Grocery stores are energy portals — read before your next shopping trip

Have you ever noticed that most people love going to the grocery store and want to go all the time OR they hate it and avoid it at all costs?

Yeah, let’s talk about that. Neutral spaces don’t cause such extreme responses in us. And the grocery store is, energetically, anything but a neutral space.

If you’re someone who is energetically sensitive, you may already feel the portal energy when grocery shopping because you just feel different when you’re there, and again when you leave.

Whenever you visit places where you experience a concentrated amount of energy at once, it can change your mood, your thoughts, and even the actions you take because of it.

Grocery stores, in particular, we engage with a lot. Girl/gorl has gotta eat. Make your next trip more intentional by understanding what’s going on inside the portal.

Public Spaces as Energy Portals

Everything emits its own energy and frequency, so the more varied objects and people and actions are that occur in a single space, the more varied and concentrated the energy present is.

When a lot of energy is present, it can create what we call a portal or a gateway. Some speak of portals as doors to other dimensions and timelines, and sometimes jumping into another reality is as simple as a change in the way you feel. Your physical world responds to the way you feel — which is why it’s so important to learn to master and direct your emotions and senses — and your physical world is your perceived reality.

Certain public spaces carry more energy than others. The energy swirls in these places, so much so that sensitive and intuitive people can feel the energetic difference when they walk in. The grocery store is one such place. In fact, it’s one of the most energetically charged places you go in your everyday life.

The energy concentration manifests in a few main ways.

-1. So many people, constantly going in and out.

People all carry their own energy around with them, whether they’re aware of it or not. Just one person entering a space can change the entire feel of it — if you’ve ever been at a party that was vibing until that new person walked in, or was dead boring until that one person showed up, you know what I’m talking about.

At the grocery store, there’s a constant churn of people. They’re carrying the energy of their day, their worries, their plans (dinner and beyond), their intentions, their choices… that’s a lot of energetic concentration in a relatively small place. That’s why you can especially feel it at a place like Trader Joe’s, where it’s just all people and their energy colliding with one another in a space barely big enough to hold them all.

-2. All the products and the energies that go into making them.

Food carries it own energy, as does packaging and product processing. All of the people who went into making the products at your grocery store. All of the electricity and steam and power that went into packaging and shipping. All of the history of the food items themselves — where they started and how they got onto your grocery shelf. It’s all part of the energy every single product in the grocery store carries. And the typical supermarket carries more than 35,000 different items, with inventory in the millions. That’s a lot of energy.

-3. The sheer number of decisions you have to make at the grocery store.

If you think about the theory that every choice you make opens up a different timeline, a different reality, of how it could have worked out, then it becomes incredibly obvious why the grocery store is a potent energy portal. And why you might feel a certain way about going, or sense some change when you step out versus when you went in.

From the minute you decide to go grocery shopping, you are about to spend about an hour of your life doing nothing but making decisions.

Which store are you going to? Where are you going to park? Or are you going to get there another way? What door are you going in? Maybe you’re going to let someone else shop for you and do pick up or delivery? What side of the store will you start on? Will you buy organic or not? What kind of bread do you want? There’s only 150 choices. What kind of tomato sauce? You can choose from 300 varieties. Or maybe you make your own bread, your own tomato sauce? Maybe you saw something online and want to try to make your own this time? Now what do you need? And on and on and on…

You have to go around the store like that, making decision after decision, choice after choice, opening possibility after possibility of how every tiny decision could turn out.

We haven’t even touched the wildest part about grocery store energy yet…

All those decisions you make at the grocery store? They’re about food. You know, the stuff that fuels your body that fuels your reality that fuels your life.

Every choice you make in that swirling energy stew that is the grocery store will directly impact you physically as well as mentally and emotionally, because every decision there is about how you will nourish your body. No other public space requires you to move through so many energies, so many options, and so many choices that will impact your physical so directly.

The energy of the grocery store stays with you for much longer than just while you’re in the space. It becomes a part of you as you go about your life taking care of yourself and those you care about. That’s incredibly powerful energy for your weekly shop.

Past, Present, and Future Energy in the Grocery Store Portal

It’s always at the grocery store, and always on the day you didn’t do your hair, that you run into people you know or used to know. People you haven’t seen in years will suddenly be there at the grocery store. Miss May who taught you piano when you were twelve will suddenly pop up in the produce section. People you frankly hoped you’d never see again will suddenly appear. That one ex you thought moved states will just casually round the corner in the soup aisle at the grocery store.

It makes sense because we associate so much of our social identity with food. Food is nostalgic for us, and we make plans with other people around food. The food plans and memories we have often indicate our culture and societal status and friend groups. When we change who we hang out with, where we live or where we frequent, what part of the socioeconomic scale we’re on, etc: Our food shifts, too.

