You close the door, you put the phone on the table, and something in you is flat. Not sad exactly. Flatter than before. You had a free afternoon and now you have none of it, and you cannot say where it went.
That flatness is information. Your body measured something your mind has not named yet.
Most of us are being moved by things we never chose, and almost never by an enemy. By the ordinary environment: the people we sit with, the conversations we keep having, the information we open before breakfast, the places we walk back to out of habit. Life is interaction. You need food, air, water, other people, nature, and inside every one of those connections there is an exchange of energy, emotion and attention. So the question is never whether you are being influenced. You are, right now. It is whether you can SEE it while it is happening.
Isolation Is Not Protection
When a person feels a negative influence, the first reflex is always the same: close. Open your heart, get misunderstood, get hurt, and build a wall. Or go further and decide that all relationships are dangerous, that men are dangerous, that women are dangerous, and turn those ideas into the walls you live behind.
I tried that. It does not work.
Imagine a plant isolating itself to escape bad weather. No water, no air, no sun. It dies. That is what we do when we cut ourselves off: we cut the negative influence, yes, and we cut the beautiful ones with it. The artist who opens something in you. The friend you can be intimate with. Nature, which gives you power and asks for nothing.
Cut all of that and you do not get safety. You get an empty space with no energy, no emotion, no vitality, and a very good reason to fall into depression. We have to learn to stay in the exchange and stay clean inside it.
The Four Kinds of Negative Influence
I cannot hand you a list of villains. I could write “drugs, negative people, that job”, and it would be useless, because the same thing that drains me can feed you. What I can give you is the shape of the thing. In all these years I have found four results that a negative influence produces in a person.
1. It Takes Your Energy
You go to a party playing a personality, being nice, making sure everyone likes you, and you come home exhausted, physically and existentially. Or you sit with someone for one coffee, the person talks and talks, and you come home emptied. Or the office: every day nothing left, and you start to believe that is simply what work costs.
It may be. It may also be that you are receiving a negative influence there and calling it normality. That is why the first step is not action, it is observation: what happens in my body after this meeting, this call, this place?
2. It Deviates You From Your Purpose
This one is the most important and the most invisible.
You have a job interview in an hour. You are focused, gathering your power. Then your friend calls, the one who always calls with a problem, and he needs half an hour about how terrible everything is. You give him the half hour, and a piece of your focus, of what you had prepared, goes with it. Small? Yes. But it happens all day, and for years, and at the scale of a whole life.
Or the phone: you pick it up for one email that matters, a notification appears, and fifteen minutes later you look up and ask at what exact moment you decided to do this. You did not decide. Something decided for you, and the purpose of that hour quietly died.
Now put the same mechanism into a childhood. We come into this world with an intention, with something we came here to live. And very fast everyone starts expecting things. Study this. Take that path. Be reasonable. The original drive gets buried under social purposes, and later we wonder why we feel empty, why nothing means anything, why we are doing well on a road we never chose. The emptiness is not a malfunction. It is the distance between your life and your purpose, felt from the inside.
3. It Fills Your Heart With Heavy Emotions
This one works at the level of the heart, and you recognise it at the end of a conversation. You are full, but not of energy. Full of weight.
Sadness, sorrow, pity. These emotions do not move you anywhere. They do not make you grow, they make you passive. They pull your attention into the suffering and hold it there, and the whole system slows down. It can come from a person who complains all day about how terrible the world is, and it can come from information: magazines built on dramatic news, films built on jealousy, betrayal, poverty and weakness. Watch one episode and measure. More alive and more capable afterwards? Or heavier and more resigned? That answer is the measurement.
In shamanism we call one version of this the spirit of pity. It feels virtuous. “Poor him.” But look at where your energy went. Pity does not heal anybody and it does not give you power to help. It installs the heaviness in your own chest.
4. It Installs Pessimism And Calls It Realism
The fourth kind puts a negative idea about life itself into your head and justifies it with data.
There is more information around us than any human being has ever had to process, and a huge part of it is negative, delivered with a technique: numbers, science, percentages. That is how a claim is made to feel trustworthy. But the numbers can be true and the idea behind them can still be poison, because the conclusion they install is: something terrible is coming. In the world, in the economy, in your body.
