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These concepts are foundational to co-creating and sustaining the Experience of We
Energy
In many spiritual, therapeutic, and relational spaces today, people speak about “energy.”
They say things like:
“I can feel the energy in the room.”
“That interaction drained my energy.”
“Their energy feels unsafe.”
“We had really good energy together.”
In The Experience of We, we take these experiences seriously. People are not imagining something.
But we also notice something important:
The word energy often gestures toward real relational experiences without explaining what they are, how they work, or how to orient to them.
We want to gently complete that gesture.
The short version
What people often call “energy” is best understood as:
The felt experience of nervous systems sensing, mirroring, and co-regulating with one another—resulting in real, embodied changes in arousal, safety, and metabolic load.
This is not a magical power. It is an evolved biological capacity.
Understanding it this way does not diminish the experience. It grounds it, making it intelligible, ethical, and actionable.
Humans are not self-contained regulators
Human nervous systems did not evolve to regulate themselves in isolation.
Across evolutionary history, survival depended on:
Small, stable groups
Constant physical proximity
Shared attention
And mutual responsiveness
Under those conditions, regulation was distributed.
Fear, vigilance, rest, and safety were not carried by one body alone—they were shared across the group.
This made regulation:
More reliable
Less metabolically expensive
And more resilient
Our nervous systems still expect this.
When that expectation is met, life feels lighter. When it is violated, life feels heavy, tense, or draining.
That felt difference is one of the primary things people now call “energy.”
Co-regulation requires sensing other nervous systems
For shared regulation to work, nervous systems must be able to sense each other in real time.
Humans do this continuously through:
Facial micro-expressions
Vocal tone and rhythm
Posture and movement
Breathing patterns
Timing, pacing, and silence
Subtle shifts in muscle tone and attention
Most of this happens below conscious awareness.
When we say:
“I can feel what’s happening with them.”
What is often occurring is:
“My nervous system is registering another nervous system’s state and adjusting itself in response.”
That adjustment involves real physiological changes:
Heart rate variability
Breath depth and rhythm
Muscle tension or release
Hormone and neurochemical shifts
Attentional narrowing or expansion
These changes are felt internally as pressure, openness, charge, heaviness, warmth, contraction, or ease.
That felt interiority is what gives rise to the language of “energy.”
Why it feels energetic rather than cognitive
People rarely describe this experience as “information,” even though it is information.
That’s because it is:
Pre-verbal (it happens before words)
Somatic (it is felt in the body)
Metabolically weighted (it affects effort, fatigue, and capacity)
You don’t think:
“My sympathetic nervous system is increasing load due to insufficient co-regulation.”
You feel:
“This interaction is draining.”
“Energy” is the phenomenological surface of regulatory processes in motion.
The experience is real—even if the language is incomplete.
Why modern life makes this feel mysterious
In ancestral environments:
Embodied contact was constant
Social roles were stable
Regulation was shared by default
There was no need to name “energy.” It was simply how life felt together.
Modern environments disrupt this profoundly:
Regulation is individualized
Interaction is often disembodied or digital
Social fields are unstable and anonymous
Nervous systems are asked to carry more than they evolved to carry
The result is a paradox:
We are still wired to feel each other—but we have lost a shared framework for understanding what we feel.
“Energy” becomes a placeholder for a lost relational literacy.
Why The Experience of We doesn’t stop at the word “energy”
The word energy has value—it points toward lived reality. But on its own, it has serious limitations.
When used without grounding, it can:
Collapse many processes into one vague term
Obscure cause and responsibility
Invite projection (“your energy is bad”)
And make shared sense-making difficult
In The Experience of We, we don’t reject the experience.
We complete it.
Instead of stopping at “energy,” we speak about:
Nervous system states
Regulatory load
Co-regulation and dysregulation
Metabolic cost
Protective mobilization
Integration and recovery
Relational fields
This preserves the felt truth and adds explanatory power.
Why this matters ethically
When we understand these experiences biologically and relationally, something important happens:
Responsibility returns.
We can say things like:
“My nervous system is getting overloaded.”
“I’m sensing sympathetic activation in this interaction.”
“This field isn’t metabolically sustainable for me right now.”
“I need more regulation before continuing.”
These are not spiritual judgments. They are relationally clean signals.
They support:
Consent
Boundaries
Accountability
And care for shared relational fields
The Experience of We perspective
In The Experience of We, what people call “energy” is understood as:
How life allocates, mobilizes, and transforms regulatory capacity across bodies in relationship.
Therefore, energy is:
Embodied, not abstract
Relational, not individual
Biological, not mystical
Meaningful, not random
When we restore this understanding, people don’t lose mystery. They gain agency, clarity, and shared language.
And that is one of the foundations of moving from Separation toward Reunion.