Holy Spirit or Holy Psyche? Energy-like Somatic Experiences in Contemporary Abrahamic Meditative Traditions

Abstract

Meditation practitioners, historically and today, sometimes report experiencing energy-like sensations in their body. While recent empirical studies have explored such experiences in the context of Buddhist and Yogic practice, no comparable research has yet examined energy-like sensations in Jewish, Christian, or Islamic traditions. We interviewed 30 practitioners and 30 teachers from Abrahamic contemplative traditions and found that energy-like somatic experiences were common within our sample. Twelve practitioners (40%) spontaneously reported having experienced at least one, and thirteen teachers (43%) described them occurring either personally or to their students and colleagues. These experiences occurred along a continuum of intensities and valences, with interpretations ranging from anticipated signs of progress to striking unexpected events. Participants drew on a variety of metaphors and frameworks to make sense of these experiences. They often blended ideas from multiple traditions and mixed concepts from spiritual and psychological explanatory models. When comparing these descriptions from our sample to those reported by Western Buddhists in earlier research, we observe notable commonalities as well as differences in the patterns of energy-like experiences across these traditions. Our findings suggest that energy-like somatic experiences emerge through a complex interaction of cultural and bodily processes, where interpretive frameworks interact with attentional and biological processes to determine the specific phenomenology and outcomes of these energetic sensations.

1. Introduction

1.1. Meditation Research and the Study of Energy-like Somatic Experiences

Scientific research on meditation since the 1960s and 70s has been dominated by the study of practices drawn from Buddhist, Yogic, and other Asian religious and spiritual traditions. While most of this research has focused on the therapeutic potential of these practices, or their mechanisms of efficacy, in the last two decades there has been a movement to explore the full range of experiences reported in these traditions, some of which go far beyond the clinical domain (Lutz et al. 2004; MacLean et al. 2010; Hagerty et al. 2013; Laukkonen et al. 2023; Sparby and Sacchet 2024). This “third wave of meditation science” as it has recently been dubbed, is explicitly oriented towards exploring “advanced meditation” which includes a wider range of phenomenology that meditators may experience as they progress in their practice (Sacchet and Brewer 2024, 72). These advanced meditative states and stages have been documented to be both positively and negatively valenced and associated with both enhancement and impairment of functioning across multiple domains (Lindahl et al. 2017). In addition, some of these states and stages entail unusual or anomalous somatic experiences that until recently have received little scientific attention (Galante et al. 2023).

Within this “third” wave of meditation research has emerged the “Varieties of Contemplative Experience” (VCE) project, a mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges reported by Buddhist meditation practitioners in the West (Lindahl et al. 2017). Recently, the VCE research team published a paper on what they called “energy-like somatic experiences” (ELSEs) which they defined as “a type of sensation moving throughout the body or throughout a body area described with language of vibration, energy, current, or other related metaphors” (Cooper et al. 2021, 5). The authors of the study do not choose to interpret these as evidence of a “kundalini awakening” or employ any other interpretive framework, in contrast to some recent studies of similar phenomena in Yogic and other traditions (Woollacott et al. 2021; Edwards and Woollacott 2022). Instead, they sought to investigate the phenomenological characteristics of these experiences “independently from interpretations of meaning and value” (Cooper et al. 2021, 23). This methodological posture involved remaining agnostic to the meaning of these experiences and instead paying careful attention to the ways their informants make meaning of them. As they highlight, this tact is consistent with “attribution-based approaches to the study of experiences deemed religious” developed by the religious studies scholar Ann Taves (p. 22). Instead of assuming that certain experiences are inherently religious or will always be appraised as such, this way of studying meditative experience emphasizes the interpretive processes involved with “deeming” an experience religious, spiritual, psychopathological, or any other way. Employing such an approach, Cooper et al. (2021) reported on the various ways in which energy-like experiences are described and interpreted, and what kind of impact they have on the life of Western Buddhist practitioners.

Given the prominence of Buddhist and other Asian contemplative traditions in the scientific study of energy-like experiences, one may wonder if practitioners of these traditions are the only ones encountering and seeking to make sense of such experiences. Do practitioners within the contemplative1 traditions found within the “Abrahamic”2 religions also report similar phenomenology along their respective contemplative paths?

1.2. Historical Background

ELSEs are described in a range of textual sources from within Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Taking an attributional lens historically—that is, separating phenomenological features from appraisals (the interpretations and claims made about them)—we can observe a range of experiences described in traditional texts that fit this definition, even as the metaphors employed differ across time and cultural context. Though not always sharply distinguished within the texts they are reported in, it is possible to differentiate the various cultural frames and traditional religious concepts that have been used to make sense of such experiences from the reported experiences themselves. In general, we find that these experiences are often appraised as related to either subtle forms of energy, subtle energy centers, or subtle bodies variously conceived. This is the case even as the relationship between the three is rarely systematic (if discussed at all) or consistent across texts and temporal periods, even within a single religion (Samuel and Johnston 2013).

In Jewish traditions, these experiences are often described using metaphors of light, fire,3 and water, which are sometimes combined, for example, into a “river of light” (Hellner-Eshed 2009). They are also described as sometimes involving temperature changes, visions, intense emotional arousal, and involuntary movements (like cataplexy and trembling) (Garb 2011; Idel 1988b; Wolfson 1994). These experiences are appraised as associated with an influx of divine energy (shefa), the holy spirit (ruach hakodesh), the active intellect (sechel hapoel), the feminine divine indwelling presence (shekhinah), luminous divine emanations (sefirot), alterations in divine life force (chiyyut) or even the positive possession of the body by the souls of deceased saints (ibbur) (Brill 2001; Idel 1988a; Garb 2008). In Eastern and Western Christian traditions, comparable metaphors of light, fire, and water are also employed to describe ELSEs, which similarly are reported to arise with involuntary movements like shaking or falling to the ground (i.e., being slain in the spirit), visions, emotional arousal, as well as extreme temperature changes (Marin 1962; Taves 1999; McGinn 2006; Luhrmann 2012; McGuckin 2015). They were often interpreted as, or associated with, an encounter with angels, divine fire, divine light, uncreated divine energies (energia), Jesus, the holy spirit (pneuma hagion), or with God directly (McGinn 2001; Stang 2022; Pino 2023). And finally, in Islamic traditions, metaphors of light and fire are likewise ubiquitous to describe such experiences, which are reported to arise alongside a range of emotional, visionary, and somatic events. They are interpreted as, or associated with, accessing one’s spirit (ruh), subtle levels of the heart (qalb), subtle spiritual centers (lata’if), the imaginal or “corporeous” body (jism mithali), and the imaginal world (alam al-mithal) (Hermansen 1988; Corbin 1989; Bashir 2011; Milad 2013; Buehler 2015).

But what about today—what kinds of “energetic” experiences are being reported by practitioners of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic contemplative practices? Moreover, given the dizzying array of explanatory models available in today’s multicultural spiritual landscape, what kinds of interpretive frameworks are practitioners using to make sense of these energetic experiences?

2. Methodology

Our study—which we call The Varieties of Contemplative Experience—Abrahamic (VCE-A)—recruited 60 Abrahamic meditation practitioners and teachers from Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Islamicate4 traditions (Brown IRB #1301000752; UCSB IRB # 17220120). Inclusion criteria for practitioners required a minimum age of 18 years, a contemplative practice in an Abrahamic tradition, and the ability to report on a meditation-related experience that was associated with significant physiological or psychological changes. We also recruited meditation teachers who had taught extensively in one or more Abrahamic traditions. Inclusion criteria for teachers was an occupational identity as a meditation teacher or spiritual director in an Abrahamic tradition. The overall sampling strategy was purposive, utilizing both snowball and special case sampling to investigate the target phenomena. We began recruiting by reaching out to teachers from established contemplative traditions and organizations and then asking if any of their students might be willing to be interviewed as well. From there, we would ask the student practitioners to refer us to other practitioners and teachers they thought would be willing and interested in participating. Our sampling approach also aimed to include both orthodox and heterodox perspectives and traditions which together represent the contemporary landscape of contemplative practice in all three religions. Interviews were conducted over Skype, Zoom, the phone, or in person. The first round of interviews was conducted through Brown University between April 2012 and May 2015, while the second occurred through the University of California, Santa Barbara between March 2021 and March 2025. Thirty practitioners—ten from each religious tradition—and thirty teachers were recruited and interviewed for this study. While we sought to interview both Islamic “hybrids” and “perennial”5 Sufi teachers and practitioners (Hermansen 1997), the majority (though not all) of interviews were conducted among perennial groups due to accessibility and the snowball sampling method. For the Jewish and Christian subjects, there was more of an even split between orthodox and heterodox traditions, though Sephardi Jewish and Eastern Orthodox Christian traditions are underrepresented in the sample.

