How to Protect My Energy (Especially Now)

Plus: Protecting Your Energy Also Means Being Responsible With It

The summer months tend to encourage a particular kind of openness: windows that stay open all night, people smiling and conversational, bodies gathering in parks and at parties, the calendar crowds itself in celebration of what is meant to feel solar and Yang in nature.

Light can also expose, and the exposure can feel like a kind of pressure. This is when the question of how to protect my energy from others spiritually shifts from theory into daily necessity.

There are times when protecting your energy means choosing silence over sharing, or stillness over movement, even when everything around you suggests the opposite. Energy protection means being able to register your own nervous system before you respond to someone else’s. This isn’t always easy. Many of us have been trained in attunement as a form of survival, conditioned to read the room, then shape ourselves accordingly. (As a trusted psychic and occultist, offering shamanic readings / psychic readings online, I find it’s especially easy to fall into patterns of over-attuning and have had to work on consistent energetic hygiene).

Protecting your energy from others, spiritually or psychically, asks you to unlearn that as the default. Or at least to recognize when it’s happening, and then to choose in the present moment if that is what you would like to keep doing.

That said, energetic protection is NOT cliqueness, being hardened, or invulnerable, sealing yourself off from the world. I’ve found that it’s more about noticing how easily you can disappear inside someone else’s needs, how quickly your system can contort out of a desire to meet what hasn’t even been asked for explicitly. If you tend to overextend, or mirror back what’s expected before you’ve even checked in with yourself, then it’s likely your energy has already left the room before your body has. This is vitally important to have awareness on, because when auric and physical body are operating from a place of separation or disassociation, there will invariably be an energy leak or an energy leaching. In extreme cases, when aura and 3D body are not in tandem, it can even invite unwell spirits to latch (here is the thing: protecting your energy is a direct form of protection from spirits that harm).

There’s a certain politeness that’s mistaken for care. A kind of over-giving that looks generous on the surface but runs on depletion underneath. If you’ve been that person, you’re probably exhausted. You’re probably reading this hoping for permission to do less. You have it.

How to Protect My Energy as an Empath

If you ever ask yourself specifically, “how to protect my energy as an empath?”, it helps to first be precise about what you're experiencing. Empathy is not the same as overwhelm. Sensitivity is not always insight. Empathy isn’t overwhelm. Sensitivity doesn’t always equal insight. Feeling emotions doesn’t automatically mean you're stewarding them with maturity. The ability to feel others deeply can be meaningful, but it can also confuse your system if you haven’t developed a reliable way to differentiate between what belongs to you and what doesn’t.

Discernment takes practice. It isn’t as simple as lighting a candle or wearing black tourmaline, though those things can help. Sometimes it starts with just admitting that you don’t feel well after certain interactions, or that certain relationships leave you unclear about who you are. Clarity might begin there, in the decision to stop apologizing for needing time alone, or needing more space than someone else finds comfortable.

How to Protect My Energy in a Crowd

Some of my clients, whether seeking a psychic reading Vancouver-based or a more remote psychic reading by phone, say that being in crowds can be when they feel most untethered. You might catch yourself adjusting too quickly, scanning conversations for safety, matching a tone that was never yours. Being around many people, especially during a season where sociability is rewarded, can make it harder to hear yourself.

If you've asked, even quietly, how to protect my energy in a crowd, you already know what it feels like to lose track of your own signal. Sometimes the answer is to stay home. Sometimes it's to go and leave early. Other times it’s to prepare a kind of inner perimeter, not necessarily by armouring up, but by deciding what version of yourself you're bringing, and what you’ll keep just for you.

Contrary to what New Age beliefs may say around “there is more than enough of everything”, your energy is not infinite.

Managing Energetics is Integral to Spirit Work and Witchcraft

Protecting your energy isn’t about disappearing. It’s about remaining engaged in a way that sustains you. Engagement here refers not only to human interaction, but also to animistic relationship, a worldview that recognises all things as alive with agency, spirit, and voice. Plants, animals, stones, rivers, weather patterns, even words and tools are not inert, and instead, conscious and relational.

In witchcraft and spirit mediumship, where you are quite literally in relationship with unseen presences, energy management becomes a way of showing up responsibly in the wider ecosystem. This is not about drawing a binary line between what’s ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ but rather about practising discernment, staying attuned, and knowing how to hold your own centre without dominating or collapsing into the field around you.

Protecting Your Energy Also Means Being Responsible With It

Learning how to protect your energy from others spiritually is vital, but just as essential is learning how not to unknowingly drain the energy of those around you. If you identify as highly sensitive, empathic, or energetically porous, it’s easy to focus entirely on shielding. But protection is ultimately reciprocal. When you enter a space—physical, emotional, spiritual—you are also bringing a frequency. The question is: is your own frequency co-regulating or consuming?

If you’ve been doing deep work or are in a state of heightened vulnerability, here are a few things to watch for in yourself, especially if you identify as someone socially conditioned to receive softness, validation, or space:

• Over-disclosing emotions or trauma without invitation

• Crying or escalating emotion or use of exaggerated language as a form of unconscious control

• Fishing for sympathy rather than cultivating real connection

• Taking up more space than was given

• Leaking attachment wounds or feeling like wounds grants you exemptions from accountability

• Generally assuming that others are available for you, this is especially important during ritual and ceremony, when so often, we have expectations that spirits will show up when we call them, or that it’s assumed we will be comforted.

I’ve discussed before that animism teaches us that humans are not at the centre of meaning or power. Animism reminds us that boundaries are not self-serving. In fact, energy management is all-serving. This means:

• Checking in with your capacity before sharing, and before asking someone else to hold space for you

• Practising inner resourcing (journaling, spirit work, grounding techniques) before / in tandem of asking for another to help

• Allowing others to have their own needs, responses, or limitations without making it personal

• Asking: Is this the right time, space, or relationship to bring this forward?

• Staying present to how your energy lands on others, even when you feel raw or overwhelmed

• I should also say this applies to human-to-human interactions as well as when consorting with spirits.

If you want more…

I offer spell services aligned with Chinese almanac timings that work with energetic boundaries, clarity, and resilience. They are not about control, and they aren’t about escape. They are designed to support your autonomy, your ability to return to yourself after being pulled outward too many times. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how to protect and directing your energy through your own practice, my witchcraft course Crafting the Arcane is open for enrolment. We study foundational techniques in how to cast spells, we work with effigies, and we explore spirit contact as a relationship, not a transaction. This work is for those who want to participate in life more clearly, not just more often.

If summer is the season of expansion, let it also be the season where you choose how far you’re willing to stretch.

Following the spirits,

Mimi
Spirit medium and occultist