You Were Born Knowing How to Read Energy
Animals sense danger before it arrives. They don't need to see the threat. They don't need proof. Their bodies just know.
You were born with that same ability.
Before you had language, before you understood what people were saying, you understood how they felt. In the womb, you felt your mother's stress. Her joy. Her fear. As a baby, you didn't need words to know if you were safe. You felt it.
Energy was your first language.
Up until around age eight, before your ego fully developed, you navigated the world by feeling everything. You learnt your family's dynamics not through explanations, but through the energetic atmosphere of your home. You knew when tension filled a room. When anger was simmering beneath the surface. When love felt conditional.
Your nervous system was constantly reading the energy around you.
And it still is.
The Science Behind What You Feel
Clinical research has proven what your body already knows. Studies on children living in dangerous neighbourhoods show that even those from loving, stable homes develop health conditions at higher rates than their peers in safer areas. The cause isn't violence they've directly experienced. It's the hypervigilance. The constant scanning for threat. The nervous system that never gets to rest because the environment demands constant alertness.
The same pattern emerges in toxic working environments. Research demonstrates that employees in high-stress, psychologically unsafe workplaces develop physical health conditions at alarming rates. Cardiovascular disease. Autoimmune conditions. Digestive disorders. Chronic pain. These aren't coincidences. They're the body's response to an environment that keeps the nervous system in a perpetual state of threat, even when there's no physical danger present.
Your body is responding to energy. To atmosphere. To the felt sense of safety or danger that exists beyond what's visible. And when that energy is toxic, when your nervous system never gets the signal that it's safe to rest, your biology changes. The hypervigilance becomes embedded in your system. And it creates real, measurable physical consequences.
Here's something most people never consider: What if most of your thoughts aren't actually yours? Some belief systems suggest that up to 98% of our thoughts are absorbed from others. From our parents. Our culture. Our relationships. The people we've spent the most time around.
Think about it. That critical voice in your head... is it really your voice? Or does it sound suspiciously like someone from your past? That belief that you're "too much" or "not enough"... did you come up with that on your own? Or did you absorb it from someone who made you feel that way?
We don't just learn behaviours from others. We absorb their belief systems. Their fears. Their limitations. And then we make them our own.
If you're highly sensitive, if you're empathic, if you grew up walking on eggshells, you became an expert at reading energy. You had to. In chaotic homes, survival meant knowing the mood of the room before you entered it. In narcissistic relationships, safety meant constantly scanning for shifts in energy. In abusive dynamics, your nervous system learnt to prioritise everyone else's emotional state over your own.
You can cut the air with a knife. That's not a metaphor. You literally feel the negative energy around you. And your body reacts. Tightness in your chest. Knots in your stomach. A wave of anxiety that seems to come from nowhere.
But here's the problem: Your nervous system doesn't know the difference between your energy and theirs. It just knows there's a threat. So it responds. Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fawn. Even when the danger isn't actually yours to solve.
When Environment Becomes Biology
Just like those children in dangerous neighbourhoods who develop health conditions from hypervigilance, your body is creating physical responses to energetic threats. You might work in an office where nothing overtly dangerous happens, but the atmosphere is toxic. The passive aggression. The unpredictability. The emotional manipulation. Your nervous system registers all of it as threat.
And just like those clinical studies show, your body starts producing the same stress responses as if you were in actual physical danger. Elevated cortisol. Inflammation. Digestive issues. Sleep disruption. Chronic fatigue. These aren't signs you're weak or broken. They're evidence that your nervous system is doing exactly what it's designed to do: respond to threat.
The problem is, the threat never resolves. Because it's not a threat you can fight or flee from. It's energetic. It's environmental. And your nervous system keeps searching for a solution that doesn't exist.
You might believe you're not good enough. Not smart enough. Not lovable enough. But ask yourself: Is this really your belief? Or is this something you internalised from a parent who projected their own insecurities onto you? A partner who needed you to be small so they could feel big? A culture that profits from you feeling inadequate?
These beliefs didn't just live in your mind. They became part of your nervous system. So now, even when you consciously know you're capable, your body still reacts like you're not. Even when you logically understand you deserve better, your nervous system still braces for rejection.