Interviews were transcribed and then verified to ensure the accuracy of the transcriptions. Transcripts were then uploaded and coded by the research team through the Dedoose coding software program (version 9.054) utilizing a “team-based coding” approach that utilized Applied Thematic Analysis (ATA) methodology, which combines theory-driven (deductive) and data-driven (inductive) approaches (Giesen and Rosen 2020; Guest et al. 2011). Specifically, the team utilized the phenomenology codebook developed in the VCE study informed by the attribution theory approach to the study of “experiences deemed religious” (Taves 2009), as described above.6 This resulted in a coding scheme which sought to differentiate phenomenology from appraisals as much as possible (Lindahl et al. 2017; Taves and Barlev 2023). Excerpts from the dataset were identified that met inclusion criteria for the original phenomenological category of “somatic energy”7 (as specified in Lindahl et al. 2017) as well as any discussion or appraisal of those experiences. The team-based approach to coding involved reaching consensus between the two primary coders (EI and MY) and the coding supervisor (NF) as to which phenomenological and appraisal sections warranted inclusion, resulting in 12 of the 30 practitioners and 13 of the 30 teachers meeting inclusion criteria. All in all, this resulted in 42% of the total sample (n = 25) reporting either ELSE phenomenology or ELSE- related appraisals.

After an initial round of open coding (data-driven) by the coding supervisor, the coding team held a series of iterative meetings to establish a coding framework. We settled on a codebook that included four parent categories: phenomenology, impact, metaphors, and appraisals. These parent code categories were adapted from Lindahl et al. (2017) and Cooper et al. (2021). Coders were trained to both make use of these existing coding schemes and also record instances in which deductive strategies were inappropriate or did not match this dataset. After independently coding all excerpts, the primary coders met to compare codebook implementation and resolved any discrepancies between them either together or, if needed, with the coding supervisor.

3. Results

3.1. Subject Characteristics

Out of the sample of 30 total practitioners interviewed, 12 of them (40%) voluntarily described at least one ELSE arising in the context of their meditative practice of techniques taught within Abrahamic traditions. In addition, 13 of 30 teachers (43%) discussed ELSEs and their appraisals that occurred either personally or amongst their students and colleagues. For the practitioners, seven were female, five were male, and they ranged in age from 30 to 71 years old. Almost all were from the United States with White and European ethnicity, while one was born in Bulgaria and another was Latino. The sample was highly educated, with 8 of the 12 completing advanced degrees, and they reported a range of meditation practice experience or expertise at the time of their ELSE onset, from beginner level (less than 100 h) to advanced practitioners and teachers (5000–10,000+ h) (see

Table 1. Practitioners’ demographic information.

Age	58.5 years (SD = 12.33) (range = 30–71)
Sex	n = 7 Female, n = 5 Male
Race/Ethnicity	n = 11 White, n = 1 Latino
Education	n = 1 GED, n = 3 BA, n = 4 Masters, n = 4 PhD
Religious Identity	n = 5 Christian, n = 2 Jewish, n = 2 Muslim Sufi, n = 1 Non-Muslim Sufi, n = 2 SBNR
Meditation Experience	n = 1 Beginner, n = 6 Intermediate, n = 5 Advanced

).

At the onset of their ELSEs, five practitioners were engaging in Christian forms of meditation, two were practicing Jewish forms of meditation, and five were practicing Islamic forms of meditation. These contemplative techniques, all indigenous to or derived from Abrahamic traditions, included chanting of divine names (Hebrew and Arabic), the Ignatian Spiritual exercises, the Jesus prayer, Contemplative or Apophatic prayer, Lurianic Kabbalistic practice, Heikhalot chanting and imaginal practice, vocal and non-vocal forms of Dhikr, and Mevlevi whirling. All five of the practitioners of Christian meditation identified as Christian (four Protestant, one Catholic) and both practitioners of Jewish practices identified as Jewish (conservative and modern orthodox). In the Islamicate sample, two identified as Sufi Muslims (converts), one identified as a non-Muslim Western Sufi, and two identified as spiritual but not religious despite considerable involvement in Western and Eastern European Sufi groups at the time of their ELSEs. Over the course of their lives before the onset of their ELSEs, practitioners reported a wide range of affiliations and involvement with different religious and contemplative traditions. In particular, 6 of the 12 practitioners (50%) reported meditation practice indigenous to or derived from Asian traditions which explicitly discuss or seek to cultivate ELSEs in some capacity (such as Hatha and Kundalini Yoga) (see

Table 2. Demographics, religious affiliation, meditation experience and practice before and at ELSE onset.

Subject ID	Age	Sex	Religious Affiliation(s) Before Onset	Meditation Experience	Practice(s) Before Onset	ELSE Onset Practice
100	30	F	Mainline Protestant Christianity (Presbyterian), Evangelical Protestant (Baptist), Pentecostal	Intermediate	Contemplative Prayer, Charismatic Prayer (Tongues)	Contemplative Prayer, Charismatic Prayer
101	64	F	Mainline Protestant Christianity (Presbyterian and Episcopalian)	Intermediate	Contemplative Prayer, Jesus prayer	Contemplative Prayer, Jesus Prayer
103	65	M	Catholicism (Jesuit)	Advanced	Kataphatic and Apophatic/Contemplative Prayer, Ignatian Exercises, Yoga, Zen Buddhist Meditation	Ignatian Exercises, Contemplative Prayer
106	64	F	Mainline Protestant Christianity (Methodist and Presbyterian); Catholicism (Jesuit)	Advanced	Kataphatic and Apophtic/Contemplative Prayer, Lectio Divina, Examen, Centering Prayer	Contemplative Prayer
107	69	M	Mainline Protestant Christianity (Episcopalian)	Advanced	Yoga, Jhana Meditation, Contemplative Prayer	Contemplative Prayer
111	57	M	Conservative Judaism; Jewish Shamanism	Advanced	Shamanic Journeying; Heikhalot Chanting; Kabbalistic Meditation (Abulafia); Raja Yoga Meditation	Heikhalot Chanting
117	69	M	Conservative Judaism; Modern Orthodox Judaism	Intermediate	Kabbalistic Meditation (Abulafia, Vital); Transcendental Meditation; Postural Yoga	Kabbalistic Meditation (Vital)
121	71	F	Western Sufism (Non-Islamic)	Intermediate	Chakra Meditation; Pranayama; Kundalini Yoga; Dhikr (vocal)	Dhikr (vocal)
122	55	F	Persian Sufism (Islamic)	Beginner	Dhikr (vocal)	Dhikr (vocal)
124	41	F	Eastern European Sufism (Mixed Islamic and Non-Islamic)	Intermediate	Pranayama; Postural Yoga; Holotropic Breathwork; Bagua Circle Walking; Dhikr (silent)	Contemplative and Petitionary Prayer
125	64	F	Western Sufism (Non-Islamic); Turkish Sufism (Islamic)	Advanced	Dhikr (vocal); Sufi Dancing;	Dhikr (vocal)
127	53	M	Western Sufism (Mixed Islamic and Non-Islamic)	Intermediate	Yoga; Dhikr (vocal and silent); Sufi Dancing	Dhikr (vocal and silent)

).

3.2. Co-Occuring Phenomenology

Co-occurring phenomenology were coded using the phenomenology codebook from Lindahl et al. (2017) which is organized into seven domains of experience: Affective, Cognitive, Conative, Perceptual, Sense of Self, Social, and Somatic. The most prevalent co-occurring phenomenology occurred within the Affective, Somatic, and Perceptual domains, although there were a few other notable co-occurring experiences. There were, however, a few novel categories of experience that emerged from the data that were not covered by the VCE codebook.

The most common affective experiences that co-occurred with ELSEs were “Fear and Anxiety”8 as well as “Positive Affect.”9 Five practitioners reported the arising of fear or anxiety in relation either to the ELSEs themselves (particularly if they were unexpected, unfamiliar, or overwhelming) or to other features of the same event (such as Vivid Imagery10 or Hallucinations). For example, one Jewish practitioner reported that during the course of one particularly absorptive guided meditation session where an ELSE in his head featured prominently, he became “anxious because at first I wasn’t sure I was gonna get back, wherever the hell I was. Even after the session was over, he remained anxious about the nature of the psychological change he felt was catalyzed by the session. Similarly, a Christian practitioner described being “scared shitless” during a visionary encounter with a figure “dressed in white” with “light brown skin with really curly brown hair and gold, gold brown eyes” who reached into his body triggering an intense ELSE throughout his body (described below). Finally, one Sufi practitioner reported getting “locked into fear” as a result of certain breathing practices which caused “dangerous energy” that was “out of control” to start “pounding inside” her body but in a way that “it just wasn’t going anywhere.”

