Because of my background in the yoga world, the many years I spent in the heart of bourgeois spirituality (Marin County, California), and my circle of wellness-focused friends and clients, I tend to land a lot of projects editing self-help books for indie authors. And I notice certain patterns with the language.
One of the things I’ve been noticing a lot recently is an overabundance of the word energy in contexts like:
Surround yourself with people with good energy.
If someone has weird energy, they’ll distract you.
People with bad energy are toxic.
We’ve all heard it, and a lot of us probably use this word almost as prolifically as we say literally instead of figuratively. And, like literally—the bane of modern lingo—I dare to suggest that we’ve gotten a little sloppy in our use of the word energy. (I’m also not a fan of toxic in the above context, but I’ll save that for another time.)
Loosely defined, energy is the physical activity of converting one substance (like food or gasoline) into another form that allows work to be done. Strictly speaking, all matter is composed of energy. Einstein’s theory of relativity was all about mass-energy equivalence. (My good friend Jen Heilman, a feng shui expert in Western Mass, where I grew up, just happens to have a video up on YouTube explaining this whole idea far better than I ever could.)
The problem comes when we lean on energy to describe the bad or good juju we feel from people without putting a lot of effort into defining what we really mean. For instance, on the insipid Power of Positivity.com, I read:
Every day we come in contact with a variety of different people. Some of these people make us happier, and others may have the opposite effect. Who we allow to influence us is up to us and choosing to spend more time with positive people will help prevent a buildup of negative energy around us.
When I read this, I picture an atmospheric state in which a buildup of negative ions in an aura-like circumference around the victim’s body causes some sort of horrible static-cling disaster. (I admit I know nothing about physics; I have a BFA in ceramics.) But, in fact, I think what the author is trying to say is that hanging out with people who aren’t “positive” (and again, not in the ion-sense) can make us feel cranky and out of sorts.
I’m not really sure this has anything to do with energy per se, but I confess that I use this word all the time in just as egregious a way as any blogger or indie self-help author out there. So I’ve been thinking about my own sloppy use of the word.
For the most part, I love people. As part of my half-assed Buddhist practice, I really work to find the positive in everyone, and also to find compassion for the things about them that bug me. Not pity (read something I once wrote about Buddhist Near Enemies like “pity” and “compassion” here), but true compassion: being at peace with others who are different, and trusting that, even if I don’t understand where they are coming from, they have reasons for doing what they do and acting how they act. We are all just doing our best, after all.
But sometimes I will meet someone who really rubs me the wrong way, and like most of my new-age contemporaries, I will usually shorthand my dislike of that person by shrugging and lazily saying “I don’t know; I just don’t like her energy.”
Instead of the ol’ scapegoat “bad energy,” I have decided to put forth some real effort into figuring out just why I might feel a certain way about a certain person. This process is making me dig deep. I’m finding out what it really is about people that might rub me the wrong or right way, and that’s making me look extra hard at myself and my own shit. It’s also making me a better writer, because I’m being forced to come up with actual meaningful adjectives.
Of course, sometimes we can’t put our finger on why we get a bad vibe from someone, and it’s still okay to listen to our intuition, even if we can’t explain why.
(Thanks to Vanessa Fiola as always for her willingness to partake in constant text-messaging convos with me that inspire me to write droll blog posts such as this one. Everyone should have friends who make them think—and never make them get on the phone!)
