What does it mean to be energetically literate?
Many of us have learned to name our feelings. This is emotional intelligence. Yet most of us in the West still don't know how to read our energy. Emotional literacy took decades to become common language, but many teachers and parents who've had the educational privilege and resources now comfortably discuss feelings, compassion, active listening, etc. But energy — the current beneath the emotion, the thing that moves through a room before anyone speaks — too often remains unnamed, underutilized, and, in the West, often outright dismissed.
Energetic literacy is the capacity to work consciously with energy in and around the human body. It’s an embodied understanding of the human energy system and how it interacts with the world around it.
The human energy system encompasses the movement of energy throughout the physical body, from the bioelectric communication between our cells to the electromagnetic fields that surround our entire body; it is therefore broader than just our nervous system, and it influences our physical, emotional, psychological, and social wellbeing. Energetic literacy is both a cognitive and somatic familiarity with our own energy systems and how they interact—and indeed are interconnected with—those of others and the world around us.
Much as the concept of emotional literacy has come to be widely accepted by psychologists, neuroscientists, educators, child development and parenting experts, etc., it is time for us to embrace the idea of energetic literacy and teach it to ourselves and our kids. This is the central aim of the Energetic Literacy Project. Being energetically literate can help us live healthier, more fulfilling, more peaceful, more sustainable, more equitable, and more successful lives—and there is now plenty of research to show it.
As human beings we experience how energy moves in, around, and through us in myriad ways every day, whether we are conscious of it or not. Energy is the current that enables movement, change, and the sharing of all forms of information. Since time immemorial, human societies across the globe have cultivated some form of energetic literacy—the ability to understand and consciously work with energy—in order to heal themselves and others, raise healthy and capable children, resolve conflict, wield power, reach higher levels of consciousness, etc. Yet Western colonialist cultures (as well as many others impacted by it) lost their energetic literacy, and later condemned this key tool of many societies as a New Age fad.
We now find ourselves living through an exciting—but also alarming—time. Against the backdrop of unprecedented disparities in wealth, ongoing systemic racism, global pandemic, increasingly destabilized democracies, and perilous climate change, a quiet revolution is unfolding. This is the converging of centuries of traditional energy work with Western scientific research from quantum physics, biochemistry, neuroscience, and more. Our most advanced scientific thinkers are finding truth in ancient mysteries. Practices and knowledge dismissed as nonsense for decades or centuries are now being validated by contemporary research showing how energy defies space and time in the quantum field, and how the human body is essentially a matrix within a matrix within a matrix—permeated throughout by energetic impulses that enable deeper and faster forms of communication than we could have imagined.
So what does it mean to be energetically illiterate? It means you might find yourself missing important tools or cues or information that could be beneficial for your health, wellbeing, happiness, professional success, creative output, parenting, love life… or just to be able to orient yourself calmly and confidently in the world. In my case, as someone who is relatively sensitive to other people's energies and emotions, as well as to sensory input from my environment, developing energetic literacy has been the most important education of my life. But I only came to it long after receiving a more "traditional" education: an Ivy League degree, a Fulbright fellowship abroad, a PhD with an award-winning dissertation, an esteemed postdoctoral position, a first book with a reputable academic press, and a tenure-track professorship. I became literate in many things through these experiences, and benefited in countless ways. Yet I remained energetically illiterate, until a series of personal challenges—including becoming a mother to a highly sensitive child, struggling with physical and psychological postpartum challenges, and nursing my partner through chronic Lyme disease—left me desperately wondering what skills and wisdom I was missing that would help me survive, and ultimately thrive, through these real-life challenges.
Since then, I've left my job as a professor, moved my family from southern California to central Vermont, reconnected with the land, studied Aikido, Reiki, and the Ishtara Method (among several others), pored over stacks of research in a process of self-reeducation, and interviewed respected experts across several fields. Through all of it, I've come to realize that energetic literacy was what I had been missing over all those years of learning and living. And I know now that the key to my daughters' happiness and success in life will be their energetic literacy. It might be the key to yours, as well.
