Amidst the sea of commentary following the remarkable midterm elections this week, I want to draw our attention to a possibility that most are not (yet) discussing: a truly different way of doing politics.
As Adam Hamilton tells it, a woman in Greensburg, Kansas once asked him, “Would you please help me to stop hating the people in the red ball caps?” She hadn’t spoken to some family members in a year.[1,2,3] My family has felt that divide too.
Hamilton, a Methodist pastor, had spent the spring on a listening tour across Kansas. On the campaign trail, he said, he heard “over and over again” that people were looking for “decency” and “kindness.”[1] Registered as a Republican until earlier this year, he ran as what he calls an “independent-minded Democrat” and became Kansas’s first Democratic senator since 1932 – nearly a century.[4]
Whatever your politics or thoughts on the elections may be, stay with me – this is relevant for all of us. And there are many more significant accomplishments coming out of these midterms, like the wave of historic firsts for women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.[5]
But the Greensburg woman was naming something subtle but important: a charge in herself and in the space between people, the tightness of contempt and the ache of estrangement, and asking for help to move it.
Here’s precisely what I think energetic activism proposes: Change what moves within and between people first, and new politics can grow from there.
For much of this past year I’ve been thinking about what this might mean. Can we harness our under-utilized energetic intelligence to help create real, lasting change in a society that’s struggling with chronic stress and illness, trauma, and deep polarization?
One of my current favorite researchers, Martin Picard of Columbia University, defines energy as “the potential for change.” (This is a sexier variation on the standard physics definition of energy as the capacity to do work.) Picard notes that this is “true at the biological level, the psychological level, the societal level“ (my emphasis).[6] The overall health of our bodies, he and his colleagues propose, is “a field-like state emerging from the dynamic interplay of energy, communication, and structure within the organism.”[7]
In plain terms: health is about how energy and information move through the whole. Can we extrapolate this out to the health of the social body, the body politic?
If energy is the potential for change, can consciously working with it in and around the human body – and, especially, within and between groups of humans – be a form of activism? Could we harness energetic activism for social change, and for a healthier, more functional body politic?
At the Energetic Literacy Project we think of energetic intelligence as our innate capacity to sense and respond to energy in our bodies and in the world around us – like when you pick up on the tension in a room before a word’s been spoken, feel a friend’s exhaustion through the phone, or your “spidey sense” tells you not to trust someone. Energetic literacy is the cultivated ability to work with energy, and it is how we hone our energetic intelligence.
Energetic activism, then, is energetic literacy applied to social change. It means paying attention to the energy, nervous systems, and emotional states moving through a group, and working with them on purpose. Because how a group feels together shapes what it can see and do together.
There’s real science behind this possibility. For example, when heart rhythm and breath fall into a steady, synchronized pattern, a marker of a calm, regulated nervous system, emotional regulation improves; some studies also show gains in attention and other cognitive skills.[8][9][10] States like awe have been shown to make us less wrapped up in ourselves and more focused on each other – very helpful for collective action.[11] And emerging research suggests that a group’s shared physiological state – its coherence or dysregulation – is linked to how cohesive it feels and how well it performs together.[12][13]
In other words, energetic activism is about shifting how a group feels together, and building its capacity to stay there, in order to change what that group can achieve. It treats our bodies and the shared field between us as catalysts for change. Through this lens, attunement, coherence, and working with particular emotional frequencies like awe might become organizing strategies or methods as worthy of attention as messaging and coalition-building.
Awe is a powerful emotional frequency – arguably underutilized in many social change efforts – but we could also consider others. A group’s capacity to metabolize grief together, rather than avoid or individually absorb it, can bind that group as powerfully as shared celebration. Even righteous anger, when the group has the energetic literacy to transmute that anger to fuel passionate engagement rather than fractious conflict, can be a conduit of powerful energy directed toward collective transformation.
Most forms of political action and social change efforts through history have relied (consciously or not) on emotional intelligence, but energetic activism might prompt us to work more deeply, consciously, and impactfully with the underlying physiological and relational states. We might focus on the relational field, rather than understanding the collective as just the sum of individuals. We might strategize based on how emotional energy can be harnessed and moved, rather than on a calculation of opinion polls.
Energetic activism would also take into account the centrality of the human nervous system, the superhighway of our energetic intelligence, in shifting how individuals and groups perceive and respond to the world around them.