In terms of “Positive Affect,” six practitioners described how their ELSEs co-occurred with experiences of “peace,” “gratitude,” “bliss,” “awe,” and “love. One Christian practitioner described how her ELSE involving “this really warm liquid starting from my head and going all the way to my toes” was accompanied by “this feeling of peace like, ‘It’s okay, I’m here, you’re alright.’” Another described how some specific contemplative experiences that occurred to her consisted of “so much energy … full of so much power and so much vibration and even love. On other occasions, “experiences of utter peace” would “flood” her being. This practitioner also described some energetic experiences as “waves of glory” because they reminded her of “moments you are … awestruck by like the sunset or something happens in nature and you’re taken over by the sublime beauty of it. It’s like that in condensed form, pouring in and out of your body. One of the Sufi practitioners also described several ELSEs co-arising with being “overwhelmed by a feeling of absolute gratitude and beauty. For example, one ELSE in particular arose during an “energetic contraction” while gazing at his teacher which he compared to “when you see something that is so profoundly beautiful that you just cannot believe how beautiful it really, really is, that such a beautiful thing could exist. That was the experience.”

Several practitioners also reported “Re-experiencing of Traumatic Memories”11 associated with their ELSEs, including early childhood memories of sexual abuse, self-described attachment wounds, as well as internalized guilt and shame. For example, one practitioner described an experience where “all my energy” was activated that “just like brought up … all [my] unresolved everything. On the one hand, “it was a beautiful experience of energy just pouring forth” but “at the same time, just like tons of shit-stuff started coming out of that experience, and like trauma and like … I would sleep all the time [given all] I was trying to work through.

Some of the co-occurring Somatic experiences were “Headaches,” “Pain,” “Pressure/Tension and Release of Tension,” “Thermal changes,” and “Sleep changes. One practitioner described a particularly “powerful” headache that attended his ELSE “in the third eye place. Several practitioners described thermal changes, specifically heat, either throughout the body or concentrated in specific bodily areas, that accompanied their ELSEs. Pain was also reported by several practitioners arising with their ELSEs, again at times diffused throughout the body and sometimes more localized. Pressure and tension, or the release of pressure or tension, was described by one practitioner on one occasion during a retreat as follows:

my muscles, in that experience were trying to relax and actually did relax in a more profound way than I’d ever experienced. So, the tensions I’d felt in my neck and back and other things, just began to kind of unwind. It’s as if the body were, you know, in this defensive protective mode and this experience just opened that up. Now of course they kind of came back, those are habits you don’t just get rid of one time, but it was different after that. I was more aware of the bodily stuff, more aware of the importance of attending to it.

And finally, several practitioners described the inability to sleep during periods of acute ELSEs, or in the case of a more temporally extended ones, during the entire period in which they were experienced. One practitioner even described how sleep itself would often trigger her own ELSEs for more than a decade, after which she would have serious difficulties returning to sleep for the rest of the evening.

Two other frequently co-occurring experiences were “Visual Lights” (see Note 10) and “Hallucinations, Visions”12 (Perceptual). In the former, four practitioners described how the perception of light accompanied their ELSEs. For example, one Jewish practitioner with considerable neo-shamanic training described working with the “light” and “energy” within his own body and that of other bodies encountered in intentionally cultivated trance experiences. The most prevalent co-occurring phenomenological category though, reported by seven practitioners, was hallucinations and visions. For example, one Christian practitioner reported a very impactful vision in which Jesus, “stuck his hands right into my chest, around my heart, and every chakra went off at that point in order, from one to seven. As this occurred, “the part of me that had been sexually abused as a child was healed. And he said, “I will be with you like this. And then there was this feeling of unconditional love, and he disappeared.”

Lastly, there were three categories of co-occurring phenomenology that emerged uniquely from this dataset and was not found in the VCE codebook. One category which co-occurred with ELSEs for two Christian practitioners in the study, we called “vocational” experiences, was described as acutely relating to one’s “calling” or mission in life, the felt sense of being drawn into a particular career or course of action independent of one’s desires or sense of independent agency. One Sufi practitioner reported that she experienced “paranormal abilities” such as clairvoyance and distance healing arising with some of her ELSEs, the former of which was also mentioned by one Jewish teacher as associated with ELSEs in some cases as well. And finally, one Muslim Sufi practitioner described the complete “inability to speak” during a particularly acute ELSE that lasted about half an hour.

3.3. Metaphors

As with Cooper et al. (2021), the most common metaphor used in the description of an ELSE was, of course, “energy,” although “spatial/movement”, “electricity” and “hydraulic” metaphors were also prevalent, and a few others were also invoked as well.

3.3.1. Energy

Eight of the practitioners explicitly used the metaphor of “energy” to describe their experiences, which was the most prevalent metaphor used in the study, perhaps not surprisingly. While it was often combined with other metaphors in their descriptions of ELSEs, it was also the only metaphor that would sometimes be used without any other metaphors to describe the experience. One Jewish teacher was discussing challenges associated with a particular meditation technique as “a kind of overflowing of energies” that he has seen result in “moments of panic when … unfamiliar energy became too strong. In the middle of this explanation, however, he interrupted himself to share that while “I hate the word “energy” as much as I hate the word “ego” … sometimes you can’t avoid using it.”

3.3.2. Spatial or Movement

The next most popular metaphor category, used by seven of the practitioners (and many teachers as well), were spatial or movement-oriented ones. Energy or vibration was often described as moving in a certain direction, whether in space generally or within the body in particular. For example, several practitioners mentioned energy “coming up” or being generally “raised” as a result of particular practices. Others described how it would move through certain parts of their body, like one Sufi practitioner who reported that after a particular retreat he experienced “vibration radiating out from my heart into my arms, out my fingers, and out the top of my head. Another Sufi practitioner recalled during one ELSE it moved very quickly “from my belly to my heart,” whereas another on another notable occasion it travelled “from my head to heart and belly button and out into the earth. One Christian practitioner similarly described her ELSE “starting from my head and going all the way to my toes.”

Some teachers in particular described how some practices they teach were specifically oriented towards mobilizing energy either up or down in the body (or both). One Christian teacher remarked that Centering Prayer as a practice “tends to deflect energy downward and outward, rather than concentrated upward. Several others remarked on how ELSEs appraised as kundalini or related to it (described more below) are often related to the “raising” of this energy in the body (whether intentionally or unintentionally), and that for traditions that do work with it directly, “one brings the kundalini up” through the body and subtle energy centers “and then back down again.”

3.3.3. Hydraulic

Hydraulic or liquid-related metaphors were also quite common amongst those who reported ELSEs. As mentioned above, one Christian practitioner described “waves of glory” that “passed through my body up and down” and was “pouring in and out” of her body. Another described how during one notable Jesus prayer practice session she “felt like this really warm liquid starting from my head and going all the way to my toes” which also co-occurred with a “feeling of peace. One Jewish practitioner offered an elaborate “wave” analogy, with both light and aquatic dimensions, to describe how he was able to partially heal a chronic medical condition through a form of ancient Jewish meditation that he discovered can impact the body on subtle levels:

The best way I can describe it is it’s like working with energy wave patterns … I experienced it as working with the waves upon water, so that as if each of our individual experiences we are waves on the ocean, we’re a ripple. The ripples have a unique identity. But in this case, it’s not working with a ripple, it’s working with the shadows that the ripples in the water project … if you think about the stream that has an eddy, the eddy doesn’t have independence from the river. But you can impact it either by changing the stones in the river [or] by sticking your finger in at certain points in the current … in a way that moves the eddy or changes things.

One Sufi practitioner described a “golden river which came and went through me on my head and through my body … in my body and outside like a river flowing through me. Finally, a Christian practitioner described how on one occasion the “energy” in his body was “kind of pouring out” with the effect being that “my body was kind of shaking.”

