“Everything is Energy“

You’ve heard people say, “Everything is energy.”

I know. Depending on your background, that sentence alone might make you a little skeptical. Words like energy and frequency can sound very New Age, especially if you grew up in a religious environment where that kind of language wasn’t used or was something you were taught to be suspicious of. I understand that because it wasn’t really part of my language either. But if we forget the terminology for a minute, I think most of us already know the experience.

You know that feeling when you were a child and you walked into the house and knew your father was angry before he ever said anything? Maybe he wasn’t yelling. Maybe his anger wasn’t even directed toward you. You could just feel that something was different, and your body picked up on it before your mind had any reason to explain it.

I remember being at the gym once and being around someone who was extremely anxious, and after a while I could feel it in my own body. Nothing had happened to me. I wasn’t worried about anything in particular. I was simply around this person and started feeling unsettled myself.

We have scientific language for some of that. Human beings are constantly picking up information from one another through facial expressions, posture, tone of voice, movement and all sorts of tiny cues we aren’t consciously analyzing. Our nervous systems respond to other nervous systems. We know that emotional contagion and co-regulation happen. I’m also perfectly comfortable admitting that I don’t think we understand everything about what happens between human beings on a non physical plane. So when I talk about frequency, that’s the territory I’m talking about. I mean the state you are carrying into the room with you, and even more importantly, the state from which you are experiencing your own life.

I understand that talking this openly about God and spirituality on a wellness business page may make some people uncomfortable. It may even scare some people away. I’ve thought about that, and I’m okay with it because I believe that what you fundamentally believe about your own existence affects the state of your nervous system. That belief is actually at the center of how I understand wellness.

You can learn how to breathe differently, stretch, exercise and meditate. Spending time outside can help you notice what is happening in your body. You can begin to recognize tension you didn’t even realize you were carrying. I believe deeply in those practices, and they are a huge part of my own life and the work I care about. I also believe there comes a point when we have to ask what the body may be responding to in the first place.

If underneath everything you are carrying uncertainty about whether you belong here, whether there is something fundamentally wrong with you, whether you are safe in your relationship with God, or whether love can ultimately be taken away from you, I believe your body is going to live inside that story. And then it doesn’t matter what we practice. Those practices just become treatments for symptoms of a deeper fundamental problem.

Sometimes what the body is responding to is connected to something that happened to us. Our histories matter. The environments we grew up in taught our bodies things about connection and safety long before we were old enough to understand what was happening. I think there is another layer underneath even that, though, and it has to do with what we believe about the simple fact that we exist.

I have always been a deep and abstract thinker. At some point I started asking myself what I actually believed about where I came from and who I was before everything happened to me. I wanted to understand where I thought my value came from before I did anything useful or impressive with this life. Those questions became incredibly important because for most of my life I carried a foundational belief that I came into this world fundamentally flawed.

I grew up in Christianity, and I want to be careful here because Christianity is enormous. Christians have disagreed for centuries about original sin, human nature, salvation, atonement and hell. The particular version of Christianity I received doesn’t represent every Christian tradition or every way of understanding Jesus. I can only talk honestly about what I was taught, what I understood from it and what happened when those ideas settled into me as a child.

What I understood was that human beings were born with a sinful nature. Humanity was fallen and separated from God, and somehow I had inherited that problem simply by being human. I hadn’t personally done anything yet, but something was already wrong. Of course, I wasn’t sitting around as a little girl analyzing the theology of that. What settled into me was much simpler. There is something wrong with me.

I think that belief became much more important in my life than I understood for a very long time because it fit easily with the idea that goodness was something I needed to demonstrate. It became possible to experience my own spiritual life through the question of whether I was doing it correctly.

Even faith could become something I was doing. I could genuinely be praying while some part of me was monitoring how well I was praying. I could love God and still wonder whether God was pleased with me. Something that could have been a place of connection became tangled up with evaluation.

When I think about that now, I picture a little girl who can tell her father is angry. She doesn’t necessarily know what happened. She feels the atmosphere change and begins paying attention because paying attention helps her feel safer. Somewhere inside her is a very simple concern about whether she has done something wrong and whether she is still a good girl.

That question can follow a person for a very long time. Eventually the language becomes more sophisticated, but the question itself may remain surprisingly simple. Am I good? For me, that question followed me right into my relationship with God.

