I Perceive Subtle Energy

What I actually mean when I say I work with energetic information

Executive Energy Journal  |   Issue #77   |     Niina Gullstén

Welcome to The Executive Energy Journal, where we explore a side of leadership few talk about —the subtle energy we have, live in, and how it impacts clarity, decision-making, and performance.

How EEJ works

What's measurable: what research and observable mechanisms support
What's unknown: where evidence ends, and interpretation begins
What I do pragmatically anyway: the simplest reliable practice I use with clients
Your role: take what is useful and leave the rest

In this issue

I’m doing something slightly different this week.

I talk a lot about perception, intuition and subtle energy, but I rarely describe in detail what I actually perceive or how I work with that information.

So this week, I’m taking you inside a real example from my client work: a situation where what I could perceive in a client’s energy was different from the problem she was consciously trying to solve.

I’ll also look at the difference between perceiving energy and deliberately reading it, where science fits into how I think about these experiences, and why I see intuition as a continuum rather than a single ability.

1. I mean energy literally

I write a lot here about perception, intuition and the information we pick up beyond conscious thought.

But I haven't talked very much about what that actually looks like in my own work. So let me be more direct.

I perceive subtle energy.

I perceive it around people, relationships, places and situations. I perceive how energy moves, where it stops, where something changes, and where what I perceive does not seem to match what is visible on the surface.

This is not a metaphor for being observant. I mean that I perceive energy.

That absolutely doesn't mean I go around reading or analysing people. Not only would that be unethical, it would also be simply exhausting. 

There is a difference between perceiving something and deliberately reading it.

Things register in my awareness without me looking for them, just as you might notice someone's tone of voice, an unusual sound in a room or a change in the atmosphere around you. I may perceive something in a person's energy that most other people don't notice, but normally I simply notice it and move on.

Reading is different: it means that I deliberately turn my attention towards what I'm perceiving and look for more information. I do that when someone has asked me to, or in my own life when I have a reason to need that information.

I've spent years working with this perception, questioning what I perceive and testing it against what I can subsequently learn.

That has included working with mentors, receiving feedback from clients, and observing what happens in my own life.

As a result, I often perceive more than the presence of something in someone's energy. I may also perceive what it relates to, what caused a change, how different elements are connected, or what dynamic is producing what I'm seeing.

Sometimes the information is very specific.

That doesn't mean I assume that everything I perceive is automatically "true". There is still an important distinction between what I perceive, what I interpret, and what can actually be established.

But I don't treat energetic perception as a vague impression that becomes useful only after conventional analysis has explained it. It can itself contain detailed information.

And sometimes that information shows me something important that isn't available from the visible facts alone.

Here is an example.

2. Client case: point of decision

A person I worked with was unsure whether to move forward with a relationship.

There were several issues, as there often are in relationships, and my client was very aware of them.

They could name this issue, and that issue, and another one, as well as all the promising potential. They were trying to work out what the sum total of all that was, while also considering everything the relationship might still become. That was where their conscious thinking was.

But while they were talking, I could see something quite different in the energy around them.

At a deeper level, the decision had already been made to move forward with the relationship. Their words were "I don't know what I'm going to do", but their energy was more like someone saying "I'm going to pursue this relationship." And there was something else.

There was something they needed very strongly, and this relationship had somehow become connected with getting that need met.

So while their conscious question was essentially: Do all these problems mean I should or shouldn't move forward with this relationship?

what I was perceiving suggested that something else was happening underneath that question.

3. I told the client what I could see

I listened to them and then reflected back what I was noticing in their energy. Note that I didn't present it to them as a fact. I told them what I perceived and asked whether they recognised it as something that might be true for them, or whether they disagreed.

They stopped, for quite a long time.

I could see that the observation had stopped them in their tracks. Initially, they didn't particularly like the information, but they chose to stay with it, because they recognised that this was exactly what had been happening deeper inside them.

They had already been moving towards the relationship because there was something in it that represented a very specific need.

Once that need surfaced, the whole question changed.

They realised that it wasn't actually the troubled relationship or the other person they wanted. They wanted the need that had become embedded in it. It seems very obvious in hindsight, but we all have experiences of being in that situation and not seeing the deeper question.

I won't describe that need here because it was personal and specific to this client. But once they could see it, they could address the need itself rather than pursue a difficult relationship as a way of trying to get it met.

