How the Sedona Method Helps You in Challenging Financial Times
What Do Your Emotions Have to Do With Lowering Your Home Energy Bill? (Hint: Everything!)
by www.Sedona.com
Many Americans are feeling a financial crunch after a summer of record-high gas prices and a slumping economy. In order to save a few dollars here and there, many have cut back on driving, eating out, and buying anything other than necessities.
But there is something you can do to save money that won’t take a major sacrifice, and you can do it right from your own home; it involves changing your use of energy.
Do you, for instance:
- Leave lights on when you’re not in the room?
- Turn your TV on just for background noise?
- Feel your home is safer or “more homey” if all the lights are on?
- Have the brightest house on the block come the holiday season?
- Leave appliances plugged in when they’re not in use?
All of these habits are major energy wasters that silently eat up your finances, and the earth’s natural resources, at an alarming rate.
In fact, so-called "vampire energy loss" from appliances in passive mode (the clock on your microwave) or standby mode (your VCR scheduled to record something) account for 5-8 percent of your home's total electricity usage per year, according to the Department of Energy, which is equal to about one month's electricity bill for every household in the United States.
And that is for appliances that are not being actively used! So if you are in the habit of leaving on extra lights or televisions, imagine the cost over time.
What Do Energy Costs Have to Do With Your Emotions?
About now you’re probably wondering where we’re going with this. Saving money on energy costs is really about practical things like turning off lights and turning down the heat, right?
To some extent, yes, but a large part of your actions are actually governed by your emotions. So if your emotions are not in the right place, you could be using energy that you don’t need, and you could be doing it without even realizing it.
Hale Dwoskin, CEO and director of Sedona Training Associates, explains:
“Your emotions impact every part of your life whether you are aware of it or not. Even your most rational decisions are colored by your emotions. However, things like leaving on lights and the TV are particularly emotionally driven by things like fear and loneliness, and by our wanting to escape from our inner landscape with artificial external props.”
In every sense, turning on the television the minute you wake up or get home from work -- or leaving the bathroom light on for a bit of extra security when you go to sleep -- are just habits formed by your emotional self.
And as you may know if you have been reading the Sedona Newsletter for a while, one of the key applications of The Sedona Method and its principle of releasing is breaking unwanted habits. It’s not that turning on the TV automatically is a bad thing, necessarily, but it is something you should avoid doing if you want to save money on your energy bills, or look out for the environment.
The first step to breaking any habit, ironically, is not to stop doing it, it’s to release.
“If you feel the need to turn on the TV, whether it is just for entertainment purposes or to add a layer of familiar noise to your environment, or if you turn on the lights when you don’t need to you can make a pact with yourself to continue this behavior with one qualifier,” Dwoskin says. “You will release first. By releasing whatever feeling is motivating these activities you can weaken and ultimately dissolve these habits. You then can turn on the lights when necessary and turn on the TV when you really want to be entertained.”
Why does this process work? Because habits are driven by patterns of feelings. And when a certain feeling comes up (such as “it’s too quiet, I feel lonely” or “it’s too dark, I’m scared”) you compensate for them by taking a certain action (in this case using energy inappropriately). When you release, you let go of that underlying feeling, so there’s no need to do the compensatory action.
The premise is simple: the more you let go, the more you will be in control of your energy use … and ultimately the more you will lower your home’s energy bill and save your money.
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