Patiently she explained that the recapitulation is the act of calling back the energy we have already spent in past actions. To recapitulate entails recalling all of the people we have met, all of the places we have seen, and all the feelings we have had in our entire lives; starting from the present and going back to the earliest memories; then sweeping them clean, one by one, with the sweeping breath. ~ Taisha Abelar, The Sorcerer’s Crossing: A Woman’s Journey

Recapitulation is the ability to completely release the energies that keep you bound to specific incidences in your life oftentimes causing you to be trapped within a vicious cycle of replaying repetitive and draining emotional conflict. The continually rehashing of these patterns over and over again causes your life force energy to be constantly wasted as you replay these outmoded patterns of behavior.

We have tons of energy, we are pure energy. If we choose to recall and revisit past occurrences we are simply feeding them which ultimately makes those past occurrences stronger and more prevalent. Who wants to hold on to old energy? To do so weakens you and prevents you from being in the moment within the continual evolutionary act of creation or co-creation.

To recapitulate means to take back and recover lost energy. Castaneda wrote about doing exercises of recapitulation in caves and prescribed tasks such as making long lists of people that you have known over the course of your lifetime starting with the most recent. We don’t have time to sit in caves for months on end so you shouldn’t be put off by this prescribed method. All you have to do is start by taking some time out of your day with a clear intention of essentially reclaiming your power. As you reclaim personal power you will free up the energy that makes it possible for you to see more examples of where or to whom you have lost energy and then you can just keep practicing the process of recapitulation.

To not free yourself of these old energies or to remain immersed in the old patterns of replaying them over and over causes your body to have energetic blockages which eventually lead to depression, anxiety, fear, sadness, illness and disease. On the other hand, to free yourself from these old energies allows you to have excess personal power and allows for creativity to flow, feelings of well-being, healthiness and increased awareness.

Many years ago when I started the practice of recapitulation I would sit quietly indoors or outdoors and start thinking about recent people or situations that I had been in, good, bad or otherwise. Remember, it’s all energy and the focus needs to be placed on reclaiming personal power. The energy that I was reclaiming was all of it, negative energy, positive energy, sexual energy, all energy. And as these people and situations revealed themselves to me I would breathe back into myself the energy that had been expended in those situations and through the exhalation I would release those moments of those recollections of the past. Gaining more energy allowed other past situations to easily present themselves that needed to be recapitulated and the practice eventually became easy to do in the moment that these old situations surfaced.

This exercise returns to you your own vital and essential life force energy that you were born with but have lost throughout the years. You must pull back all of your lost energy into your sacred center and be done with the situations to which you had lost the energy in order to be free. If you continue to revisit the situation or worse, share your stories of pain with others over and over again you wind up feeding the past and giving it more energy. If you give energy to the past trauma you are trying to release it will become so big that it will consume you.

It doesn’t matter what one reveals or what one keeps to oneself. Everything we do, everything we are, rests on our personal power. If we don’t have enough personal power the most magnificent piece of wisdom can be revealed to us and it won’t make a damn bit of difference. ~Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power