to improve things around you. Or you may wish to preserve the traditions. Your way of thinking makes you unique.
Those who pollute your space try to change the direction of your thoughts. They support ideas you dislike. Their opinions can make you think — for some time — in a biased way.
After a long time, these people change your way of thinking.
Suppose you are an optimist by nature. When a pessimist comes near you — and says there is no hope of improvement — you start imagining the outcomes. In other words, someone can poison your mental space with negativity.
2. Subliminal messages
Sometimes, the polluting person does not use the exact words. But their body language and the way they speak — or paralanguage — convey what they stand for.
If there is someone in your space who hates walking or jogging, she may act in a way that you’d be discouraged to go for a walk.
Imagine, it is going to be really cold tomorrow morning. Your alarm goes off at 5:30 am, you wake up, and then you see your spouse snoring under the blanket.
If you are like me, you may think it is okay not to go for a walk just this one time.
3. Not caring about you
I have tried to define good and evil since I was a child — I try to live in a moral universe. At one time, I just wanted to write about morality and all.
But no definition felt right until I thought of this one: “If A cares about B, then A is good for B. If B doesn’t care about A, B is evil for A.” This definition may be wrong. But I believe that simply not caring about a person is enough for you to be evil for them.
When you have someone in your fuzzy biofield space, and that person doesn’t care about you, it creates more problems than you can imagine.
I have felt it intensely. The effect the uncaring person had on me was that I missed an investment opportunity. I didn’t care about my health as much as I usually did. I did not love myself as much because I felt ignorable.
If somebody doesn’t care about you, it means they’ll think irresponsible thoughts about you. They’ll say not-so-nice things about you and paint a very different picture of you.
4. Hating you
Some people hate you. You can never make everybody happy. But when a hating person comes near you, you feel it.
I feel ‘impossibility’ when someone hates me. Whatever I am doing becomes difficult for me. The pain I was otherwise willing to feel seems insufferable. My dreams start to feel impractical. I simply refuse to do what it takes.
The hatred felt this way causes many side effects. Above all, it causes inflammation in your body and brain. When your brain cannot work at its best, you feel your tasks becoming more difficult.
5. Hidden enmity towards you
Some people feel hostility towards you — for an actual or perceived hurt. If you have ever told someone not to lie to you — and that person was a habitual liar — she may consider you an enemy.
You may not think that a person means you harm. But these people will do anything to get back at you.
When such an enemy is in your space, you feel uneasy. You may not know why.
Your subconscious knows, through hidden cues, who is hurting you. But you refuse to blame that person — you can not connect the dots on a conscious level.
“I don’t know why but I don’t want to do anything right now,” you may say. Life seems heavy and difficult.
The presence of your enemy also causes inflammation. Long-term feelings of hatred and enmity can damage your immune system.
6. Catching stress
You can catch stress like the common cold. Stress is contagious.
You pick up the signals automatically. Just by being in your space, some people will make you stressed. Sometimes, people with high blood pressure induce high blood pressure in their caregivers.
A stressed individual says things that cause stress. They express what they are feeling. But some words and expressions always cause stress. For example, if somebody says that most marriages end up in divorces — and your relationship is going through a rough patch — you become stressed anyway.
I had a friend who was the embodiment of stress and tension. That guy never learned the meaning of chilling out. He was always hurried, worried, and ready to be destroyed. No matter what you said, he said something negative that made total sense in the situation.
The science behind your space
Neurons fire when something touches you. But in an experiment involving a monkey, a neuroscientist — Michael Graziano of Princeton University — saw that the neurons also fire when something comes near the monkey.
“The brain computes a buffer zone around the body, which is very flexible. It changes in size, depending on the context, computed in a largely unconscious manner.”~ Michael Graziano in National Geographic
For more science, you can read Graziano’s book The Spaces Between Us.
The human use of space and its effects on behavior and individual and social interaction is the topic of a new field of inquiry — called Proxemics.
Other nonverbal communication fields are haptics (touch), kinesics (body movement), vocalics (paralanguage), and chronemics (structure of time).
When someone hurts you, again and again, your immune system flags that person like a disease. The immune system starts producing antibodies, cytokines and causes inflammation.
Your immune system doesn’t know that the uncaring person is outside your body, and the immune response may not help. But it gets into a disease-fighting mode anyway.
When you feel sick and tired of a person’s behavior, and you want that person to go away, or you want to move away from her — due to what you are feeling inside — that may be your body’s way of telling you to move away from that person.
Final Thoughts
Some people can hurt you by being near you. They can damage your work, personality, and spirituality.
What if the opposite is also true? What if someone could make you better by being near you?
Some people wish you good, and their words and body language say it. Usually, these people are your good friends and loving family members. You can infer that someone who cares about you will help you reach your goals and dreams. Those who love you will never stand in the way of your dreams.
For me, my mother was one such person. She always wanted me to read and write. She wished me to be intelligent, caring, compassionate, loving, and hard-working. She wanted me to be patient. “Everything takes time,” she would say.
You must get away from the people who don’t care about you. It is also necessary to find someone who cares about you and loves you.
You can read my curated stories here.
