What Is Energy, Really?

You’ve been experiencing energy your whole life. Have you ever stopped to notice what it’s telling you?

You have probably walked into a room at some point in your life and known almost immediately that something was not quite right, even though nobody had told you there had been an argument or that something difficult had happened before you arrived. You have probably also spent time with someone you genuinely love and found yourself unusually tired afterward, while another person can sit across from you for an hour and somehow you leave feeling clearer, lighter, or simply more like yourself. Then there are the places that affect us: the ocean, the woods, a favourite room in the house, somewhere that makes us settle almost as soon as we arrive. We experience these things all the time, and without giving the word very much thought, we tend to call many of them energy.

We use that word in so many different ways that it is worth stopping to ask what we actually mean by it. We say we have no energy, that someone has wonderful energy, or that a place feels strange. We talk about food giving us energy, music changing our energy, and certain situations draining it from us, and most of the time the person listening understands exactly what we mean even though none of those experiences is necessarily the same thing. The energy required for your body to walk up a flight of stairs is not exactly the same as what you are describing when someone changes the atmosphere of a room, and the energy your cells obtain from food is not automatically the same thing energetic practitioners are referring to when they work with Reiki or chakras. Yet we continue to reach for the same word because, somewhere underneath all of these experiences, something is being received, transferred, used, changed, or felt.

Perhaps the most interesting place to begin is not by trying to define energy in one sentence, but by realizing that you have been responding to it your entire life.

A very young child may not know that there has been tension between her parents or that someone in the family is worried about something, but she can still become unsettled in response to the atmosphere around her. Adults do this too, although over time we often become much better at overriding what we notice. You may walk into a gathering feeling quite well, spend half an hour beside someone who is angry or deeply negative, and discover later that your own mood has shifted. Another person can enter your life on a difficult day, sit with you for a while, and somehow the day does not feel quite as heavy afterward. Long before we had scientific language for emotional contagion, social cues, or physiological synchrony, people already understood that human beings affect one another.

What we know today is that this interaction is happening on more levels than simply the words we exchange. We read facial expressions, tone of voice, and posture without consciously thinking about it, and researchers have found that aspects of our physiology can even become coordinated while we are interacting with other people. This does not explain every experience someone may describe as “feeling another person's energy,” but it does remind us that we are receiving and responding to far more information from one another than the conversation alone would suggest. Sometimes the most useful question is not whether we can completely explain the experience, but whether we noticed that something in us changed.

The Body Is Far More Active Than It Appears

When we look at ourselves, the body seems solid and fairly straightforward. We see skin, muscles, bones, and organs, and it is easy to imagine that this visible structure is the main story. Underneath what we can see, however, an extraordinary amount of activity is taking place every second. Cells are continually producing and using energy; charged minerals are moving across cellular membranes; chemical messages are being sent and received; heat is being produced, and electrical activity is occurring throughout the body.

Most people are familiar with electrical activity in the heart, brain, and nerves, but the field of bioelectricity is showing us that electrical signaling is involved throughout many other types of cells and tissues as well. Cells maintain tiny voltage differences across their membranes, and these electrical patterns are involved in communication, growth, repair, and the way tissues organize themselves. Our heart produces electrical activity with every beat, and that activity also creates a measurable magnetic field around the body. Living cells can even release extremely small amounts of light as part of metabolic processes, something researchers now refer to as ultraweak photon emission.

This tells us that the physical body itself is much more dynamic than the simple picture many of us have carried around for years. We are chemical, electrical, thermal, and constantly changing living systems, interacting with our environment every moment of the day, whether we are consciously aware of those interactions or not.

That point becomes important because we often dismiss something simply because we cannot see it. We cannot see the electrical signal travelling through the heart, the aromatic molecules moving through the air when we open a bottle of essential oil, or the sound waves reaching us when someone speaks, yet each of those things can create a very real response. There is an enormous amount of information reaching us all the time that never requires our conscious permission before the body begins doing something with it.

Sound, Light and Aroma Are Already Changing Us

Think about what happens when you hear a piece of music you have not heard in many years. Within seconds, you may remember a person, a particular summer, or an experience you had almost forgotten, and suddenly the emotional state you were in before the music began is different. Sound is vibration moving through a medium, but our experience of it goes much further than the physics of the sound wave itself because the body and brain turn that information into language, memory, emotion, and meaning. Research has shown that music and other forms of sound can influence aspects of stress, heart activity, and other physiological responses, although the effect depends on both the person and the sound.

Human beings understood the power of sound long before we had instruments capable of measuring any of those changes. Cultures throughout history have used chanting, singing, and drumming during prayer, ceremony, celebration, and healing because people observed that intentional sound could change the way they felt and the way they focused their attention. This is one of the reasons sound and mantra are used in chakra work. We do not have to make exaggerated claims about a particular sound magically repairing a chakra to understand that deliberately using sound can change breathing, focus, emotions, and awareness, and that sometimes those changes help us notice something within ourselves that we had previously overlooked.

