The author Robertson Davies once wrote,
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
Welcome to The Soul Podcast. I’m Stacey Wheeler.
Have you ever walked into a room and instantly felt the energy shift—even before a single word was spoken? Something is happening in the room. You don't know what it is. But something is off.
Or maybe, you’ve met someone for the first time and felt an immediate sense of warmth and safety… or an unexplained discomfort that made you want to step back. Or perhaps you’ve entered a space—a home, a forest, an old building—and felt a distinct atmosphere or “vibe” that you couldn’t quite name, but could deeply feel in your body.
These experiences point to something many of us sense every day: energy, frequency, and “vibes”—the subtle undercurrents of life that we can feel but often struggle to measure or fully explain.
We’ve all had those moments. You can be having a perfectly fine day, and then someone enters the room carrying heavy energy, and suddenly your mood drops. Or you spend time with a certain friend and leave feeling lighter and more alive than when you arrived. We might casually notice or even mention something like “the vibe was off in the room” or “their energy is so calming,” even though we can’t point to anything visible or logical—nothing we can physically or scientifically measure.
So what are we actually sensing?
Science is beginning to catch up with what many spiritual traditions have known for centuries. We now understand that everything—our bodies, thoughts, emotions, and even the spaces around us—carries an energetic frequency. It's measurable! The heart generates a powerful electromagnetic field that can be measured several feet away. Research into heart-brain coherence shows that our internal state doesn’t just affect us—it ripples out and subtly influences the people and environment around us.
And yet… there’s still so much we can’t fully measure or prove. That unexplained “vibe” when you meet someone new. The way certain places seem to hold a particular atmosphere long after the people have left. It’s a felt sense of peace or tension that has no obvious cause.
Most of these are very subtle. Unless you’ve learned to pay attention to them, you may only notice the more extreme vibrations. And powerful vibrations, it seems can linger for a long time.
Once, decades ago, while on vacation in Scotland and touring yet another of the dozens of castles and keeps I’d see there, I stopped at one on the eastern coast. It’s known as Blackness Castle and was one of the few castles to survive destruction after the Jacobite uprisings. It was a beautiful day, the grounds were well kept and green. The castle clung to the coastline along the Firth of Forth, an inlet connected to the sea. The building was grand and it had that classic castle look. I was in a wonderful mood that morning, but midway through the tour that energy felt like it was pulled from me. It happened the moment I looked down into a large hole there. It had been carved into the rock, inside the walls of a section of the building labeled as the prison. A dreadful feeling came over me—a sensation I’d never experienced before. It was a feeling I can best describe as dread. It as a dark vibration.
Later I spoke with one of the workers there who explained that prisoners were lowered into this hole, which could fill up with sea water to nearly waist high as the tides changed. Some were even chained to the wall so they couldn’t move around. Because the cell was carved into the rock in the shape of a wide bottle -big flat bottom and rounded walls- there was nearly no way to escape. An unknown number of people suffered and died there. The pit was designed for suffering. Something in me that day recognized the darkness of the place long before I heard the history of it.
That’s the first time I ever sensed an energy like that. I’ve never felt anything that dark since. I remember thinking that day that “Blackness” was a fitting name for the castle.
This is an example of the more intense—or dark—vibrations around us. But there are many energies and vibrations that we can learn to more easily recognize.
These unmeasurable energies seem to speak in a language older and deeper than words—a language our bodies understand even when our minds don’t. Some of us are well-tuned to feel more positive energies when we encounter them. Maybe you’ve experienced this—walking into certain places and feeling an immediate sense of peace and expansion, as though the space itself was welcoming you there. Many people feel these more easily in nature. But we all feel them to some extent. Through recognizing them, we feel them more easily.
These experiences invite us to ask: What if we are far more sensitive and interconnected than science and our modern world acknowledges?
Science has started to map a few of the edges. The heart’s electromagnetic field is measurable. When a person moves into a more coherent state—steady breath, settled emotion—that field becomes more ordered, and nearby people can register the shift even if no one speaks. Ever sit in a room of mediators, or people in focused and intentional yoga? This feeling can be measure in places like that. Instruments can pick this up a few feet away. That much is no longer only metaphor. It is a physical signal the body produces and other bodies can detect. Now, scientific capabilities have finally risen to the level it can confirm what people have known forever. Funny – how we seem to get this backwards; thinking something isn't real unless we can prove it's real. All we lacked was the ability to prove this. What else do we lack the ability to prove... yet is still just as real as these measurable vibrations?
What the instruments still cannot catch is the rest of what we report: the atmosphere that seems to linger in a room after the people have gone, the sudden weight or lightness that arrives with a stranger, the dread that can rise from a place with a long history of suffering. Those remain in the realm of repeated human experience. We can name them. We can learn to notice them more clearly. We cannot yet hand a device to someone else and say, “Here, measure this exact thing I felt at Blackness.”
Spiritual traditions have treated this sensitivity as ordinary rather than exceptional. They don't need a stamp of scientific validation. Many describe a subtle field that people and places carry, and a capacity in the body to register it before the mind has a story. They do not all agree on the metaphysics—whether it is energy, spirit, memory in the walls, or simply the accumulated residue of attention and emotion. What they share is the observation that the body often knows something before language arrives. Paying attention doesn't require settling the larger questions. It only requires noticing that the information is already present.
Davies was pointing at the same hinge. The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend. The same is true of these quieter signals. If we have never practiced looking for them, most of them stay below the threshold. We register only the extremes—the heavy mood that walks in the door, the sudden drop in a place that has held pain. The milder ones pass through unnoticed, even though they are shaping how we feel and how we respond.. just below the surface.
The invitation is simply to become a little more prepared to notice.
The next time you walk into a room or sit down with someone and feel a shift, pause for a breath and name only what the body is registering: tightness, warmth, heaviness, lift. Do not explain it yet. Instead ask, quietly, whether this sensation feels like it arrived with you or whether it seems to have been waiting in the space or the person. Over time (and with repetition) the distinction grows clearer. You begin to recognize your own baseline and vibrations more accurately, and you notice sooner when something else has entered the field.
None of this requires believing that every old building holds trapped emotion or that we are all one continuous ocean. It only asks us to admit that we register one another, and the places we move through, more continuously than everyday life trains us to acknowledge. That registration is already happening. Attention is what makes more of it available to the conscious mind. And the more prepared the mind becomes, the more the eye—and the body—can actually see.
If you want to work on your expansion, check out the books, The HeartMath Solution and Heart Intelligence. These two books cover the heart’s electromagnetic field, heart-brain coherence, and practical techniques for shifting your own state so it registers differently to others. I'll share a link in the show notes. If you buy a book, please use these links. You get the book at the regular price but a small portion of your purchase will come back and help support the show.
The eyes see what the mind is prepared to comprehend. And the more we prepare, the more we seem to comprehend. All we must do is practice being more open.
The question is -how open are you willing to be?