3.3.4. Electricity

Also common were electricity metaphors, either describing ELSEs or their as electric in nature in some way one Christian practitioner described their experience of “energy centers” in their body as “electric. In making sense of and appraising a challenging meditation-related experience, one Jewish practitioner offered an in-depth description of the relationship between their body and the electrical energy within it that was being impacted by both contemplative and therapeutic practices related to “electrical conductivity. Without being prompted or specifically queried, they explained:

A perfect metaphor for this is the following. Do you know this concept of … electrical conductivity? When temperature gets to … absolute zero, there is no resistance, [and usually] there are things in electrical circuits … there are impurities in wires and stuff like that [but] when you get to absolute zero, its complete, there’s no resistance, it doesn’t get hot. It turns out if there’s the tiniest bit of impurities, when you’re doing this high current stuff, it’ll blow it up or burn it … these impurities contain a huge amount of energy in themselves. And if you go and you start messing around with that energy, it can blow up.

Ultimately this practitioner felt that, in this experience, “a circuit breaker blew. Similarly, one Muslim Sufi practitioner described how during a retreat “I started to experience a vibration in the middle of my chest … as if I’d plugged an electric cord into a socket and stuck it on my heart. He continued that it is “kinda like when you have a circuit that has some resistance in it, the wiring will get hot. Or if it’s a light bulb, it glows, right?”

3.3.5. Other

Finally, several other categories of metaphors were also deployed by practitioners. “Combustive” or fire-related metaphors were one such category, where “fire” and “volcano” were used to describe the manifestation of an ELSEs for one Sufi practitioner. Additionally, “blockage”-related metaphors were also quite common, as many practitioners described different kinds of physical, psycho-emotional, or energetic impediments to the “smooth” or optimal flow of energy throughout their bodies. Several practitioners also described “Communication” metaphors when describing how the ELSE conveyed information to them non-verbally or was the somatic manifestation of a “poem speaking itself through me. One Sufi practitioner described how after a certain stage of their practice “what starts to happen is the energy that is coming through me begins to take a form, and almost like, we’ll say, having a voice, an expression. One Christian practitioner described how during one dramatic ELSE “I heard, like, words without language come into my consciousness. And like, that felt like a call. I had never felt called before. But it felt like it called me to itself. And finally, “vibration” metaphors were also commonly used to describe ELSEs, although it is unclear if these were more descriptive than purely metaphorical like some of the other metaphors highlighted above (such as fire or water, for example).

3.4. Duration and Impact

As in Cooper et al. (2021), ELSEs in our sample ranged in duration, from occurring just one time or on a single retreat (“transient”), emerging on several different occasions like other retreats or periods of intensive practice (“recurring”) to ones that continued ‘off cushion’ and lasted for months or even years (“enduring”). They were also reported to be associated with both positive and negative valence (also known as hedonic tone), as well as enhancement and impairment of functioning in different domains (psychological, social, occupational etc.). Sometimes an ELSE would remain positively or negatively valenced throughout the experience, whereas for others an experience that began positive or involved enhancement in functioning later became negative and impairing over time and vice versa.

Some ELSEs were described as distressing or challenging, and often times these were ones that co-occurred with pain, negative affect, or functional impairment in some domain of their life. Other ELSEs were described as very positive, both in terms of the period of its acuity as well as the purported effects of it afterwards. For example, one Sufi practitioner described an extremely challenging period of meditation-related difficulties that included anxiety and menacing auditory hallucinations until an experience after praying one day where “a golden energy … came and went through me on my head through my body” for a period of roughly four hours, after which both the anxiety and auditory hallucinations ceased completely. In other cases, ELSEs began as positive but then became negatively valenced or associated with challenges later on, while others began as negatively valenced and challenging but had beneficial effects at a later time. One Christian practitioner described a trajectory on a particular retreat that began as challenging but resulted in a powerful positive experience at the end of the retreat. He described how during the first five days he experienced “a continual outpouring of shame, guilt, grief, sorrow, longing, anger” which then flipped into a deeply healing experience that “filled my body with energy” and then “went still deeper after that to a sense of deep silence and resolution” by the last day of the retreat. However, after the retreat, he described how “I couldn’t put the lid back on, you know, all the stuff that had come up, all of it—the negative stuff as well as the positive stuff” which resulted in functional impairment resulting in an inability to continue his graduate education.

On the other hand, some practitioners described how initially challenging or distressing ELSEs later resulted in tremendously positive or beneficial effects. For example, one Western Sufi practitioner described how during a weekend meditation workshop they experienced “a volcano … arising from my belly into my heart” as she “started going psychotic” and became inundated by “overwhelming feelings” and “unconscious emotional material. However, after a five-day period of intense and acute destabilization under the close care of (and involved several targeted interventions by) her teacher, the distress and impairment not only stopped but she reported that “I was returned not just to reality but an enhanced reality. She described the impact of this experience as the healing and letting go of “my deepest misunderstanding about life and myself” that “freed me to love and safety” which remained at least until the time of the interview 30 years after this event.

3.5. Appraisals

In general, practitioners made sense of these experiences within three different registers of meaning: as either normative (expected and signs of progress along a path), normal but not-normative (expected side effects but not indicative of progress) or non-normative (unexpected and signs of being off the path or even pathology). In our sample, the majority of ELSEs were categorized as either normative or normal; however, there were several instances where they were described as a result of a non-normative energy “imbalance” as mentioned above. Additionally, practitioners and teachers sought to make sense of these experiences through engaging with religious (Abrahamic and Asian) and scientific worldviews and interpretive frameworks (see also Palitsky et al. 2023). Many practitioners, however, reported not having a useful or meaningful framework to understand these experiences at the time they occurred (or sometimes after) and, therefore, were often “surprised” or “unnerved” by them. For example, one Sufi practitioner described grabbing her husband’s hand anxiously during a very intense ELSE and exclaiming “I don’t know what is happening!” Another Sufi practitioner shared that his response to his most dramatic ELSE was thinking to himself “what’s going on here?! This is not supposed to be happening!” And even years after the fact, this practitioner shared that despite reading widely and discussing his ELSEs with others in his community who have had similar experiences, he concluded that “none of us knows what the fuck is going on … we throw sort airy fairy, New Agey sort of language around” but “none of us has a clue.”

3.5.1. Religious—Asian

Although this sample was practicing techniques derived from Jewish, Christian, and Islamic contemplative traditions, many practitioners also drew from Asian religious and spiritual terms, concepts, and frameworks to make sense of their ELSEs. Specifically, several practitioners invoked the concepts of qi, prana, kundalini, and chakras in the context of appraising their experiences. These practitioners were either directly involved in Eastern contemplative traditions before their ELSEs or else exposed to these ideas more passively through contemporary popular or spiritual culture where discourses around subtle energy have been indelibly influenced by the New Age movement (Albanese 1999). In fact, 6 of the 12 practitioners (50%) had had practice experience in Asian traditions which discuss and cultivate ELSEs before the onset of their own. For example, one practitioner who also had practiced both Yoga and Buddhist meditation before his own ELSE occurred (while practicing contemplative prayer in a church) described it as an “activation” of his “chakras. When asked to describe phenomenologically what that meant, he described “the sensation was that near the spinal cord there were these centers of energy, the first one right in this area (points to perineum) and then going up into the genitals, into the hara or the diaphragm, into the heart, you know, one after another, these became filled with light … up to the crown chakra, or the energy point at the top of the head. One Sufi teacher described how “the experience of kundalini energy … is not central to this [his own] Sufi path but is sometimes experienced by its wayfarers. While “there are very few real kundalini masters in the West, who really understand how it works,” he described how,

Traditionally one brings the kundalini up through all the chakras to the brow chakra and then back down again as the practitioner is transformed. It is very easy to become unbalanced or even crazy in this process, and the kundalini can also get stuck in the lower chakras, for example in the sex chakra producing constant sex drive/desire or in the psychic chakra opening one up to psychic experiences/psychic reality that can be overwhelming. When it reaches the heart chakra there is bliss and in the top chakra cosmic consciousness. But it is a difficult path to follow. And how to deal with individuals who have inadvertently had their kundalini awakened … is even more difficult.

This teacher emphasized that “only someone familiar with this energy can diagnose its effect on a practitioner” but “sadly there are very few real kundalini masters in the West. There are, however, “simple practices to help balance it” like “taking exercise” and “eating regularly but in small amounts” and he “advise[s] people not to do any breathing practices if their kundalini is active as this can bring more energy into the body. One other Sufi teacher described how the approach of his own tradition and teaching is different than Asian traditions which work directly or linearly with the chakras in the way described above:

In distinction from some of the Eastern traditions, there’s less of an emphasis on chakras, or centers, in terms of raising the awareness, the body awareness, either down from the crown to the base or up from the base to the crown. And there’s more of an emphasis I would say starting in the heart … and then sort of expanding in a spiral sense both up and down, so that, so to speak, the centers above and beneath are then included gradually … If that is done, you could say in an orderly fashion, then you have a safer progression so to speak, meaning that a person doesn’t receive out of body effects that they’re not ready to receive. Because you can see if you start in the center and then spiral up and down, you’re including lower centers which would be what we would normally call psychological issues, as well as higher centers, which are the sort of so-called “transpersonal” effects, gradually at the same time. Now it doesn’t always work that way, but … that’s basically the way that I and my Sufi colleagues work.