Look at children. Do they arrive worried about the future? No. They arrive clean of that, with a mind in a state of creativity and inspiration. Then we teach them, and we teach ourselves, and after enough years we cannot look at life without flinching.
I am not asking you to become naive. Life has a material side and the material side is fragile: things break, they pass, there is death. But that is the shallow layer. Life is a place to explore, to learn, to evolve, and it is beautiful by itself. When we only see the fragile layer everything looks terrifying, and we hand our perception to whoever is selling fear that week. So watch the channels. If every time you watch a certain channel you end up thinking “we are going to die”, that channel is not informing you. It is influencing you.
Nobody Can Hand You The List
Notice what these four have in common: none of them is a fixed object. They are results. So the work is not to memorise a list of bad things, it is to notice what produces those results in YOUR life. What drains me? What deviates me from what I want? What fills my heart with heaviness? What installs pessimism in my vision? The answers have to come from your own experience, or they are borrowed opinions.
And here is the part nobody likes: often we already see it. We keep the negative influence because seeing it means changing, and changing means losing something we are still attached to. The real reason people stay in what drains them is rarely ignorance. It is avoidance with good manners.
If You Can Leave, Leave
If you can walk away, walk away. You notice the pattern: every time you go for that coffee with that person, you come back wanting to quit your life. You see it once, twice, three times. Then you stop going. No drama, no war, no announcement. You simply do not go back. Removing a negative influence from your life is not weakness, it is the cleanest move available.
But we cannot do that with all of them, because some influences are deep in our life. The office. The partner. The neighbourhood. The family. Try telling your boss that his energy is not compatible with your path and see how far that gets you.
If You Cannot Leave, Clean Your System
Then you learn to transform the state instead of avoiding it.
You come home from the office drained. That is a fact, and maybe it will be a fact for a couple more years. Fine. So: what do I do with this state, energetically, so it does not become my life? Breathwork. A workout. Yoga. A cold shower. Nature. Dance. Music. Prayer. Whatever genuinely moves the heaviness out instead of distracting you from it.
I do this every single day, because of my work. When I guide meditations, workshops and ceremonies, there are exchanges of energy. Fears, heavy emotions, things that enter my field while I hold the space for other people. I feel them arrive, and I take responsibility for cleaning them, because if I do not, I will be carrying the room home with me.
Something touched you, something heavy came in. That is not the moment to open a series and wait for it to pass. That is the moment to move it. And accept one thing before you start: you will receive negative influence. You are not going to become a person who is never touched. The skill is not immunity. The skill is recovery speed.
The Bigger Power Influences The Lower Power
Now the essential law. In any exchange between two people, the one with the strongest purpose, the strongest vitality and the strongest will is the one who influences. Not the loudest, not the most educated: the one carrying the most concentrated power.
My teacher grew up in Greece. When he was a boy, a door-to-door salesman came to his house selling dictionaries, huge books with all the information in the world, before laptops and phones. He was a kid, he did not have much power, but the seller had a purpose, a will and a direction, and he left that house with a signature and a debt, and the boy had never wanted any of it. He was simply in the presence of a stronger current.
That is what happens in a meeting where you had decided something and you leave having agreed to the opposite. That is what happens at a table where you go quiet and let the room decide who you are. So protection is not a technique you apply to other people. Protection is your own power: purpose, direction, will, vitality. The more intentional your life is, the less the environment can move you off your axis.
The Friend Who Could Not Be Influenced
When I was young and started going to parties, my friends influenced me easily. Do you want to drink, Pablo? Do you want to smoke? And I took it, because I had no direction strong enough to say no.
There was one guy in that group with a purpose: he wanted to become an athlete, a serious one, training at a high level. Nobody could get him to smoke or drink. He said no without anger, without a speech, without rejecting us. He was in the disco with us. He was at the table. And he was free.
Here is the part that took me years to understand: he was not only immune to us, he was influencing us. I started running because of him. I watched a man stand in his own power and say “not for me, not good for my purpose”, and I thought: I want that. That is what power looks like when it is not aggressive.
There are two options. You allow the world to influence you, or you influence the world. The second one is not about dominating anybody. It is about becoming, yourself, the influence you would like to receive.
