There’s something kind of mystical you already know how to do.
Your dog knows how to do it. Your Aunt Martha who binges soap operas in her fluffy chair does too.
You walk into a room and you feel energy — who’s grounded, who’s frantic, who’s performing being okay while something underneath is coiled tight. You know when someone is pulling you and when they are pushing you away too. You’ve always known this. No one taught you. You didn’t need them to.
That’s energy work.
You’re already doing it. With clients in sessions, I just go further.
For years I held a careful line in my practice. Somatic work, yes. Common sense coaching, absolutely.
But the other part — the inner balancing, the energetic clearing, the work with what I call energetic avatars — I kept that quieter. I did it but once someone warmed up and without broadcasting it. I had reasons. I didn’t want to filter out people I would enjoy working with the most at the door. I didn’t want the word energy to make someone close the tab.
I also didn’t want to be associated with the larger community of energy workers. I don’t know that many people who veer into that lane professionally and still have my life. A mom of three, an education business owner, a homeowner — for all accounts a grounded person. A person you could sit next to at the soccer game and not think too much about. I enjoy the structures in my life. I don’t look down on commitment, continuity, community or family.
I just couldn’t see myself inside a title that seemed to make other people so out of touch. The people online calling themselves made up titles like sexual energy alchemists — naked, almost feeling incestuous in their marketing. The travel influencers. The women on the brink of being homeless but selling manifestation courses in some pyramid scheme I still don’t fully understand. The men running huge conferences and big weekend experiences without asking where their clients were after five years or ten.
I don’t want to do work that is a short burst of excitement. I want my clients to cross bridges for the very last time.
This year I stopped keeping this part of my work quiet.
Here’s what changed my mind: results.
I’ve been doing this work with some of my highest-performing clients. People moving serious money. Investors. Entrepreneurs. Doctors. People who are rigorous about what they invest their time in. And what I’ve watched happen — again and again — is that the energetic work gets to something the cognitive work and even the somatic work can’t reach. Not because the cognitive work is wrong.
Because the body holds what the mind has learned to manage around. The body is heavily influenced by energy.
Want an example anyone can relate to? The couple that is just at each other all the time. They can fight about literally anything. The way they talk is charged to a duel. If we can get them both shifted in energy toward each other — if they both take a more neutral or even just a new position — everything starts to come undone. The tightly coiled energy binding they created unravels to reveal the real heart of what they both want underneath. Ideally I think humans in romantic connection do this for themselves with sex, but when that isn’t on the table anymore, I can help them get there in a session.
That one session can be more valuable than years of talk therapy where they exhaustingly communicated and negotiated.
One client walked into a high-stakes legal proceeding a different person than she’d been in every preparation session before it. We hadn’t changed her strategy. We didn’t change anything her legal team advised. We changed what she was broadcasting. Her tone of voice changed. The room responded differently. A six-year court battle — dissolved.
Another was dreading a business conversation — the kind you’ve been circling for months because something about it feels immovable. We worked with the energy around it before he walked in. The conversation opened somewhere it hadn’t been able to open before. It wasn’t even the same terrain he imagined being in.
This is what energy work does.
It shifts the signal you emit before you enter the arena of your life.
Here’s what energy work is not: religious. It’s also not a challenge to your religion.
Though you can find its fingerprints everywhere religion has ever been.
In Kabbalah, the Sefirot are the moods through which infinite divine energy moves into form. Each one corresponds to an aspect of being. The tradition of tikkun is literally the repair and restoration of these moods or flows. Kabbalists have been mapping the energetic body for centuries.
The Christian gifts of the Holy Spirit — wisdom, knowledge, healing, the working of miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits — read differently when you understand energy. Discernment of spirits is exactly what you’re doing when you feel who’s grounded and who’s not. Healing through laying on of hands is energetic transfer. This is not metaphor. This is the text.
In Islamic mysticism, particularly in Sufi practice, baraka — divine blessing, spiritual energy — is understood to move through people, places, lineages. The concept of ruh, the breath of spirit, animates the body not just biologically but energetically.
The subtle body is not a New Age invention. It’s ancient.
What is New Age is the idea that this belongs only to certain people, or certain traditions, or people willing to adopt a particular aesthetic online. It doesn’t belong to a framework or a particular organization. It belongs to the body itself.
The body knows. It has always known.
You know when someone has clean energy without being able to explain why. You know when someone’s energy is heavy or off or predatory or desperate. Some of us are even primed to seek out that darker energy through childhood experiences.
You adjust to energy without thinking about it.
What I do in a session is make that process conscious.
We locate where an emotion lives in the body. We work with what it’s holding. We clear what’s been sitting there — sometimes for years, sometimes for decades — and we let the body reorganize.
It’s not slow work. It is immediate work with clear consequences.
When you go directly to the energetic level, the shifts can be immediate. Not because anything is being forced. Because the body has been waiting for permission to move in a new direction.
This year, for the first time, I’m opening a few spots specifically for this work — intensive, one-on-one sessions combining somatic experiencing, energetic clearing, and work with the emotional imprints shaping outcomes in your life right now.
If something in this piece recognized you, consider following up with me.
Reply here or find me at my website if you want to know more.
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.



Wow, Christina.
So much to say. I love your connection other ancient traditions. I also love affirmations that we "already know" within ourselves, unconsciously, the things we need to realize. (That feels very Platonic, and as a classicist, I appreciate that!) I love your assertion that we recognize the energies in rooms we walk into. There's so much here that rings true. Beautifully done.