For example, attention offered without an agenda – like a listening tour, when done right – can soften defenses, let what is stuck start to move, and make a different relationship possible. This is one of the possibilities of energetic activism, and Hamilton and other surprise winners may already have been working with it.
Social change leaders across the ages, including some of our foremost thought and movement leaders today – like adrienne maree brown’s work on pleasure activism, and Nipun Mehta’s work on social coherence – have been pointing us toward this possibility. Some have been practicing it for ages without explicitly naming it. What if we started naming energetic activism directly, and building our movements with it on purpose?
That’s a question I’ll be exploring here — and at greater length in the book I’m working on. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
More soon. Thanks for being here.
For more on my work check out: energeticliteracy.info
References
1. Martin, Michel, and Majd Al-Waheidi. “Kansas Just Elected a Democrat. His Message to Washington? Be Decent.” NPR, Morning Edition, November 4, 2026 (includes full transcript). https://www.npr.org/2026/11/04/nx-s1-6028587/adam-hamilton-is-the-first-democrat-since-1932-to-win-a-u-s-senate-seat-in-kansas
2. “If You Put His Sign in Your Yard, Adam Hamilton Has a Rule.” Topeka Capital-Journal, September 24, 2026. https://www.cjonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/congressional/2026/09/24/adam-hamilton-tells-topeka-crowd-a-rule-to-putting-up-his-yard-sign/91903050007/
3. “Will Adam Hamilton Challenge Roger Marshall in Kansas?” Kansas City Star, April 2026 (on the eight-week listening tour). https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article315512262.html
4. “Pastor Adam Hamilton Ousts GOP Sen. Roger Marshall, Democrats’ 1st Senate Win in Kansas in 94 Years.” Associated Press, November 4, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/senate-kansas-election-roger-marshall-adam-hamilton-7f09e5cc69e0ac8e618376e60ef311d8
5. “Democratic Victories Bring Historic Breakthroughs for Women, Minorities.” Reuters, November 4, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/democratic-victories-bring-historic-breakthroughs-women-minorities-2026-11-04/
6. Picard, Martin. “Phenomena Finale: Not a Machine but a Flame.” Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing, Sounds True (transcript). https://www.soundstrue.com/a/resources/transcript/phenomena-finale-not-a-machine-but-a-flame-takeover/ — See also Picard on the Huberman Lab podcast, where he credits the definition to his wife, a biophysicist: https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/improve-energy-longevity-by-optimizing-mitochondria-martin-picard
7. Cohen, Alan A., Martin Picard, et al. “Intrinsic Health as a Foundation for a Science of Health.” Science Advances (2025). https://www.picardlab.org/uploads/7/7/8/4/77845210/sciadv.adu8437.pdf
8. McCraty, Rollin, and Maria A. Zayas. “Cardiac Coherence, Self-Regulation, Autonomic Stability, and Psychosocial Well-Being.” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014): 1090. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01090–See also Lehrer, Paul M., and Richard Gevirtz. “Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback: How and Why Does It Work?” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014): 756. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00756
9. Lehrer, Paul, et al. “Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback Improves Emotional and Physical Health and Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta Analysis.” Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback 45, no. 3 (2020): 109–129. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10484-020-09466-z
10. Tinello, Doriana, Matthias Kliegel, and Sascha Zuber. “Does Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback Enhance Executive Functions Across the Lifespan? A Systematic Review.” Journal of Cognitive Enhancement 6 (2022): 126–142. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41465-021-00218-3
11. Piff, Paul K., Pia Dietze, Matthew Feinberg, Daniel M. Stancato, and Dacher Keltner. “Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108, no. 6 (2015): 883–899. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000018
12. Gordon, Ilanit, et al. “Physiological and Behavioral Synchrony Predict Group Cohesion and Performance.” Scientific Reports 10 (2020): 8484. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-65670-1
13. Palumbo, Richard V., et al. “Interpersonal Autonomic Physiology: A Systematic Review of the Literature.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 21, no. 2 (2017): 99–141. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868316628405
14. brown, adrienne maree. Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019. https://www.akpress.org/pleasure-activism-e-book.html
15. Mehta, Nipun. “Deep Data — Can AI Help Us Grow Wiser?” ServiceSpace. https://nipun.servicespace.org/manifesto/
