What Is Life Force Energy — And Why Everything Feels Harder Without It
This is the first in a series exploring life force, energetic health, and why certain problems in our lives feel so persistent. Once the other posts are live, you'll find them linked throughout and in the "More in This Series" section below.
Life force is the energy that flows through us all day, every day. It's the foundation that supports our physical health, healing, and recovery. It can influence our finances, help us move toward our goals, and support us in creating the life we want. It's the difference between feeling awake, energized, and engaged with life versus feeling lethargic, depleted, and tired.
For many years, I used the Sanskrit word, prana. In recent years, I've defaulted to something more universal, something we can all understand: life force. In its most basic form, it's what keeps us alive and sustains our existence. At its best, it's what allows us to thrive and reach our full potential.
If you've ever wanted to learn to sense and see prana for yourself, that's exactly what I teach in my How to See Prana course.
In this post, I'll break down what life force is, how it gets depleted or blocked, and simple ways to restore it, whether that shows up in your health, your finances, your relationships, or the patterns you can't seem to shake.
What Is Life Force Energy?
Cultures all over the world have a word for life force. Chi, Ki, Ruah, Mana… to name a few. It’s the energy that keeps us alive and when it withdraws we experience the dying process. It’s not just us that has life force circulating through our energy bodies, nourishing our minds and tissues. Everything that lives has it: nature, animals, and even our food, in its purest form.
Energetic Blocks vs. Depletion
When something is suffering in our lives, and it doesn’t matter what it is, from an energetic perspective one of two things is happening. Either there is not enough life force, or there is way too much in one area. This latter problem causes what we call congestion, or an energetic block.
Our bodies require a sufficient amount of life force to heal and be healthy. When there is not enough life force, the physical systems of the body don’t have the energy they need to function at their best.
When there’s too much energy in one spot we get an energetic blockage. This can affect the chakras, organs, or energy channels … and usually it’s all of the above. You can think of this like when your pipes get clogged, the water can’t flow through, or if it does it’s in minute amounts. It’s the same with our life force. Some life force might make it through, but often not enough.
While I'm focusing on the physical right now, it's not just that. Each major chakra has a physical, psychological and spiritual function, playing a role in our spiritual growth and emotional well being just as much as our physical body. So if there's not enough life force reaching a particular area, any of these functions can be affected. When that happens it registers as some sort of issue in our day-to-day lives. It could be in the body, could be in the mind, could even be in our relationships, and more.
How Life Force Affects the Whole Being
So how does a lack of life force, or energetic block affect something seemingly ‘outside’ of ourselves like our relationships? It’s because when the psychological function of the chakra is impacted it can cause problems for us. This often shows up in our personality, what we’re attracting (or not), repetitive patterns or unhealthy behaviours, etc. The chakras influence our personality for better or worse. Ideally we want them clean, healthy and functioning harmoniously together, but in full disclosure that’s rarely the case for any of us. Why? Because we’re human and we go through things in life.
Life Force and Physical Health
I want to talk about physical healing and recovery first. Our bodies know how to heal themselves. They are SUPER intelligent whether we know it or not, and whether we have faith in their capacity to heal or not. Sometimes when we’re trying to heal a particular issue, healing is slow because there’s not enough energy. Ailments that cause pain in the body can use up a lot of life force. It's just the nature of pain, when something is acute like that the body is working hard to heal itself so it demands more energy. This in of itself can cause depletion. To help heal the body it's important to expose yourself to more life force. This doesn’t mean that simply exposing ourselves to more life force will automatically resolve every health issue, but it can give the body more of what it needs to support its natural healing processes.
Life Force and Your Finances
When it comes to something like our finances, there is a particular chakra that is the ‘money making’ chakra. However, the belief systems, ideas, emotions, thoughts, etc. we have about money can get lodged in a variety of chakras, not just the Root (Basic or 1st) Chakra. For the sake of this article, I want to focus on this particular chakra because when it gets cleaned up, a channel widens for our prosperity and wealth. I’ve seen this numerous times: job opportunities open and arise when that chakra gets clean. It also produces a type of energy in the energy body that helps to attract money. Sometimes when the chakras are blocked, they can become small in size. When this happens, it tends to affect how we think and feel about things. In the case of the Root/Basic Chakra, it can affect how we think about money and work.