Because I was a girl, there was another layer to this that I didn’t really understand until much later. I was being taught that God loved me and that I had value, while at the same time learning something very specific about where a woman belonged in relation to a man. In the Christian world I knew, we were told that men and women were equally valuable before God, but we were also taught that the man was the head and that the woman was supposed to submit to his leadership. As an adult, I’ve had to think about what those two ideas actually say to a girl about the nature of her creation. Heck, the Christian Bible even refers to God with a male pronoun.

If God created male and female and regards both as fully valuable, what does it mean to place one underneath the authority of the other? I began wondering whether God somehow shows preference towards the masculine. Is there something about being male that gives a person access to an authority a woman does not have simply because she is female? If both carry the image of God, what exactly are we saying about that image when one is assigned authority over the other?

I know there are thoughtful Christians who believe equality and different roles can exist together, and I understand that this is how many people reconcile those teachings. I’m interested in going underneath the explanation and asking what it means for our understanding of God and creation. Because my nervous system wasn’t studying systematic theology. I was learning what it meant to be a human being, and specifically what it meant to be a female human being in relationship to God.

If I believe I was intentionally created by a loving Creator, then I have to ask whether it makes sense to understand my femaleness as something that places me in a spiritually subordinate position to another created human being. For me, that question reaches much deeper than gender roles. It reaches all the way down into what I believe about the character of the Creator.

Sometimes I think about the girl I was on the day I was born, before I knew there were rules attached to being female. I didn’t arrive as half of an image that required a man to complete it. I arrived alive. Whatever mystery placed breath in my body had already given me a mind that would question and a voice that would eventually learn how to speak. My capacity to think and create and love was already there waiting to develop.

Part of examining my faith has meant becoming willing to ask whether some of the things I once understood as God’s design might actually be human interpretations of God. I’m no longer afraid of that question. If something is true, I don’t think my examining it threatens the truth. When I stand before God, I believe I stand there as a fully created human being. I don’t believe the Creator made me a lesser version of humanity by making me female.

And then there was Jesus. The version of salvation I learned was fairly straightforward when it was explained to me as a child. Humanity was separated from God because of sin. Jesus died for our sins, and I needed to believe in him and ask him into my heart. Once I did that, my sins were forgiven and I was reconciled to God.

I accepted that explanation because it was the world I had been given. As I got older, I began allowing myself to ask questions I had previously been afraid to ask, and one of the first was surprisingly simple. Was God loving me five minutes before I asked Jesus into my heart? Everything inside me says yes.

Once I allowed myself to answer that honestly, I had to think about what it meant. If I was already loved, then my prayer didn’t cause God to begin loving me. If God knew me before I existed, whatever love exists between the Creator and me existed before I could understand Christianity. It was there before I knew what sin was and before I knew there was supposedly something I needed to do about it. So I began wondering what actually changed.

That took me into much bigger questions about atonement. I had been taught that a sacrifice was necessary because something about humanity’s relationship with God had to be made right. Jesus paid the price for sin, and through that sacrifice human beings could be reconciled to God.

I’m still deeply interested in Jesus and what the cross means. I’m simply no longer willing to pretend I don’t have questions about the explanation I inherited.

If the sacrifice is what makes humanity acceptable to God, I have to wonder what that says about God’s relationship with humanity before the sacrifice. Human beings lived for thousands of years before Jesus. They held their babies and buried people they loved. They suffered and hoped and wondered why they were here. They looked toward whatever they understood to be sacred. I have a hard time imagining that God was absent from them.

Then there is the question of salvation. I know what some people will say because people have said it to me. God loved you all along. God gave you a choice, and that is love. I understand the argument. God doesn’t force relationship, and human beings are free to respond. But I have trouble understanding something as an entirely free choice when the version of the story I was taught included eternal hell on the other side of choosing incorrectly.

Hell wasn’t an interesting theological concept to me as a child. It was terrifyingly real. That left me trying to understand how I could be loved from before the foundation of the world while also believing there would eventually be an eternal consequence attached to whether I understood something correctly and responded to it correctly. Calling it a choice never completely resolved that tension for me. It becomes even more complicated when I think about the actual human being who is supposedly making this enormously consequential decision.