Light offers another example. After several grey days, the sun finally appears, and suddenly people want to go outside, move around, and participate in life again. We sometimes talk about this as though sunshine simply makes the day prettier, but light is also biological information. Specialized cells in the eyes communicate information about environmental light to systems that influence circadian rhythm, wakefulness, and melatonin production, which means the body is responding to light in ways that go far beyond simply allowing us to see.

Traditional energetic systems have also used colour for centuries, and modern chakra systems associate different colours with particular energy centers.

Science does not need to prove those traditional associations before colour can become useful in personal exploration. If deliberately working with a colour repeatedly draws your attention toward a particular feeling, memory, or part of yourself, then it has become one more way of observing your internal response. The purpose is not to obey a colour chart; the purpose is to notice what

happens.

Aromatherapy may make this even easier to understand because smell can change our internal experience incredibly quickly. When an essential oil is opened, volatile plant molecules move into the air and interact with the olfactory system, which has close relationships with areas of the brain involved in emotion and memory. That is one reason a smell can take you back to childhood or bring a person vividly to mind before you have consciously figured out what you are smelling.

At Casaroma, however, we do not think of essential oils as pleasant smells that simply help people relax. Different plants contain different combinations of chemical compounds, and they have different physical, emotional, mental, and energetic characteristics. If you tell me you are overwhelmed, I want to know whether you are frightened, mentally exhausted, or carrying something emotionally that you have not expressed, because those are very different experiences even though the same word may be used to describe all three. When we choose an essential oil or blend, we are not choosing a smell for a symptom; we are considering the whole person who is having the experience.

Food Is Energy, but It Is Also Much More

Food may be one of the clearest places where we have reduced something incredibly complex into a handful of numbers. We talk about calories, protein, and carbohydrates because those things matter, but a carrot is not simply a certain number of calories, and a blueberry is not interchangeable with a beet because their carbohydrate counts happen to be similar. Different foods contain different nutrients, pigments, and plant compounds, and the body interacts with each of them differently.

Food gives us chemical energy, but it also provides the physical materials from which the body repairs tissue, produces hormones, and carries out the countless processes required to remain alive. We also experience food emotionally and culturally. There are meals associated with family, foods that remind us of childhood, and foods we naturally reach for at different times of the year. Traditional systems have described foods through qualities such as warming, cooling, or strengthening, while chakra teachings have added energetic, colour, and elemental associations.

At Casaroma, we are interested in all of those layers, but we do not want chakra nutrition to become something as simplistic as “red food equals Root Chakra.” We would rather ask what the food contains, how the body responds to it, and what relationship the person has with eating it, and then consider what it may contribute within the energetic work we are doing. Food is physical, chemical, emotional, and, within our teaching, energetic as well. There is no reason those things need to compete with one another.

Pay Attention to What Changes Around Other People

The people around us are another place where this becomes very real. Think about three people you know well and notice how different parts of you appear around each one. There may be someone with whom you become more confident, someone around whom you measure your words, and someone who seems to bring out your sense of humour almost immediately. You are still the same person, but the relationship changes something about the way you respond.

The same thing happens with our energy. There are people who continually leave us questioning ourselves and others who seem to make us feel more capable. There are relationships where we can disagree and remain completely ourselves, and others in which we begin shrinking long before the disagreement even happens. Science can describe parts of this through behaviour, memory, emotional contagion, and physiological synchrony, while energetic traditions also talk about what happens within and between human energy fields.

Whichever language we use, one question is especially useful: Did I notice that I changed?

If you continually come away from one environment exhausted, that is information. If you feel stronger and clearer every time you spend time with a particular person, that is information too. We do not have to immediately diagnose the other person as having “bad energy,” nor do we have to explain away what we noticed. We can simply begin paying attention to how our own system responds.

That is where energy work becomes useful rather than abstract.

This Is Where the Chakra System Begins to Make Sense

When people first hear the word chakra, they often picture seven coloured circles lined up down a human body. While that diagram is useful for teaching, it can also make the chakra system appear far simpler than it really is. The older traditions from which chakra teachings developed described subtle systems of centers, channels, breath, awareness, and energetic movement, and even those traditions did not all use the same number or arrangement of chakras.

At Casaroma, we use the seven-chakra system as a framework for understanding ourselves. It gives us somewhere to begin looking at experiences connected with safety, relationship, confidence, love, expression, perception, and our connection to something greater than ourselves, but we do not treat the chakras as seven separate compartments because human beings do not experience life that way.

Imagine that you need to have an important conversation with someone, but when the moment comes, you simply cannot say what you intended to say. It would be easy to call that a Throat Chakra issue because communication is involved, but the more useful question is why the words will not come. If you are afraid that speaking honestly may threaten your security, Root is part of the experience. If you are frightened of damaging the relationship, Sacral becomes involved. If you do not trust yourself enough to stand behind what you want to say, Solar Plexus is now involved as well.