3.5.2. Religious—Abrahamic

Practitioners and teachers also drew from Abrahamic religious frameworks to appraise their ELSEs and those of their students or colleagues. In the Islamicate sample, one practitioner appraised his ELSE in relation to the lata’if (Arabic: subtle centers), while amongst Jewish interviewees, ELSEs were related to chiyyut (Hebrew: divine vitality or life force) and the sefirot (divine emanations) as energy centers in the body. Finally, both practitioners and teachers drew from the conception of the Holy Spirit in Christian traditions, while one teacher also contextualized them in relation to teachings related to the heart and the body of resurrection. Perhaps not surprisingly, these traditional Abrahamic appraisals were all reported by more orthodox or observantly practicing Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Interestingly, the often-cited correspondence between qi, prana and Abrahamic concepts like ruach, ruh, and pneuma was not mirrored in this sample, as these particular terms were not used to appraise ELSEs by these practitioners (cf. Boyadzhieva and Kayhan 2021).

One (of the two) Islamicate practitioners that identified as Muslim in the sample drew upon classical Sufi teachings regarding subtle energy centers to make sense of his own ELSEs that involved a strong vibration around his heart (described above):

This is my best grasp on it. The body is composed of energetic centers, the Sufis recognize many of these … some of them are similar in location to the famous Hindu chakras. They’re slightly different, and I think they have a different set of … psycho-spiritual associations, maybe. But … as the body purifies, we become more open to the movement of the … cosmic energy through you. And sometimes you … reach blockages, you reach places where those energy points, they call … they call them lata’if in Arabic, [which] means “subtleties. Those subtle energy centers sometimes don’t expand or don’t respond to the energy or don’t let the energy flow smoothly for God knows what reason.

Regarding his own experience, he believed that as a result of “some kind of energy transformation” or “energy movement that had been set in motion,” the energy in his body “wasn’t moving smoothly through my heart center … and my heart center was just not opening to it and not … letting it pass smoothly. The result was that “it was creating kind of friction like, like the energy was trying to get through” that manifested as the intense sensations of vibration.

One orthodox Jewish teacher and Rabbi described differing experiences and intensities of ELSEs as related to a Hasidic teaching and interpretation of the verse from Ezekiel (1:14) that the “animals ran and returned,” where the Hebrew word for “animals” (chayot) is etymologically related to the word for life or “life force” (chiyyut). Based on this connection, the teacher described how “the mystics” teach that “the energy force runs and returns, it releases and comes down” which refers to the fact that at times “Hashem [God] will turn up your electricity” which allows access heightened states of meditative awareness which may be accompanied by ELSEs and involuntary bodily movements. At other times, when “Hashem is really sucking the energy out of you” (which he compared to weaning for developmental purposes), a practitioner will find it much more difficult or impossible to access spiritual awareness in meditation practice and ELSEs (seemingly positively valenced ones) will be uncommon or absent. Another Rabbi invoked the idea of the sefirot (divine emanations) when he described how he employs “a model that sees the different centers of a human being [as] … different energy centers” and that “the goal of a meditative practice, as I understand it, is to get all of them well developed and aligned and balanced. He also described how some other Jewish contemplative groups that taught powerful (Abulafian) practices (irresponsibly in his estimation) without any preparation, would “amplify one particular center that became dominant and entrained all the other centers of the being so that a person was quite distorted [and] hyper-charged with energy.”

Only one Christian practitioner explicitly interpreted her ELSEs as related to the Holy Spirit, and she described how one such experience (which has only ever occurred a handful of times to her) arose while silently praying during a church service, when,

all of a sudden, with no one around me, I was … pushed down to the ground. Like I couldn’t handle the pressure I was feeling on my body. I was pushed and laid out to the ground. And all I could say is like, the experience was, like all time ended and was full at the same moment. It like ceased, but yet … like eternal presence. And waves, the only description I ever been able to describe [it as is] waves of glory I felt like passed through my body up and down, pulsating … And I felt so much peace just flood. And I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know anything except that experience.

When asked to try and describe the “waves of glory” more phenomenologically, especially what “glory” felt like, she described how in her yoga practice (which she developed after this experience), “I’ve had like a kundalini experience several times. And that feels very naturally oriented around my nervous system. This was so other than me. Later, this practitioner continued to explain the difference between yoga-induced ELSEs and these Holy Spirit ELSEs along the lines of this difference between her own energy system and the experience of something wholly “Other”:

So I think … one example I would give is, like, when they talk about pranayama, or breath work, right? Like pranayama is not the breath work, it’s the experience of not needing to breathe anymore and being caught in like a prana state. And so when I was in Nepal … getting my yoga certification I worked on breathwork, I had multiple experiences of reaching that state of … not needing to breathe for extended 15, 20 min periods of time … it was like a flow state of like, nothingness and sort of spaciousness, and my whole mind was calmed … It was just like a vast nothingness and a lot of people would be like, “Whoa, that’s amazing!” But like … compared to experiencing the Holy Spirit … (laughs) I don’t know, it felt like I was experiencing my own consciousness.

She also described how even in experiences of what she understands to be kundalini, “I feel like I was experiencing my own body’s energy and like purging, purging that was happening in my energetic bodily system. However, “It just all felt like it was happening on a natural plane of existence. Like it didn’t feel holy other than that, I didn’t feel like I was encountering this personal Holy Other thing that was shattering me … I wasn’t being gifted another spirit … it feels so not me.”

Finally, one Christian teacher discussed some lesser-known traditional appraisals of ELSEs as well as the reasons they might be unfamiliar to many Christians today. She described how, “Christianity, by and large, particularly Christianity in the West, never developed an extensive kind of subtle body taxonomy, actually, because it wasn’t sure it believed in those things. On the other hand, the “Eastern Orthodox tradition developed a very good one, because they were doing a lot of meditation” which was “centered around the heart” as “the home of the Holy Spirit” and “the meeting point between what you would call the spiritual worlds and incarnate worlds. While even the Orthodox traditions never developed “a full fold understanding of the chakra system, or even any kind of innate understanding of the hara, or belly,” she did find the “increasingly physical and embodied understanding of the heart … in the traditions of hesychasm … as it develops later on, from the ninth century onward” to be a helpful framework for making sense of some ELSEs in her own practice tradition. Specifically, the teachings and descriptions of “the warming or burning of the heart” in these traditions is referring to, in her reading, “what some of the Eastern traditions would call … a kundalini uprising.”

One of the reasons this teacher suggested that ELSEs do not often get interpreted according to Christian teachings is that the particular frameworks that can account for them have been repressed historically. She described how “these Hesychasts” were “spiritual professionals” that developed through their practice “a body of data that didn’t specifically mesh with the theological data. The result was that the official dogma of the church authorities was “no, there’s no subtle bodies, its all grace” and specifically that the

Christian notion of the resurrection of the body being the physical body … did real damage to the incipient Christian understanding of the resurrection body.13 And all of a sudden Christianity didn’t want to hear about the subtle bodies anymore. The resurrection body that Paul talked about unabashedly in Corinthians, they didn’t want to hear about anymore … And so you’ve gotten a devaluing, and actually a repressing, of the theological context in which subtle embodiment of spiritual states could be understood.

In a more hopeful or optimistic comparative reflection, this teacher characterized comparing subtle body physiology across different religions and traditions as “one of the wonderful breaking conversations of the 21st century. While “you’ve got your … Indian taxonomies and you’ve got your chakra taxonomies, you’ve got your subtle bodies, you’ve got the teaching on the Sufis of lata’if, the subtle sensing … they’re all finally talking with each other, so I look forward to that … being a tremendous step forward. The result of this cross-cultural conversation might eventually disclose that “this non-egoic selfhood is really housed in, and held and manifest through, what various traditions would call the subtle body and from there, it infuses its way out through the limbs into the physical body. But she concluded that to date, “we don’t know how to talk about that yet in a uniform way. And I daresay that it would vary from tradition to tradition, based on … what view you’re using.”