None of us arrives here as a perfectly rational adult standing on neutral ground. We arrive with bodies and brains that are still developing, inside families we didn’t choose. Things happen to us before we have enough awareness to understand what is happening. Our nervous systems begin learning about safety and connection long before we have any idea that there is something called theology.

Imagine two children hearing that God is their Father. One has a father whose presence has always meant safety. The other child’s body has learned something entirely different about fathers. Those children are hearing the same words, but they are not necessarily having the same experience. Surely God understands that.

If God knows us completely, then God knows the biology we were born with and the environments in which we developed. God understands how experience affects a person’s ability to trust. One person may hear a religious message and experience comfort while another hears the same message and feels something inside her recoil. That makes the statement “everyone has a choice” much more complicated for me.

I think about someone sitting in the worst moment of her life. Maybe she has lost someone she loves or something terrible has happened to her. Maybe she has stopped believing in God because life has hurt too much. I cannot imagine that the Creator is standing somewhere outside that suffering waiting for her to get her theology right before entering it with her. When someone is sitting on the floor after her entire life has fallen apart, I need a God who is already on the floor. I need a God whose compassion is large enough to understand the human being who cannot currently find God at all.

Of course that brings me straight into one of the hardest questions human beings have ever asked. If God is loving, what do we do with the amount of suffering in this world? I don’t know. I don’t know why children suffer or why bodies sometimes fail in horrific ways. I don’t understand why one human being can do something almost incomprehensibly cruel to another. There was a time when I thought faith meant having an answer for questions like that, but I’m much more comfortable now admitting that there are things I simply do not understand.

Sometimes I think we become so uncomfortable with mystery that we reach for an explanation before we have really sat beside the suffering. There are experiences in human life that I don’t want to stand outside of and explain. If someone’s world has collapsed, I’m not particularly interested in telling her why God allowed it. I would rather sit beside her, and I believe God is there too. That belief has become more important to me than having an explanation for why suffering exists.

All of these questions eventually forced me to consider something that was frightening at first. What if some of what I was taught about God was someone’s interpretation of God?When you have been given a religious framework as truth, questioning that framework can feel almost indistinguishable from questioning God. The fear that rises up can become powerful enough to stop the question before you’ve really asked it. But tradition and God are not necessarily the same thing. Human beings have been trying to understand God for a very long time. The fact that an interpretation is old doesn’t make it meaningless, but age also doesn’t turn human interpretation into God.

I reached a point where I would rather ask a frightening question in the presence of God than spend the rest of my life protecting an answer that keeps me frightened of God.

I started looking at creation differently too. Sometimes I think about how strange it is that any of us are here. I am alive on a tiny planet inside a universe whose size I cannot actually comprehend. My heart began beating before I knew I had a heart. My body formed without asking me how to build it. I can walk outside and put my hand against a tree and touch something alive that began growing without my involvement. The fact that I exist feels like a living miracle, and I did absolutely nothing to make that happen. That makes it difficult for me to believe that the deepest meaning of this extraordinary act of creation eventually comes down to an action I have to perform so that the Creator can finally reunite with something the Creator chose to make. I find myself thinking that surely God is bigger than my decision and love is bigger than the theological program I was given for getting back to it.

I create things myself, and there is a particular feeling when something that existed only inside you suddenly exists outside of you. You wanted it here, and now it is here. I sometimes wonder whether the rest of creation tells us something about the Creator in that way.

A flower can bloom somewhere in a forest where no human being will ever see it. Its existence isn’t wasted because nobody applauded. Stars existed long before human eyes ever looked toward them. Creation seems capable of having value simply because it exists. Why would a human being be the one part of creation whose existence begins primarily as a problem that needs to be solved?

I can’t reconcile that with my experience anymore. I believe I came into this world in love, by love and for love.

I think about a newborn because something about that image gets underneath all of our arguments about worth. When you were born, you had no idea that worth was something anyone could question. You couldn’t perform goodness or prove that you were useful. You hadn’t developed an identity around what other people thought of you. You were simply here, and someone could pick you up and look at your face with wonder simply because you existed. There is something deeply sacred to me about that.

