What is energy?

The word "energy" gets used to describe very many things. I do not like their energy. The energy of this piece isn't quite right yet. The energy is weird lately. When one word is doing that much work in that many contexts, it's normal to get really, really confused about what we're even talking about.

I know the frustration personally. When I started out in energy healing, I felt really excited about the idea that everything is energy and that you can work on your personal energy. But my mind is quite analytical, and at some point the vagueness became untenable. I took classes for two years, then started seeing clients, then started teaching — and only five years in did the definition I needed finally arrive. It's very, very simple: energy is vibrating information.

Vibrating information — all the way down

This definition let me relax because it covers all of it. The table is energy. The device you're using to listen to my words is energy. The sound of my voice is energy. Drill down into anything that exists and you'll find empty space and vibrating information. And that information is organized in systems — which is what makes the concept genuinely useful rather than hand-wavy.

And defining it matters. The point of pinning the word down isn't pedantry — it's that once your analytical mind can relax about what energy actually is, you can feel grounded and competent using it, instead of half-believing a word you can't explain.

You are an energy system

A human being is a system. Your personal energy includes your physical body — your organs, your capacity to move from one state to another — and it also includes all your thoughts, all your concepts, all your emotions. It's an inclusive way of looking at a human being.

"Vibrating information" means your emotions are information vibrating in a certain way, interacting with your thoughts — which also vibrate in their own way and carry their own information — interacting with your physical body, which vibrates at a slower, denser rate and holds information of its own. One system, many layers, all in conversation.

It doesn't stop at people

Every single thing in the whole wide universe has energy — is energy. So we're all this vibrating information, vibrating and connecting with each other. And when many, many people across a society are feeling roughly the same emotions and having the same kinds of thoughts, that influences the collective energy — and we can start to pick it up. It's subtler than personal energy, but having a way to talk about it is enormously helpful.

Harmonious, blocked — but never "bad"

Energy can be aligned and harmonious, working beautifully together — like being out in nature when the birds are chirping and the wind is moving through the leaves. There are little tensions in it, but they're creative, harmonious ones; everything builds on everything else. And energy can be blocked — like a radio caught between two stations. Signal going in all directions, nothing emerging that's of any help. Noise.

Which lets us review an idea most of us carry: that there's good energy and bad energy. Truly, there is only energy — and it interacts in a harmonious way, or it interacts in a challenging way. Try trading the labels. Instead of "bad energy": blocked energy, challenging energy, energy that doesn't serve my highest good. Instead of "good energy": harmonious energy, energy that serves my highest good. Notice what changes for you then — especially since you're made of the stuff too.

There is only energy — and it interacts in a harmonious way, or in a challenging way.

Try this: change your glasses

Here's where I want to leave you: start playing with your perception. Take off the glasses of everything is separate and put on the glasses of everything is vibrating information, interacting. Sitting on a chair, you can experience it as an object apart from you — which, at some level, of course it is. Or you can notice the system that is you being supported by the system that is the chair, and the interaction between the two. See whether the experience is different. That small experiment is the doorway to everything else in energy healing.