The idea that subtle bodies vary between different traditions, both in the East and West, is a point made in research scholarship on subtle body practices and frameworks (Cox 2022),14 but for now it is important to note how contemporary discourse on subtle body frameworks in even many Western Abrahamic traditions is suffused with comparison to Asian ones given their cultural currency and familiarity.

3.5.3. Scientific/Psychological

Interestingly, not all appraisals for ELSEs were religious or spiritual in nature. In fact, a considerable portion of the sample drew from different psychological or psychotherapeutic frameworks to make sense of their experiences, either in place of religious appraisals, alongside them, or in a psychologized religious hybrid or syncretism. In terms of pure psychological or psychotherapeutic appraisals, many practitioners made reference to the idea that trauma is stored in the body and that some contemplative practices impact that stored trauma in different ways which can result in or manifest as an ELSE. Additionally, some practitioners drew on different psychoanalytic and psychodynamic conceptions of the “unconscious” and its relationship to the body to explain or make sense of their ELSEs.

Many subjects combined psychological and religious frameworks, resulting in hybrid or syncretic appraisal frameworks. For example, one Sufi practitioner described her own ELSE as a result or manifestation of “unconscious emotional material” being purified as part of a spiritual purification process. One Christian practitioner who found Jungian frameworks resonant and helpful for making sense of her own experiences stated very explicitly that “the body is the unconscious” and that a lot of her contemplative path involved “coming back into my body and facing horrendous things that I would rather not face about myself. With regards to the ELSE that she reported, she described how she came to understand it as involved in a process of “seeing through the eyes of God” instead of seeing through her “unconscious” as it had been shaped by her traumatic experiences earlier in her life. Combining Christian and Jungian psychoanalytic frameworks, she described how “there’s a lot to grapple with in the shadow, but a lot of the shadow is nourishment for a defeated soul. One Jewish practitioner combined terms and concepts from the trauma treatment modality Somatic Experiencing (SE) with frameworks and ideas from Jewish mysticism, understanding his own experience of “purifying energetic blockages” in his body working with an SE therapist as liberating the sparks of light from the “klipot” (demonic shells) as part of a process of intrapersonal “tikkun olam” (healing the world).

Finally, one Christian practitioner, who shared that she had been in regular psychoanalysis for the last few years prior to the interview, sought to differentiate what she considered “naturalistic” psychological ELSEs from ELSEs caused by the Holy Spirit, even as both interact with the trauma stored in her body—just in different ways. She explained that,

This is what’s really weird, like when I’m working through psychic problems, like psychological traumas, it’s very oriented around different pain bodies so like I can point to the organ … like this whole left side of my body has been filled with pain in the last four years, working through my childhood trauma. And I can usually point at different places my body’s holding it when I’m working through, but only when I’m strictly working on a psychic plane, like with my analyst. When I’m in spiritual experiences, it’s more of like a covering of sorrow, or an emotional overwhelm of the body. And it feels just everywhere … that’s why I have a hard time using the word pain. It feels like pain is much more when I’m working through psychic trauma. And I feel like when I’m in the religious presence covering me, it’s much more suffering and it feels total, totalizing over my body … It feels like a garment almost.

This practitioner was keen to recognize the importance of these psychological “pain bodies” and the sensations associated with working to heal the imprint of trauma upon them. At the same time, she continued to emphasize the importance of “discernment” to differentiate the source and nature of different ELSEs. It was important to her to be able to mark the phenomenological similarities while clarifying the ontological differences, or in her words, “without reducing the spirit to the psyche. In contrast to many of the other practitioners who made sense of their ELSEs (following trends in New Age spirituality) as part of a “psychologizing of religion and sacralization of psychology” (Hanegraaff 1996, pp. 222–23), this practitioner found a firm distinction between spirit and psyche more compelling and useful for making sense and meaning of her experiences.

4. Discussion

As part of the Varieties of Contemplative Experience—Abrahamic (VCE-A) project, in this study we sought to investigate the phenomenology and interpretations of energy-like somatic experiences (ELSEs) as they occur in contemporary Abrahamic traditions. We interviewed 30 practitioners and 30 teachers of practices derived from Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Despite not being explicitly including questions about energy-like experiences, 12 of the 30 practitioners we interviewed spontaneously reported at least one ELSE. Similarly, 13 of the 30 teachers described ELSEs (or the appraisals of them) experienced either personally or by their students and colleagues. If we had asked directly, we anticipate that even more participants would have reported such experiences. We found that these experiences were not only common in this sample but associated with a wide range of co-occurring phenomenological features, metaphors, appraisals, and impacts.

Co-occurring phenomenology ranged from positively to negatively valenced and were reported across a range of experiential domains. Affective experiences included negative feelings such as fear and anxiety, positively valenced emotions such as love, peace, and awe, as well as the re-experiencing of traumatic memories. Somatic experiences included headaches, pain, pressure or tension and the release of pressure or tension, thermal changes, and alterations in sleep. Also prominent were perceptual experiences such as visual lights and hallucinations. The main metaphors employed (besides “energy”) were spatial/movement, electrical and hydraulic metaphors, and combustive, blockage, and vibrational metaphors were also used in a few cases. Appraisals ranged from normative to non-normative and drew from Asian and Abrahamic religious frameworks as well as secular psychological ones, at times even combining the different religious and psychological interpretations or differentiating them hierarchically. Finally, the impact of such experiences ranged from impairment to enhancement of functioning across multiple domains—physical, emotional, psychological, social, and occupational. Many participants reported trajectories that began as impairment or negatively valenced and ended in enhancement or positively valenced, or vice versa.

All in all, perhaps the most important take home message from this study is that meditation-related “energy” experiences reported in these traditions are not homogenous but vary widely across different phenomenological and functional domains. These observations should encourage scholars and researchers (and perhaps practitioners too) to bear this diversity in mind when discussing and comparing energy-like experiences, rather than assuming that one pattern of energy-like experience prevails within or across different religious and cultural contexts (Kripal 2022).

4.1. Buddhist and Abrahamic Comparison

When comparing our findings to those of the previous study of ELSEs among Western Buddhists (Cooper et al. 2021), we find that the Buddhist and Abrahamic samples demonstrate striking similarities in terms of co-occurring phenomenology, the metaphors deployed by practitioners, the specific range of impacts, and even some tradition-specific appraisals. However, some noticeable differences were also observed in terms of both the phenomenological features of the ELSEs as well as some other appraisals invoked in the process of making sense of them. Please see

Table 3. Phenomenology, Metaphors, Duration, Impact, Trajectory and Appraisals.