Life Force and Emotional Well-Being
Just as life force can affect our physical health, relationships, and finances, it can also affect our emotional well-being. Emotions show up energetically as well, and each emotion has its own quality and colour of energy. When we push feelings down instead of allowing ourselves to experience and process them, that energy doesn't simply disappear. Anger we don't process, grief we don't sit with, sadness we talk ourselves out of, or other emotions we haven't fully processed can become stuck in the energy body.
What we call negative or lower emotions aren't inherently bad. They're part of being human, and experiencing them is not the problem. It's when emotional energy becomes stuck that it can begin to create problems. Sometimes what we experience as an energetic block is actually stuck emotional energy. Over time, this can have a domino effect, affecting our health and well-being on physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual levels.
Life Force and Recurring Patterns
Similar to how our emotions show up energetically, so do our belief systems, ideas, programs, thoughts, etc. These can become embedded in the energy body and influence how we see ourselves, how we respond to situations, the choices we make, and even what we attract into our lives. When these patterns become deeply established, we can continue to experience the same situations or behaviours without fully understanding why.
Sometimes we know intellectually that we want something to change, but another part of us continues to operate from an old belief, program, or thought form. This can create a kind of energetic momentum that keeps the same pattern going. Bringing this into our awareness is an important first step. From there, things can start to shift and change.
What Depletes Life Force Energy?
Life force can become depleted for many reasons. Some are physical, while others are emotional, psychological, or energetic. Common sources of depletion include:
Stress and overwhelm
Poor boundaries and over-giving
Long-standing anger
Unprocessed emotions
Chronic pain or illness
Constant mental activity (over-thinking) or worry
Disconnection from your body and nature
Draining relationships or environments
Energetic congestion or blocks
Trying to control everything, and more.
Not everything that depletes life force is something we can simply eliminate from our lives. Stress, illness, grief, work, parenting, and difficult periods are all part of being human. The goal isn't to create a life where nothing ever drains us. It's to recognize when we're becoming depleted and then replenish ourselves. When possible, it's helpful to reduce the things that unnecessarily drain us or address the underlying causes, but sometimes life simply asks more of us than we'd like.
Restoring Life Force Energy
Whether we live in the middle of nowhere or the heart of New York City, you and I exist in an ocean of life force. Our bodies naturally draw it in all day, every day through certain chakras in the energy body. However, if those chakras are blocked energetically, our ability to absorb it will be somewhat compromised. Getting fresh air, getting your feet onto some grass, and spending time near an ocean can be incredibly supportive; the ocean in particular is deeply nourishing, not only because of all the life force in the air and water, but because the salt itself has a cleansing effect on the energy body.
What we eat matters too. Fresh food carries a good amount of life force in it, and cooking doesn't entirely strip that away, so there's no need to eat everything raw. What's worth watching is processed food, a diet built mostly around it won't do much to replenish you. But because I’m a huge fan of moderation in all things, some here and there of course is fine. You just don’t want this to be all that you eat. This is important not only for preventative health, but when you’re actively working to get better.
Resting when we need to rest and getting our bodies moving are also simple ways to support our energy. But restoring ourselves also means looking at what is continually taking our energy. This might mean creating better boundaries, stepping away from relationships or environments that are draining us, processing emotions that we've been carrying, or addressing energetic blocks that are preventing life force from flowing freely.
When we have enough life force flowing through us, life doesn't necessarily become easier, but we often have more energy available to meet what life asks of us. Things that once felt overwhelming can begin to feel more manageable. We have more capacity to heal, think clearly, make decisions, connect with others, and move toward the things we want in our lives. As I wrote earlier, at its best, life force helps us thrive.
More In This Series
In upcoming articles, I’ll take a deeper look at why some things don’t heal, other factors that can affect healing, as well as psychic attack and how sometimes it isn’t others doing it to us, but something we’re doing to ourselves.
Where to Go From Here
If you're feeling depleted, stuck, or like something in your life isn't flowing the way it should, working with your energy can help you understand what may be happening beneath the surface. Through remote Energy Healing, I work with clients all over the world to explore energetic patterns, clear what is no longer serving them, and support greater flow and balance.