Then life starts happening. A child begins figuring out what connection feels like and what threatens it. If home is unpredictable, she may become incredibly sensitive to changes in another person’s mood because there was once a very good reason for her body to pay attention. Years later she may simply call herself anxious without realizing how intelligent that anxiety once was. I’ve learned to look at a lot of the things we call personality with more curiosity because sometimes there is an adaptation underneath them. Something that causes difficulty in adulthood may once have made complete sense in the environment where it developed. Seeing human beings this way doesn’t mean pretending we never cause harm. We obviously do. I don’t need a doctrine to convince me that cruelty exists because I can look at the world and see it, and I can look honestly at myself and know that I have the capacity to hurt other people.

What has surprised me is that understanding myself as loved has actually given me more room to take responsibility. When you fundamentally believe you are bad, a mistake can feel like evidence. You aren’t simply facing something you did. Somewhere underneath it, you are afraid the thing you did has revealed who you really are. If my worth isn’t on trial, I have more room to look directly at my behavior. I can acknowledge harm without turning the entire experience into a verdict about my existence, and I can understand where behavior came from without using history to excuse it.

That has changed the way I think about authenticity too. I used to think being authentic simply meant being true to yourself, but eventually I became curious about which self I was talking about. An old wound can speak in my own voice. Fear can feel remarkably like intuition when I’m inside it. Ego can make something feel enormously important because it touches identity, control or vulnerability. I’m interested now in the part of us that can notice all of that happening.

That is one reason meditation has become so important to me. For someone who spent so much of her life doing, sitting still can be surprisingly uncomfortable. When I get quiet, I sometimes realize my body has been bracing while I was busy thinking. I notice tension I wasn’t aware of or realize that my mind has been replaying something while my body responds as though the thing is still happening. If I stay there for a while, sometimes something begins to soften. Whatever is hurting may still hurt when I get up, but I have a little more space around it. I don’t have to let the state I’m experiencing in that moment make every decision for me.

Prayer has changed for me in that space too. There are times now when I don’t have anything to say, and years ago I probably would have wondered whether I was praying correctly. Now I can sit quietly and wonder whether experiencing God sometimes has very little to do with words.

I feel that in nature often. I can walk outside carrying something heavy and realize after a while that I am simply present again. I didn’t argue myself into peace. Something about being there allowed my body to settle enough for me to remember where I was.

This is why nervous system regulation and spirituality have become almost impossible for me to separate. I believe that what we fundamentally believe about our existence has a profound effect on the state from which our nervous system operates. I think this is important enough that we have to be willing to spend real time figuring out what we actually believe if we want to understand why peace can sometimes feel so difficult.

Breathing can help. Exercise can help. Meditation, stretching, time outside and grounding practices can be incredibly useful. I use those things myself. But if underneath all of it I don’t know what I believe about where I came from or who I am, eventually I have to go there because otherwise I may spend years treating the symptoms of a body that is trying to get my attention.

Maybe you don’t have an answer. I actually think there can be tremendous peace in admitting that. There is a difference between living honestly inside mystery and carrying around an inherited answer that some deeper part of you no longer believes. Sometimes saying, “I don’t know what I believe about this anymore,” can be an incredibly honest place to begin.

I certainly don’t have absolute certainty. I still have enormous questions about Jesus and atonement. I don’t know how to reconcile everything I believe about God with the amount of suffering in this world, and I don’t know exactly what happens when we die. I may carry some of those questions for the rest of my life. What has changed is the foundation underneath the questions.

I believe I belong here. I believe my existence had meaning before I accomplished anything with it, and I believe I came from love. When I allow myself to live from those beliefs rather than simply agreeing with them intellectually, my body experiences the world differently.

For me, one of the questions underneath so much of this was whether I was fundamentally good enough to be loved. I could have learned every regulation technique in the world and still carried that question underneath them. At some point I had to stop trying to teach my body how to be peaceful while continuing to give it a story that frightened it. This is where all of it comes back to frequency, because what we believe about our existence doesn’t stay inside theology.

Imagine that somewhere underneath a person’s life is the belief that she is fundamentally flawed and needs to prove that she is good. Something happens that she doesn’t understand, and the thoughts that arise will develop inside that foundational belief. Those thoughts affect the emotional meaning of what happened, which can influence the decision she makes next. When similar responses happen often enough, they begin becoming familiar ways of moving through the world. Years later, what began as a belief may simply feel like personality or identity. Look how far downstream we have traveled from the original story.

The same thing can happen in work, relationships, rest, ambition, creativity and the possibilities we imagine for our lives. What we believe about ourselves is already present when we decide what we are capable of doing.