ID	Practice Tradition(s) at Onset	Phenomenology						Metaphors Used	Duration	Impact and Trajectory	Appraisals
		Affective	Somatic	Perceptual	Cognitive	Sense of Self	Other
100	Charismatic Protestant; Mainline Protestant	Change in Doubt, Faith, Trust, Commitment; Positive Affect; Re-experiencing of Traumatic Memories; Positive Affect; Empathetic or Affiliative Changes	Involuntary Movements; Pressure, Tension, and Release; Pain; Breathing Changes; Sleep Changes	Derealization; Distortions in Time/Space; Hallucinations, Visions;	Mental Stillness; Change in Worldview	Loss of Sense of Agency; Change in Self-Other or Self-World Boundaries	Vocational/Calling	Hydraulic, Spatial/Movement, Pulsating, Communication, Energy, Vibration	Transient; Recurring;	Enhancement	Psychological (Trauma) Asian (Kundalini, Prana) Abrahamic (God, Holy Spirit, Glory) Psychological/Spiritual Hybrid (Purification Process)
101	Mainline Protestant	Fear, Anxiety, Panic; Positive Affect	Cardiac Changes	Hallucinations, Visions; Visual Lights		Change in Sense of Embodiment		Hydraulic, Spatial/Movement	Recurring; Transient	Negative → Positive	Abrahamic (Jesus)
103	Catholicism (Jesuit)	Affective Lability; Re-experiencing of Traumatic Memories; Positive Affect	Involuntary Movements; Pressure, Tension, and Release		Mental Stillness, Meta-Cognition	Change in Sense of Embodiment		Energy, Hydraulic, Communication	Transient	Enhancement; Negative → Positive → Negative; Impairment	Psychological/Spiritual Hybrid (Integration Process)
106	Mainline Protestant; Catholicism (Jesuit)	Fear, Anxiety, Panic,		Hallucinations, Visions;	Vivid Imagery; Change in Worldview			Energy	Transient		Psychological/Spiritual Hybrid (Integration Process)
107	Mainline Protestant	Positive Affect; Fear, Anxiety, Panic; Change in Doubt, Faith, Trust, Commitment	Thermal Changes	Hallucinations, Visions; Visual Lights		Change in Sense of Embodiment	Vocational/Calling	Energy, Spatial/Movement, Electricity	Transient	Enhancement	Eastern (Chakras) Abrahamic (Jesus)
111	Conservative Judaism; Jewish Shamanism		Pain, Fatigue/Weakness	Hallucinations, Visions;				Energy, Hydraulic	Transient	Enhancement	Abrahamic (shefa/“spiritual energy”)
117	Conservative Judaism; Modern Orthodox Judaism;	Fear, Anxiety, Panic	Headaches/Head Pressure, Sleep Changes, Thermal Changes			Loss of Sense of Basic Self; Change in Self-World Boundaries; Loss of Sense of Agency; Change in Sense of Embodiment		Electricity, Blockages, Combustion, Other (Pulsar)	Transient	Distress/ Impairment	Psychological (The Unconscious, Trauma) Asian (Chakras) Abrahamic (Divine Sparks and Demonic Shells) Psychological/Spiritual Hybrid (Purification & Integration Process)
121	Western Sufism	Fear, Anxiety, Panic; Crying or Laughing, Empathetic or Affiliative Change	Breathing Changes	Synesthesia	Meta-Cognition	Loss of Sense of Agency	Paranormal Abilities	Energy, Spatial/Movement, Communication	Enduring (Years)	Impairment; Positive → Negative; Enhancement	Psychological (The Unconscious) Asian (Chakras, Kundalini)
122	Persian Sufism	Positive Affect; Depression, Dysphoria;		Hallucinations, Visions; Visual Lights; Perceptual Hypersensitivity; Derealization; Synesthesia				Vibration	Enduring (Months)	Positive → Negative; Impairment	Abrahamic (hal/“state”) Psychological (Psychopathology)
124	Eastern European Sufism	Positive Affect; Empathic or Affiliative Change;		Hallucinations, Visions; Perceptual Hypersensitivity; Visual Lights				Energy, Hydraulic, Spatial/Movement	Transient	Enhancement	Other (Spirit Healing)
125	Western Sufism; Turkish Sufism	Fear, Anxiety, Panic; Affective Lability; Crying; Positive Affect; Self-Conscious Emotions; Re-experiencing of Traumatic Memories	Involuntary Movements; Sleep Changes		Change in Worldview; Disintegration of Conceptual Meaning Structures			Electricity, Spatial/Movement, Combustive, Other (Lightning)	Transient; Recurring	Impairment; Negative → Positive; Enhancement	Scientific (Neurology) Psychological (Guilt; Unconscious) Psychological/Spiritual Hybrid (Purification)
127	Western Sufism	Depression, Dysphoria; Rage, Anger; Agitation or Irritability; Positive Affect, Crying; Empathetic or Affiliative Change	Cardiac Changes; Pressure, Tension, and Release; Fatigue, Weakness			Loss of Sense of Agency	Inability to Speak	Energy, Vibration, Spatial/Movement, Electricity, Blockages	Transient; Recurring	Impairment	Eastern (Chakras) Abrahamic (Purification; La’taif/“subtle centers”)

below.

Regarding phenomenology, the samples were similar in their co-occurring somatic experiences (such as heat, pain, involuntary movements, and insomnia), perceptual experiences like hallucinations, as well as affective experiences such as negative affect and re-experiencing traumatic memories. However, one difference in the Abrahamic sample was that ELSEs co-occurred with positive affect more than in the Buddhist sample, particularly positively valenced emotions like “love” and “peace. While it is tempting to turn to cultural or practice specific differences to account for this difference, it is just as likely that this reflects the differences in samples. Subjects in the Buddhist sample were included in the study only if they reported at least one challenging or distressing meditation-related experience. In contrast, participants in the Abrahamic sample were included if they had experienced significant physiological or psychological changes, whether positive or negative; an impairing or distressing experience was not part of our inclusion criteria (although 60% of the total practitioner sample did report at least one). Still, future research should explore these potential differences between Abrahamic and Buddhist practitioners. It is intriguing that in the Buddhist sample, although ELSEs were associated with some positive affective states such as “bliss”, they co-occurred less often with more affiliative emotions like “love” or lower arousal ones like “peace.”

Practitioners in both samples also used similar somatic oriented metaphors including energetic, spatial/movement, electrical, combustive, hydraulic, blockage, and vibrational imagery. Some of these analogies were identical across traditions, such as comparing the effects of energy in the body to electricity moving through electrical appliances. This similarity may be at least partially attributable to the fact that energy and electricity15 metaphors are ubiquitous in the contemporary spiritual marketplace, particularly in the New Age movement. Indeed, some authors have argued that discourse related to subtle bodies and their energies is definitive of the New Age movement itself and can even be traced back to the movement’s predecessors in the 17th and 18th centuries (Albanese 1999). It is likely that the influence of this movement (and its precursor in Theosophy) has shaped almost all modern Western discourse on subtle energy, most notably the “Western chakra system,” even as its influence may not be recognized by practitioners themselves (Leland 2016; Cox 2022). Nevertheless, we believe it is unlikely that this similarity is attributable completely to cultural construction or “invitation,” as we will discuss at length below.

The two samples also showed similarities in terms of both the range of positive and negative impacts associated with ELSEs and the variety of resulting trajectories. Even many of the appraisals were similar, with Abrahamic practitioners frequently drawing on Asian appraisals such as kundalini and the chakra system to make sense of their experiences, as well as spiritual purification frameworks. In contrast, some practitioners in this sample drew exclusively from their respective Abrahamic religious frameworks and indigenous terms to interpret their ELSEs. Even more interesting were the differences in psychological frameworks used to interpret the ELSEs. While both samples drew from “trauma-specific” and sensorimotor psychological models and frameworks like Somatic Experiencing, we found that the Abrahamic sample had a tendency to invoke explicitly psychoanalytic or psychodynamic frameworks that interpret ELSEs in terms of the unconscious and psychic energy in the body.

This last point is of particular interest as it may reflect the operation of a unique historical looping effect.’ Recent historical scholarship has shown that Western mystical texts and traditions, including Abrahamic and Neoplatonic sources, directly influenced psychoanalytic understandings of the “subtle body,” particularly those of Carl Jung and James Hillman (Kingsley 2021; Cox 2022; Shaw 2024). Our finding that Abrahamic practitioners today find resonance with these archetypal and psychodynamic appraisals of their ELSEs suggests that they may be recovering traces of (arguably ‘repressed’) subtle body frameworks from their own contemplative traditions through these psychological intermediaries.

4.2. ELSEs, Expectation, and Interpretive Frameworks

In their paper, Cooper et al. (2021) emphasize that “ELSEs may occur regardless of the expectation effects from specific practices or associated worldviews” (23). They draw this conclusion based on the fact that they observed similar frequencies of ELSEs across Buddhist traditions despite the fact that “normative frameworks for understanding and working with [these experiences] differ significantly depending upon the Buddhist lineage” (23). In our study, we similarly found that some practitioners reported ELSEs although their particular meditative traditions and microcultures neither valorized nor even explicitly named such experiences. Indeed, many practitioners in our sample had great difficulty making sense of these experiences. As described above, they often expressed that during or right after their ELSE they were “surprised” or “unnerved” by the experience since they had no accessible or amenable framework to make sense of these experiences nor even suggest that they could result from meditation practice. Perhaps even more surprising to the reader will be that this was true even for several practitioners with previous practice experience (before ELSE onset) in Yogic or other traditions with omnipresent discourse about subtle bodies, subtle energy, and/or subtle energy centers.

This pattern of Abrahamic contemplatives being surprised and confused also appears in several contemporary autobiographical accounts. For example, Özelsel (1996), in her published diary from her traditional 40-day Sufi retreat in Istanbul, describes many ELSEs involving “an intense trembling … in my whole body” which often manifested with involuntary movements like “twitches and jerks” (28). She describes the progressive development of a “vibration that sometimes pulsed through my body like a current,” and “feeling as if my lower pelvic cavity was filled with a bubbly, champagne-like liquid” (29). She explains that these experiences, in contrast to many of the others that unfolded over the course of the retreat, “were not familiar to me either from traditional Sufi literature nor from conversations with friends on the Sufi Path” (p. 131). Eventually, she encountered the work of Lee Sannella (1987) by recommendation of some non-Sufi “acquaintances interested in the esoteric” and thereby comes to understand her own experiences as “kundalini-like processes” (131). She does, however, strongly argue against the identification of practices associated with the “Lata’if” with “Sufi Kundalini” since the differences between the two are “more numerous than the similarities” (131).