Suddenly we can see why the chakras continually affect one another. What looked like a communication problem may actually contain safety, relationship, and confidence all at the same time. Once we understand that, chakra work becomes much less about learning the names of seven energy centres and much more about learning to see the connections within ourselves.

What Happened, and What Did You Decide It Meant?

One of the relationships we teach in the upper chakras is Crown receives, Third Eye interprets, and Throat expresses. Crown represents our connection with something greater than ourselves, whether we use the language of God, the Universe, Source, or Spirit. Third Eye is where perception and interpretation become important, while Throat is where what we understand begins to find expression.

The interpretation piece is especially interesting because human beings are remarkably quick to take an event and decide what it means. Someone does not return your call, and within a short time the event may become “they don't care about me.” Your adult child does not come to supper, and it becomes “my children don't want to spend time with me.” Your partner comes through the door unusually quiet, and before you have even asked what happened, you may already be responding to the belief that he is upset with you.

The event and the meaning we attach to the event are not always the same thing, yet once we have created the meaning, our emotional and physical responses often follow it. We begin responding not simply to what happened but to what we decided what happened meant.

This is where one of our long-standing teachings at Casaroma becomes valuable: “There is no judgement in the Universe; there is no good or bad there, there just is.” This is not suggesting that harmful actions have no consequences or that we stop using judgment when making decisions. It is asking us to separate, even briefly, what actually happened from the story we immediately created around it.

That question alone can reveal a great deal about the way we move through our lives.

We Have Become Very Good at Looking Everywhere Except Within

Perhaps this is why the conversation about energy matters so much right now. We live in a world that continually pulls our attention outward. Before breakfast we can know what is happening in another country, what someone posted overnight and what still needs an answer in our inbox, and then we move immediately into everything required by our own day.

We become very good at knowing what our family needs, what has to be done at work and what everybody around us is feeling. We can spend an enormous amount of time thinking about what needs to happen next without ever asking what is actually happening inside us while we are doing all of it.

Then someone asks, “How are you?”

“Tired.”

“What do you need?”

“I don't know.”

That is interesting, because it is not that nothing is happening inside us. Quite the opposite. There may be thoughts we have been carrying for weeks, reactions we keep repeating, and things we know we need to address, but our attention has become so accustomed to travelling outward that we sometimes struggle to recognize what is happening within us until something becomes impossible to ignore.

This, for me, is one of the most important reasons to explore energy and chakras in the first place.

What Happens When You Start Noticing?

Energy work does not always have to begin with something mystical. It can begin with observation.

Before you spend time with someone, notice how you feel, and then notice again afterward. Pay attention to what happens to you after twenty minutes on social media compared with twenty minutes outside. Notice what happens inside you when you are about to agree to something you do not really want to do.

We are not fixing anything at this stage. We are learning.

Over time, patterns begin to appear. You begin to recognize what strengthens you, what exhausts you, and where you repeatedly stop listening to yourself. You may notice that you can speak freely in one relationship but continually hold back in another, or that certain circumstances repeatedly affect your confidence in ways you had not connected before.

This is where the chakra system can become an extraordinary map, because it gives us a structured way of investigating those patterns instead of simply knowing that something does not feel right.

Thirty-Five Days of Turning Some of the Attention Inward

This is the real reason we are bringing back Casaroma's Chakra Cleanse beginning September 22. The purpose is not to spend several weeks memorizing chakra colours, stones, and essential oils, although we will work with all of those things as part of the experience. The larger purpose is to spend 35 days deliberately directing some of the attention that normally goes toward everything happening around us back toward ourselves.

We will use aromatherapy, sound and mantra, colour, stones, food, nature and meditation as tools for exploration, while working through the chakras individually so there is enough time to notice what each area brings forward. At the same time, we will continue to look at the system as a whole because one thing very often leads into another. A problem with communication may lead us back to safety, something we thought was about confidence may actually involve a relationship, and an emotional reaction that seemed to come from nowhere may reveal an old belief we have carried much longer than we realized.

Often the most important discovery is not dramatic at all. It may simply be the moment when you recognize, “I do this every time.”

Once you can see the pattern, you finally have somewhere to begin.

So What Is Energy, Really?

After everything we have explored here, I do not think the most useful answer is to reduce energy to one definition. We know that our physical bodies are continually producing, receiving, and transforming energy through chemical, electrical, and biological processes. We know that light, sound, aroma, food and other people can affect our internal state in ways we can sometimes measure and sometimes simply experience. Energetic traditions add another layer, giving us ways of thinking about subtle energy, flow, centres, awareness and the ways different parts of ourselves interact.

We do not have to make all of those things identical in order to learn from them.

What matters first is becoming interested enough to notice.

You already know what it feels like to have energy and what it feels like when it seems to disappear. You know that certain people, places, and experiences can change something in you. You have probably been noticing those changes for most of your life without ever putting all of them together and asking what they might be telling you.

And that may be the most useful place to begin.

You have spent years paying attention to everything happening around you. How much attention have you actually paid to what is happening within you?

Maybe understanding your energy starts there.