And that was a step forward, because there was never any guarantee that this relationship would have met that need in the first place.

4. The information changed the problem

This is one example of what I mean when I talk about perceiving energy. I wasn't reading another person's mind. I didn't know whether the relationship would work, and I wasn't predicting what would happen.

I could perceive information that wasn't present in the story they were consciously telling me.

And once we brought that information into the conversation, the problem changed. The question was no longer only: Should I move forward with this relationship?

There was now another question: 

What is it that I actually need, and what would be the best ways to move towards that?

That gave them several new, different options.

5. Perception and interpretation are not the same thing

This distinction is central to how I work. If I perceive something in someone's energy, the perception itself can be very clear, but its actual meaning may not be. They are different layers of information.

If I perceive resistance, for example, I don't automatically know what the resistance means. If something changes when a particular person or possibility is mentioned, that doesn't automatically tell me why. Sometimes it does, but it is not automatic. 

Interpretation is where it becomes very easy to turn information into a story, so I separate the two as far as I can.

• What did I perceive?

And then:

• What might it mean?

Sometimes the person I'm working with immediately recognises what I describe. Sometimes we need to explore it. Sometimes they don't recognise it at all, or send me an email years later saying they had forgotten about the whole thing, and now suddenly realised what it was about. Or not.

6. Where does science fit into this?

I explore that question all the time.

Some of what I perceive behaves in ways that have strong parallels with things we already understand through fields such as systems analysis and wave mechanics: interactions, feedback, interference, resonance, changes propagating through a system.

That doesn't mean those models automatically prove or explain what I perceive as subtle energy, but they give me, and hopefully you, my reader, useful ways of thinking about some of what we observe.

I've also experienced things I cannot explain that way at all. So I don't have a single theory of what "all this" is.

My working assumption is that much of what we experience as intuition or subtle perception may eventually turn out to have comprehensible mechanisms. But I don’t think humans will ever be able to explain all of reality.

(If you're new to my work and this is one of the first pieces you've read, you may be wondering where the actual science is. You'll find much more of it in earlier issues of the Executive Energy Journal and in my other work. I regularly explore research from neuroscience, psychology, physiology and other relevant fields alongside the experiential and energetic side of what I do. This particular issue is more about the practical side.)

7. I think of intuition as a continuum

I don't think intuition is necessarily one thing, but rather a continuum.

• At one end are the more mechanistic explanations: pattern recognition, rapid retrieval of learned information and non-conscious processing that produces an answer before we become consciously aware of how we arrived at it.

• Further along might be forms of deep insight, where large amounts of information seem to come together into something we experience simply as knowing.

• And at the other end are experiences people interpret as receiving information from beyond themselves. Maybe spiritually, through divine connection, or through whatever language makes sense within their worldview.

I don't think we need to decide that only one point on that continuum is "real." Different people may naturally access and process information differently. And the same person may operate at different places on that continuum at different times.

The useful questions then remain:

1. What am I perceiving?

2. How reliable is it?

3. What else could explain it?

4. And does it give me information I can actually use?

By the way, the client is now married to a different person. Not because I told them what to do (I didn't), but because once the underlying need was visible, they had more freedom in what they chose next.

8. I know I'm not the only one doing this

I know other people perceive energy as well. Some are very aware that they do.

Others may receive some of the same information without consciously recognising it as energetic perception. They may experience it as a bodily response, an impression, a sudden knowing, a change in emotion, or simply a sense that something is off.

And people may process what they perceive very differently from the way I do.

My own perception is unusually explicit. I can consciously work with a lot of what I perceive, describe it and bring it into a conversation so that we can examine it.

Not as unquestionable truth, but as information that may be useful.

9. What does this bring up for you?

I'm interested in what happens when I talk about this part of my work more directly, so I'm curious about what this issue brings up for you.

• Do you recognise this kind of perception yourself?

• Is it completely foreign to you?

• Does it raise questions about what I perceive, how I perceive energy, or what I can and cannot perceive?

Or is there something else you found yourself wondering while reading this?

You can send me a DM here on LinkedIn, or email me separately. I'm truly interested in the questions, observations and reactions.

And if there is a situation in your own life where you could use a different perspective, this is also part of what I do in my work. You are welcome to contact me about that too.

Until next Sunday,

Niina