Because the belief system lodged itself into your biology.
When you're constantly absorbing other people's energy, when you're living by belief systems that were never yours to begin with, your nervous system never gets to rest. Because it's trying to process feelings that don't belong to you. Solve problems that aren't yours to fix. Manage threats that exist in someone else's reality, not your own.
You feel anxious, but you can't pinpoint why. You feel exhausted, but you "haven't done anything." You feel stuck, but you can't figure out what's blocking you.
This is what happens when your energy system is overloaded with what doesn't belong to you.
When your nervous system encounters a problem, it follows a five-step cycle to find a solution. But when the problem isn't actually yours, when it's absorbed energy or someone else's emotional state, no solution can be found. Because there's nothing for your nervous system to solve.
So what does your body do? It parks that unresolved energy into your nervous system and stores it in your body, predominantly in the form of feeling. It keeps it there, ready to bring back up for psychological processing later. Except if it's not actually yours, psychological processing can't resolve it either.
And this is where the anxiety spiral begins.
When your nervous system can't find a solution, it interprets that as life-threatening danger. It thinks you're in immediate peril. The more it searches and can't find an answer, the more anxious it becomes. The anxiety escalates because from your nervous system's perspective, unresolved threat equals imminent death.
But not everything has a solution. And it certainly doesn't have a solution if it's energetically not yours to begin with.
This is why you can feel overwhelming anxiety without being able to identify what you're anxious about. Your nervous system is desperately trying to solve something that has no solution, because the problem doesn't belong to you in the first place.
Here's the shift: Your nervous system needs to learn what's actually yours to feel. Not every anxious thought is your anxiety. Not every heavy emotion is your burden. Not every belief about yourself is true.
When you start to ask whether a thought is yours or absorbed from someone else, whether a feeling is yours or you're picking up on someone else's energy, whether a belief is yours or was planted by someone who needed you to believe it, everything changes.
Because suddenly, your nervous system doesn't have to react to everything. It doesn't have to find a solution for energy that isn't yours. It doesn't have to carry the weight of other people's unprocessed emotions.
It can finally relax.
This is the work. It's not just about calming your nervous system. It's about learning to discern what's actually yours. What thoughts are actually mine? What feelings am I carrying that belong to someone else? What beliefs am I operating from that are limiting my life? What absorbed patterns are keeping me stuck?
When you start to release what was never yours, your body finally gets to feel what you actually feel. Not what you were taught to feel. Not what you absorbed to survive. Not what someone else needed you to believe.
Just you. Your truth. Your energy. Your nervous system, no longer weighed down by what doesn't belong to you.
Because you can't heal from wounds that aren't yours. You can't move forward whilst carrying someone else's limitations. You can't regulate a nervous system that's still trying to manage energy that doesn't belong in your body.
When you learn to feel your own energy again, when you release the thoughts and beliefs that were never yours, your nervous system finally exhales.
And you get to discover who you actually are beneath all the noise.
Working Together: Energy & Nervous System Sessions
Over 2-3 sessions, we'll work together to help you discern what energy is actually yours and what you've been carrying for others. In our first session, we'll identify where you're absorbing energy that doesn't belong to you - the thoughts, beliefs, and feelings you've taken on from family, relationships, or your environment. We'll begin to untangle what's yours from what isn't, so your nervous system can start to recognise the difference.
In the following sessions, we'll release the stored energy that's been parking itself in your body, the unresolved feelings your nervous system has been holding onto trying to find solutions that don't exist. We'll work somatically to help your body let go of what was never yours to process. This isn't about thinking your way through it - it's about teaching your nervous system at a cellular level what it actually needs to respond to and what it can safely release.
By the end of our sessions together, you'll have practical tools to discern in real-time whether anxiety, heaviness, or overwhelm is yours or absorbed from someone else. You'll know how to clear energy that doesn't belong to you before it lodges in your nervous system. And most importantly, you'll finally be able to feel your own feelings, think your own thoughts, and live from your own truth - not someone else's projected limitations.