This is what I mean by frequency. It is the state underneath the thoughts. Obviously human psychology doesn’t move through stages like a machine. Our bodies affect our thoughts, our environment affects our emotions, and the habits we practice can change our internal state too. By the time I am fighting with a habit, there may already be a great deal happening underneath it. I can spend all day arguing with a thought, but if that thought keeps growing from the same frightened soil, another version of it may appear tomorrow. So I want to know what is in the soil.

I want to know what I actually believe about myself and what I actually believe about God, because those two things turned out to be deeply connected for me. If the God living in my imagination is an angry father whose approval has to be maintained, my body is going to learn something from that image of God. If I believe God created me already disappointed in what I am, that belief is going to find its way into the way I experience myself. If I believe being female makes me a lesser expression of creation, that understanding becomes part of the story my body is living inside whether I consciously think about it every day or not.

My experience changed when the foundational story changed. I began to understand love as the place I came from rather than something I was trying to earn my way back into. That has made frequency feel much less like something I need to manufacture and much more like something I return to.

When I say love, I don’t mean constant pleasantness. I don’t mean avoiding anger or pretending people haven’t hurt us. Sometimes love tells the truth or establishes a boundary. It can acknowledge grief without rushing to make grief spiritually meaningful. I don’t believe spirituality should be used to climb over trauma either. If some part of a person is frightened, telling that part to raise its vibration completely misses what the body may be trying to communicate.

If I were sitting beside a scared child, I wouldn’t be irritated with her nervous system for trying to protect her. I would want to understand what happened and what she needs now. I’m learning to bring that same kind of attention inward, and over time I think the body notices the difference. There is something almost radical to me about discovering that a human being can simply be here after spending so much of life believing existence came with an evaluation attached to it.

I can have questions about God without assuming the questions themselves are evidence that something is wrong with me. I can make a mistake and deal honestly with what happened without turning myself into the mistake. I can experience uncertainty without believing uncertainty has separated me from the source from which I came.

That is the frequency I want underneath my life, and I don’t expect myself to remain there perfectly. Something will happen that touches an old wound and for a while I may forget what I know. That is part of being human. What matters to me now is recognizing the old place when I find myself there and understanding what I want to return to.

If you have a good life and still find yourself walking around with anxiety in your body that you can’t quite explain, I think this is worth thinking about. Of course there can be biological reasons for anxiety and depression, and there can be experiences in our histories that our bodies are still responding to. I’m not suggesting we dismiss any of that. I’m just wondering whether sometimes there is something else happening too.

Maybe there is a disconnect between what you have learned to say, what you consciously believe and what something much deeper in you knows to be true. A person can say that she knows she is worthy and genuinely mean it while her body continues behaving as though worth is something that has to be established. Someone can have said for years that God loves her while her actual experience of God still contains fear. The belief we can articulate and the belief the body seems to be living from are not always exactly the same.

I think that is worth a conversation with yourself, particularly if you have tried all the things we usually reach for when we want to feel better and there is still this unsettled place underneath everything. I would want to know what that place is trying to tell me before spending the rest of my life trying to quiet it down. You don’t necessarily need to arrive at an answer. There are things I am much less certain about now than I was twenty years ago, and strangely, I feel more peaceful about God than I did when I thought I had all the answers. There is a kind of honesty in being able to admit that you don’t know what you believe about something yet and giving yourself enough room to discover what is actually yours and what was handed to you. For me, the question underneath so much of this has become very simple. What do I really believe about the fact that I am here?

When I think about the little girl I was, I think about the fact that her heart was already beating before she knew she had a heart and that she was already here before anyone taught her what she needed to become. There was nothing she could have done at the beginning of her life to earn her existence because existence had already been given to her. And I believe she was loved.

Sometimes I still wonder what my relationship with God would have felt like all those years ago if I had understood that I had been loved the entire time. I can’t go back and give that understanding to the girl I was, but I can recognize what it has changed in the woman I am now. Maybe that is what healing has come to mean to me. I have become willing to examine the stories that shaped me and ask whether they still make sense in the presence of the God I have actually come to know.

I believe I came into this world in love, by love and for love, and that I was fully formed, intentionally created and already loved by a loving Creator. Living from that understanding has changed my whole human experience.

Much love,

Melissa