Similarly, St. Romain (2002) described the unfolding of a range of ELSEs over the course of his own contemplative practice trajectory such as “all sorts of movements of energy in the brain, the ears, the spine” as well as “a prickly sensation on the top of my head” that “felt like a mild electrical shock” and was accompanied by “waves of energy” (24). He recounts how on “a few occasions, I described my experiences to priests and nuns who were close friends and who also had experience in spiritual direction;” however, “they seemed at a loss to help me understand what was going on” (10). Once the spontaneous movements began, “my interpretive system began to fail me,” and when the prickly pain began “communing in some strange way with my abdomen … I knew I was out of the Christian contemplative framework, for sure” (8). He was also eventually recommended the work of Sannella and others (like Ram Dass) which guided him to appraise his experiences as being a result of “kundalini energy” and syncretically conceptualize his trajectory as an unfolding of “the kundalini process … used by the Spirit to awaken me to my true humanity in Christ” (25).

4.3. Cultural Kindling

In their effort to develop a “comparative phenomenology of spiritual experience,” Cassaniti and Luhrmann (2014) propose the concept of “cultural kindling” to refer to the idea that the “local culture of a particular religion shap[es] the way people pay attention to what they sense and feel in search of evidence of the spiritual” (341). Importantly though, this theory also proposes that “not all kinds of mental and bodily events respond equally to cultural invitation” (341). We believe this framework to be a very plausible and useful one (with some minor adjustments) to help in making sense of our findings, particularly when comparing ELSEs across samples and traditions.

Building on Taves’ attributional approach to the study of religious experiences as well, Cassaniti and Luhrmann distinguish between two different kinds of bodily experiences that get appraised as religious or spiritual. They call the first type “bodily affordances,” which are experiences that everyone has (such as crying, strong emotions, and bodily sensations like tingling or goosebumps) but are only interpreted as religious or spiritual in particular sociocultural settings that “afford” or invite a spiritual appraisal for that experience (334). An example of this would be the experience of a ‘chill’ in the body, that only in some cultural contexts would be understood as evidence of the presence of a ghost or spirit. In other cultural contexts, this sensation might be understood as a result of purely natural causes and/or not even noticed at all. The other type of experiences they term as “striking anomalous events,” which are more often appraised as religious or spiritual because “they are outside the range of everyday experience. In their formulation, these include “hallucinations or sensory overrides, déjà vu, mystical experiences, out-of-body experiences, near death experiences, and sleep paralysis” (334).

As a result of “cultural invitation,” Cassaniti and Luhrmann posit that bodily affordances will occur more frequently in cultures which appraise them as spiritual or religious than in cultures which do not find them salient or set them apart as special. Striking anomalous events, however, are reported even in cultures which do not name or set them apart, and even in cultures which do, not everyone will experience them. In her more recent book, Luhrmann (2020) summarizes their previous study and suggests that “the most general mechanism at work here is the effect of prior expectation” but that “expectation isn’t everything” since it “shifts the dial” more for bodily affordances than anomalous events (118). This “cultural kindling” framework thus introduces a spectrum of experiences deemed spiritual—ranging from “ordinary bodily events” (bodily affordances) to those that are “extraordinary” (anomalous)—and further predicts that the more extraordinary events will be more anchored in the body and thus less susceptible to cultural expectation (Luhrmann 2020, 118–19).

Cassaniti and Luhrmann specifically describe (one type of) what we are calling ELSEs—experiences of “an intense surge of power sweeping through the […] body like electricity”—as a type of bodily affordance they call an “adrenaline rush” (335). This characterization suggests two things about these experiences: (a) that they are experiences everyone has (but not everyone attends to), and (b) that the emergence of these experiences is substantially shaped by cultural expectation.

However, based on the data collected from both Buddhist and Abrahamic traditions, we observe that many ELSEs do not satisfy these two conditions. While some documented ELSEs appear similar to common or ordinary somatic sensations that only some people would attend to and interpret religiously, other experiences documented in both VCE studies would be considered “anomalous” by most researchers (judged in terms of frequency of occurrence in Western societies) and “non-ordinary” by most practitioners (Taves and Barlev 2023). We are thinking particularly of ELSEs with more dramatic co-occurring phenomenology and those that had significant and enduring impacts (positive and negative) on the lives of the practitioners. Moreover, in both the Abrahamic and Buddhist studies, we find documented cases in which ELSEs were reported by practitioners from traditions and microcultures which did not name or invite these experiences. In light of these observations, we propose to understand ELSEs as occurring across the ordinary to anomalous spectrum proposed by Cassaniti and Luhrmann, rather than as limited to the ordinary category as they suggest. At least for a subset of practitioners in both samples—namely, those who practiced only in traditions that did not employ subtle energy frameworks and those who had “striking” and extraordinarily impactful phenomenology arise with their ELSE—expectation and cultural invitation appears unable to fully account for these energy-like experiences.

5. Future Directions

If at least some ELSEs are shaped more by the capacity of the body than culture or expectation, which bodily processes are responsible for, or contribute to, these “extraordinary” or “complex bodily events”? (Luhrmann 2020, 118). An important aim for future research (with much larger sample sizes) will be to identify the mechanisms by which different meditation practices can lead to ELSEs (perhaps especially anomalous or extraordinary ones) as well as to understand whether different practices result in different types of ELSEs in different (non-Western) cultural contexts (Cooper et al. 2021, 23).

While making an ontological assessment of these experiences would take us beyond the scope of this paper and into very speculative (and contested) territory, it is important to note that there does seem to be a pattern across the two samples of ELSEs involving physical pain or tension, emotional arousal, and/or the resurfacing of challenging or traumatic memories. Then (either spontaneously or as a result of specific interventions) a release of tension or pressure as the “blockage” was cleared or the “knot” unwound resulting in an enhancement of psychological and sometimes physical functioning. Practitioners across samples often made sense of these trajectories according to either religious or psychosomatic psychological (or both) purification frameworks. While it is tempting to view this as evidence that “the body keeps the score” in terms of trauma being encoded in the body or viscera—indeed this was an influential appraisal by many practitioners across both samples—the evidence for this particular scientific framework (building on the work of Bessel Van der Kolk, Stephen Porges, and colleagues) is currently uncertain and contested (Grossman 2023). As such, we believe exercising caution around these particular explanatory claims is warranted. While proponents will view these cases as evidence of a cross-cultural or perhaps universal feature of healing and contemplative trajectories, skeptics will point out the current cultural capital of this psychotherapeutic framework in the West and emphasize the potential expectation effects such a cultural script could have on shaping these experiences.

Much more research investigating ELSEs, especially in terms of contemplative practice in non-Western countries and cultures, will be needed before more rigorous cross-cultural or universal claims can be supported. In fact, given the exploratory nature of both studies and the modest sample sizes (at least by quantitative standards), population studies will be necessary to investigate how representative any of the similarities and differences observed between the two studies are. While it seems unlikely that expectation effects can account for all (and perhaps especially the non-ordinary) ELSEs documented in these interviews, once again a more skeptical perspective might emphasize the relatively pervasive nature of certain kinds of subtle body discourse in Western spiritual and metaphysical cultures. Even more broadly, the omnipresence of postural yoga studios in most Western countries and the “Western chakra system” popularized by them—in person and in media involving pictures of rainbow chakras—could be argued to contribute to important and widespread expectation effects (Leland 2016). In fact, as Luhrmann (2020) acknowledges, it may very well be that culture plays a bigger role in “anomalous” or “extraordinary” experiences than suggested by her own theoretical model, and the only way to know for sure is by undertaking more cross-cultural and comparative research.

6. Conclusions

At the conclusion of this whirlwind tour of energy-like experiences in Abrahamic (and Buddhist) contemplative traditions, we would like to highlight three take-home messages. The first is simply that these experiences—perhaps more associated in the Western imagination with Eastern practices and traditions—also occur in a tremendous variety of forms and with some frequency in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic meditative traditions. The second is that these experiences are interpreted in a variety of ways, recruiting many different religious and scientific worldviews and meaning-making frameworks, and at times even combining them in novel ways. The third is that this landscape of descriptions and interpretations of ELSEs, despite some intriguing differences, evinces some striking similarities to some of those reported by contemporary Western Buddhists. Both the similarities and differences raise intriguing questions for future research regarding the specific ways that cultural influences and bodily processes interact to generate, facilitate, and shape these energy-like experiences.