So the energy of the grocery store is about more than the here and now for us individually. It’s also about the other energies running parallel to us in other people’s lives, the energy of the past we lived together, and the energy of our future plans — party, pizza and movie night, what’s for dinner, what are we eating for lunch at work. Think of every version of you who has been to the grocery store and what you were shopping for and why. That version of you is there, in the frozen food aisle, just in another place and time.

The grocery store brand matters, too.

Each grocery store brand has its own energy, on top of everything else. I mentioned Trader Joe’s earlier. That energy is much different from Walmart energy, isn’t it? The difference in feel and experience (the energy) at different grocery stores is hard to miss, even for those who aren’t energetically aware whatsoever.

Continuing in the same vein, your neighborhood bodega’s energy is much different from a Whole Foods is much different from a Wegman’s is much different from Aldi.

Working with the energy of the grocery store.

You can work with the energy of the grocery store just like you can anything else in your world. Being aware of the energy, and now you are, is most of the secret. It only takes an ounce of intention and a little bit of ritual to make the energy work for you, rather than allowing it to sweep you along to wherever it may go.

If you hate the grocery store:

You’re right and you’re not imagining it: It’s a lot. Depending on the day, the energy at the grocery store can be downright chaotic.

Try some quick personal energy management tips before you head out (or get on your shopping app):

• Cover your head. Wearing a scarf, hat, hoodie, or other head covering can help keep outside energy off your crown, which makes it harder to accidentally absorb it or let unwanted energy into your mental state.

• Note your energy before you go. How are you feeling and what is the purpose for the shopping trip? If notice your inner state beforehand, you can note when it seems to shift or change. That makes it’s easier to redirect yourself back to center and remind yourself of your intended energy for the trip.

• Lean into what the discomfort is telling you. Resistance can make a trip to the grocery store even more miserable if you loathe it already. When the environment is making you uncomfortable, listen to what it might be trying to say. There’s often deeper meaning in the moments that feel like friction.
  
  For example: I actually love to grocery shop but I really hate the check out. Standing there, doing nothing, waiting for the cashier to scan things and prompt the machine… I get hot, I get itchy, I even get short of breath sometimes. (And don’t even start with me on self checkouts.)

  But, once I started working with energy and noticing it intentionally, I was able to connect to myself and reflect on what about the checkout bothered me so much. What I got back was a lot of important information about my perceived self-value when I’m not being productive, my ability to receive without doing, and some weird money stuff. It was all coming out at the cash register. The energy, while horrible, was giving me an opportunity to examine some wounds and patch them up. Now when that feeling comes up at check out, I remind myself of the healing I did around those wounds and it usually goes away.

If you love the grocery store:

You’re right, too. It’s a creative activity, full of sensory experiences, and ripe with possibilities. Pun still intended.

Here are some quick energy tips to get even more enjoyment and benefit out of your trip to the grocery store:

• Make one different choice at the store. How does the energy shift when you pick a different vegetable (maybe one you’ve never tried before if you’re feeling frisky) or get both brands of crackers, just to see which you like better? Portal doors open, and the opportunity to learn something new and interesting about yourself awaits.

• Take a moment to note how you feel before you go. When you get there, take stock of your mood and emotions again. And once more when you exit the store. What was the shift? Were you invigorated? Inspired? Something else? What does that feeling mean to you, on a deeper level? Tap into your intuition or meaning-making muscle to see what personal reflections it might bring you.
  
  For example: I did this once recently and when I exited the grocery store, colors were brighter, the air smelled different, and I was noticing things I hadn’t noticed in years. I wasn’t forcing that to be the case. I just thought, Into the rest of the day. And when I looked the sky was cerulean, not just blue. The construction site across the way came into sharp focus when I hadn’t really paid attention to it for a year. The air smelled like the salt brine combined with evergreens that’s specific to the part of the Carolinas where I live and I hadn’t smelled in ages.

  I realized the grocery store had restored some creativity, some momentum, some motivation in me that had been missing for a while. That was very fun, and I was able to carry that energy into the rest of my day.

You want to switch up your energy? Go to a grocery store.

Sometimes the energy around you is just not working for you. Sometimes you need a good shake up. So, go to the grocery store. You have a public energy portal available to visit any time. Just stop in and walk around — you don’t even need to buy anything. The portal energy of the grocery store will shift something in you just by you choosing to go there.

Maybe the energy will bring you something so tiny it’s hard to tell even when you’re tapped into it, or maybe it will something so big you couldn’t ignore it if you tried. You’ll never know until you enter the portal how you’ll come out the other side.

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About the Oracles
Bailey Lewis - the voice behind Found Oracles - is a modern-day mystic, multimedia artist, writer, and award-winning storyteller. Bailey’s work draws from her own intuitive practice, her years of studying symbology and narrative meaning-making, and her fascination with how the stories we tell ourselves create our reality.

Found Oracles is a project of Bailey Sends Word, Bailey’s creative and intuitive media house - where everything is that deep, but not everything is that serious.