Energetic literacy is also crucial to healing and moving our societies forward toward a more sustainable future. Throughout my prior professional life my work focused on questions of social justice. I sought to elevate the stories and truths of marginalized groups in an effort to find more peaceful, equitable, and just ways to co-exist as humans. My own experience of feeling dismissed or demeaned as a woman, and the systemic inequities that silence others, impelled me to work so that more voices could be respectfully heard. As a white woman of privilege, I have too slowly come to realize—thanks to the labor and brilliance of Lyla June, Resmaa Menakem, Robin DiAngelo, Roxane Gay, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Bayo Akomolafe, Adrienne Maree Brown, and many others before them—that white body supremacy must be addressed head-on, starting first with my own white body. Becoming energetically literate in my own body, and helping others to do the same, is my humble attempt to begin to get at the root of the problem, not just treat its symptoms. In other words, to dig deep into the murky complexities of privilege, education, knowing, nervous system trauma, and the body to unearth wisdom—my own and others'—that has been relentlessly denied.
Energetic literacy will, of necessity, culture, and history, be experienced differently in different bodies, which each carry their own configurations of intersectional trauma and their own wisdom. White trauma is not black trauma; the traumas experienced in privilege are not the traumas experienced in destitution. Energetic literacy cannot be—and, on some level, has never been—the domain or exclusive playground of the privileged. It is time for all of us to become literate in, or remember, the most fundamental "language" of the body and of the universe, in the ways that resonate best for each of us while uplifting all.
Energetic literacy can be learned through simple, accessible practices. There is no one right way to be energetically literate, just as there is no single right way to use any other language or to be human. It would be more accurate to use the term "energetic literacies" to acknowledge that there are multiple languages of energetic literacy that have been developed across vastly different cultures over human history. At the Energetic Literacy Project to date we draw primarily on Eastern and Western concepts, traditions, and research because that has been our training, while also developing "living laboratories" in which we hope to bring more experts and practitioners from a range of traditions.
The concept of energetic literacy is similar to that of emotional literacy, but more broadly encompassing. Since the 1990s, researchers, educators, psychologists and others have advocated for developing emotional intelligence. This concept was further developed into the idea of emotional literacy; that learning to identify, articulate, and communicate our feelings helps us to live happier, healthier, more cooperative and more successful lives. Being emotionally literate means knowing your feelings, how to positively interact with others, having empathy, and being able to manage your emotions (or self-regulate). School curriculum, parenting guides, and many other resources have been developed to help people of all ages become more emotionally literate, and the concept has become mainstream and widely valued.
This has not been the case with regard to energetic literacy. In the world of energy medicine, practitioners often speak of the physical body, the emotional body (which can be expressed through the physical), the energetic or "subtle" body, and in some cases the spiritual body. The energetic body is thought to encompass both the physical and emotional bodies; in other words, it is the underlying layer of our material existence out of which these other expressions and experiences of our life form emerge. To be emotionally literate is important but is just one piece of the equation; to be energetically literate is to understand how emotion and other forms of information flow and constrict—in the form energy—to affect your body, your health, your psyche, your relationships, your impact on others (and vice versa), and your overall well-being. Energetic literacy is also informed by somatic awareness, or consciousness of how emotions, stress, and trauma are felt and carried in the body, as Peter Levine, Resmaa Menakem, and an increasing number of therapists are using in their therapeutic work and trauma healing.
By tuning into our energetic system, we can access subtle but potent aspects of our lived experiences—subtleties or frequencies we can't hear, see, or feel when we are accustomed to functioning in an over-stimulated, overworked, under-rested state. ELP workshops and trainings offer practical advice for how to recalibrate ourselves in order to perceive—and work with -- these subtle but potent frequencies that shape our lives. For example, science is now validating hands-on energy healing, like Reiki, that for decades was dismissed by the medical field, showing that the human body may in some cases respond more effectively to the subtle electromagnetic frequencies emitted by human hands than to the more intense electric frequencies of medical devices scientists and doctors have been testing and using for decades to help the body heal. And an increasing number of medical professionals are relying on "medical intuitives" who can see or feel human energy fields to help them diagnose illness and disease.
The primary aim of the Energetic Literacy Project is to help address the crises facing (and in many cases created by) Western societies by weaving together threads of forgotten (or marginalized) wisdoms with cutting edge scientific research from quantum physics, biochemistry and other fields that remind us that we are, fundamentally, energetic -- and how to use that understanding to live happier, healthier, and more potent lives.
The Energetic Literacy Project envisions a world in which energetic intelligence is widely accepted and understood, humanity is fluent in the language of energy, and we consciously use our body's wisdom for personal and collective transformation. Our mission is to support people of all ages to work consciously with their nervous systems and their bodies for greater resiliency and transformative growth.
— Melissa Brough, PhD, RMT