Stop Being Invisible At Your Own Table
For years I had a torture that repeated every Christmas. The family dinner. The food, the drinks, the cousins, the same jokes, the same conversations. I do not drink much and I eat little, and still I would come home destroyed.
I asked my teacher why. His answer was short: because you are not expressing yourself there. You say nothing about what you are doing with your life. They talk, you are passive, and you leave with nothing of yourself in the room.
So I tried something. When the mechanical jokes started, I started talking about my life. The trips, Peru, the Andes, Tibet at five thousand metres with almost no oxygen, the shamans, the jungle, the experiences that had rearranged me. Some people felt awkward, of course. What are these weird things he is doing, travelling with shamans and magicians.
But my energy exploded. Some of them leaned in and started asking real questions, and by the end of the night I was in ecstasy instead of despair. Later, some of my family came on those trips with me. That movement is available to you at any table. You cannot control what the room talks about, but you can stop being invisible in it, and stop calling your silence politeness.
There Is A Second Half To This
Everything so far is about refusing influence, and there is a risk in it: that you also start refusing the good things.
With negative influence, the movement is masculine. You stand, you set a boundary, you direct your energy. With positive influence, the movement is the opposite. You open. When you are with a teacher, a coach, a partner in love, when you are praying, that is not the moment to lead. That is the moment to receive, to be a student, trusting and willing to be changed.
We need both. A person who only influences becomes a wall. A person who only receives becomes a sponge for whatever is in the room. The art is knowing which state the moment is asking for.
Anger Is Poison For The Soul
There is a fair objection: is negativity not sometimes useful? Does it not show you what to fix?
Awareness of what is happening is good. Truth awakens pain, and that pain can move you. The problem is what the pain turns into. If it makes you more aware and more engaged with life, it is doing its job. If it makes you angry, it is poisoning you, because anger is poison for the soul and nothing free or creative comes out of it for long. It burns the one who carries it and it convinces nobody.
So there are two honest options. Transform the anger into something creative: walk, breathe, work, make something, until you find the way to help that does not require you to be on fire. Or, if a channel or a conversation always leaves you in rage and always will, then that is a dead end, and your job is to stop going there. Not out of cowardice, out of intelligence.
The Test: Does It Expand You Or Contract You?
Truth always brings expansion. When something is genuinely true, you feel it open inside you, even when it is uncomfortable. When you believe you own the truth and your whole system is in tension and argument, you are not holding truth, you are holding a position. And a position needs to win, while truth does not need to fight.
You can see it in people who are at war in every conversation in the name of peace. Full of information, full of proof, unable to sleep, unable to sit at their own table without a fight. The cause is good and the state is the opposite of the cause, and nothing built from that state survives, because it carries the same war inside it.
Use this as a compass, not only for information but for people, conversations and the environment you keep. Does this expand me or contract me? Does it give me energy or take it? Does it make me more myself, or smaller and more defended? Your body answers that honestly, and much faster than your mind.
Seven Questions For This Week
Do not turn this into a philosophy. Take it into your week and answer these honestly, in writing if you can.
Where does my energy actually go? Not where I say it goes, where it goes.
After which meetings, calls or places do I come home emptied? What do they have in common?
What is deviating me from what I said I wanted? Which conversation, which screen, which habit?
Where am I passive in my own life, waiting for the room to decide who I am?
What am I not saying, and to whom, that keeps me small at that table?
What am I consuming every day that installs fear in my vision of the future?
And the one that matters most: am I directing this energy, or is this energy directing me?
Become The Influence
In the end there are only two directions. Either the world shapes you, or you become a shape in the world.
You are not going to escape influence. You live in it, you breathe it, you exchange it every day. So aim higher than protection. Aim at power: purpose, direction, vitality, a life you actually chose. Then the negative influences stop being a threat and become what they always were, weather. And you will not spend your life hiding from weather. You will walk through it, and where you walk, something will change.
That is the invitation. To become the positive influence you would like to receive from the world. As your actual presence, at your actual table, in your actual town.
We do this work every week in our community, with meditation, breathwork and real conversation, and the door is open. If you want to go deeper, join our WhatsApp community. And if you want the full path with practices and training, it lives in our Inner Spark Tribe academy.
Teiwaz
