Energy Work

Is joy work any different from other energy work?

Photo by George Hiles on Unsplash

I recently went forest bathing with my god-daughter. It was her birthday and I saw a class advertised locally, so we went along. Neither of us really knew what to expect, but she loves animals and the outdoors and she’s not been getting out much so I thought it might be a pleasant way to pass an hour together.

It turned out to be powerfully restorative, though I’m not sure I’d have suggested it if I’d known what it was going to be (and we would have missed a beautiful opportunity). Annie loved it and it’s a regular fixture of our Sundays now. We do ‘forest bathe’ (a Japanese concept called shinrin-yoku which has a growing body of public health evidence to support its impact on mental and physical health). And we also hang out in a fancy dome with a beautiful and slightly dodgy-looking Heath Robinson heat-contraption and snuggly blankets to warm us up. What we do there is ‘energy work’.

We were late that first time, got lost on the way despite it being seven minutes from Annie’s home. So we missed introductions. But halfway through that first session I found myself pondering what I’d say if someone asked me what I did (I often wonder this). Do I do joy work? Is that energy work too?

I roll my eyes enough at people who choose to describe my (very rigorous, disciplined) Thinking Environment work as ‘fluffy’. The same people run a mile from words like ‘unicorn’. I’ve been counselled often about how it’s wise to meet bureaucratically-minded people where they are at, and I can see the sense in this. But my actual experience is that it’s hard to get people thinking differently if we use the same words as we always did. And because I don’t tell anyone how to run their business or do their job, it’s up to them how much of the message they take on. My work is changemaking work, and it’s possibility work. Everyone will operationalise it differently (or not at all).

Nevertheless, it hadn’t occurred to me that my joyful practice and this woodland energy work were occupying the same space, were maybe even the same ‘work’. The difference, I realise, is that one is intentionally spiritual (and we can’t have that at work) and the other intentionally secular. Of course, Spinoza comes from a spiritual place. His argument with the established faiths of his time was against the all-seeing ‘God-on-a-cloud’. He believed in God, without a doubt, but saw God as being in all of us and most of all in the energy-giving encounters we have with fellow humans and non-humans, including inanimate life forms such as trees and rocks (and I’m aware I’m getting into a philosophical knot with this that I can’t untangle right now: we have growing evidence of trees and other life forms such as fungi ‘talking’ or at least working together). He called that energy by the Greek word zoë (‘life’) and in those encounters we find the affirmative, activist, joyful energy of potentia.

As I write, I am reminded of how the prayers of others got me through that touch-and-go 48 hours when my son was so sick, and how, when I couldn’t make sense of why this had been so powerful, my friend Kay Sidebottom described it to me as an energy. So my thinking right now is that it’s the same work, and it’s the work of recovery and rest.

There is a deep authenticity about that work in the woods. The facilitator draws on different traditions of healing and connection, whilst being very intentional in indicating which are her own heritage (Celticism) and which are the lineage of her learning (Shamanic practice). This is her political work, to avoid being drawn into appropriating others’ cultures, and it has parallels with our citation practice in joy work. And in posthumanism, which has a place for all of this, we use the word ‘genealogy’ to describe the maps we make (‘cartographies’) of our own learning lineages.

I am not going to start using Shamanic practice in my work with individuals and organisations, in the same way that I’m not going to start taking confessions. It’s not my faith, it’s not my place and it would definitely be appropriation. The woodland sessions are deeply nurturing and that’s about me doing the work on myself, to generate energy for joyful practice. But it troubles me that our society cannot and will not see these energy practices as operating in the same space as each other. I remain suspicious of organised religion, particularly when it does social justice work which can be unspokenly conditional on “finding God”. That’s not all religion-based projects, I acknowledge. But these past few weeks have opened up a fresh perspective on spirituality, energy and its relationship with joy.