Energy as Coherence Flow: What Practitioners Actually Feel

Series: Tantra Epistemology | Part: 2 of 10

When a tantric practitioner talks about "energy," what are they actually experiencing?

This question tends to trigger one of two unhelpful responses. Skeptics dismiss it as mystical nonsense—vague sensations misinterpreted through cultural conditioning. Believers insist it's a subtle force beyond scientific understanding, requiring faith or special sensitivity to perceive. Both responses miss what's interesting: the phenomenology itself and what it might be tracking.

Tantric traditions have spent centuries developing precise vocabularies for describing somatic experience. They talk about warmth and coolness, expansion and contraction, flow and blockage, rising and descending, spinning and stillness. They describe energy moving through specific pathways, accumulating in particular locations, breaking through resistance, and integrating into higher-order patterns.

These aren't random metaphors. They're systematic observations of the felt experience of coherence dynamics—what it feels like from the inside when a biological system reorganizes itself.

The Felt Sense of Coherence

Consider what happens when you have a major insight. Not just an intellectual understanding, but a genuine realization that shifts something fundamental. There's often a characteristic phenomenology: a sense of opening or releasing, sometimes warmth spreading through the chest, a feeling of expansion, occasionally even a pleasurable shiver.

Now consider what happens when you're about to cry but suppress it. Again, characteristic phenomenology: constriction in the throat, tightness in the chest, a sense of something blocked or held.

Or what happens during flow states—those moments when action and awareness merge seamlessly. There's a quality of effortlessness, a feeling of alignment, often a sense of energy moving smoothly rather than effortfully.

These aren't decorative sensations accompanying mental states—they're the way coherence changes feel. High coherence (integrated, efficient organization) tends to feel like flow, ease, warmth, expansion. Low coherence (fragmented, conflicted organization) tends to feel like constriction, effort, coldness, blockage. Transitions between states have their own signatures: integration feels like rising energy, disintegration like collapse, reconfiguration like spiral or dissolution.

Tantra's distinctive contribution was to treat this phenomenology as primary data rather than as incidental accompaniment to mental content. Instead of focusing on thoughts about experience, tantric practices work directly with the felt energetic dimension.

The Language of Prana

In tantric vocabulary, the fundamental term is prana—usually translated as "life force" or "vital energy." This translation invites mystification, making prana sound like some subtle substance science hasn't yet detected. A more useful translation: prana is the felt sense of aliveness, the phenomenological correlate of a living system maintaining and reorganizing itself.

You don't need to believe in a mysterious force to work with prana. You just need to pay attention to sensations that are already present: the felt quality of breathing, the warmth or coolness in different parts of the body, the sense of contraction or expansion, the feeling of energy moving or stuck.

Tantric texts describe prana in terms of qualities and movements:

Warming and cooling. High-coherence states (like deep concentration or loving connection) tend to feel warm. Low-coherence states (like dissociation or profound fear) tend to feel cold. This isn't metaphorical—practitioners report actual temperature sensations corresponding to different energetic states.

Expansion and contraction. Integrative processes feel expansive—a sense of boundaries softening, awareness widening, the felt sense of self becoming more spacious. Fragmenting processes feel contracting—boundaries hardening, awareness narrowing, the felt sense of self becoming compressed or fragmented.

Flow and blockage. When energy moves freely, there's a quality of ease and fluidity. When it encounters resistance—physical tension, emotional suppression, traumatic holding—practitioners describe sensations of blockage: pressure, tightness, stuck-ness, dammed energy.

Rising and descending. Certain states are described as having an upward quality (arousal, excitement, transcendence, insight), while others have a downward quality (grounding, heaviness, embodiment, settling). These correlate loosely with sympathetic and parasympathetic activation.

None of this requires accepting tantra's traditional metaphysics. You can investigate these sensations directly through attention to your own somatic experience.

Mapping to Coherence Geometry

Here's the translation between tantric energy language and coherence geometry:

Energy flow corresponds to the smoothness of trajectories through state space. When a system can move fluidly between states without getting stuck in local minima or bouncing between incompatible attractors, it feels like flow. When trajectories get trapped or fragmented, it feels like blockage.

Warmth correlates with high coherence—the felt sense of an integrated system operating efficiently. The physical warmth that accompanies states like gratitude, deep presence, or loving connection reflects metabolic efficiency: less energy wasted on internal conflict, more available for coordinated functioning.

Expansion maps to dimensional increase—when tightly constrained patterns relax into wider possibility space. The expansive feeling that comes with insight or psychological flexibility isn't metaphorical—it's what it feels like when your state space literally gets bigger, when more options become available.

Rising energy describes integrative processes—the phenomenology of subsystems coupling into higher-order coherence. Kundalini awakening (which we'll explore in detail later) represents an extreme version: rapid reorganization of body-mind architecture from relatively independent subsystems into tightly integrated whole.

Blockage corresponds to high local curvature—regions of state space where the system can't move smoothly. These often coincide with trauma, chronic tension, or unintegrated emotional material. The energy doesn't literally get blocked—the system's trajectory encounters constraint that resists flow.

This mapping isn't perfect. Phenomenology is messy, and multiple coherence dynamics can produce similar felt experiences. But the correspondence is strong enough to be useful: energy language provides a vocabulary for tracking coherence changes somatically.

Why This Vocabulary Matters

Western psychology and neuroscience have mostly ignored this phenomenological dimension. We have excellent frameworks for studying neural activation, information processing, and behavioral output. We have growing frameworks for studying subjective experience through first-person reports. But we lack sophisticated methods for working with the somatic correlates of coherence—the felt sense of how well a system is functioning.

This creates a gap. Many people can describe their thoughts and even their emotions with reasonable precision, but struggle to articulate what's happening in their bodies beyond crude labels like "tense" or "relaxed." This impoverishes self-awareness and limits intervention options.

Tantric energy language offers a more refined vocabulary. Once you learn to track warmth/coolness, expansion/contraction, flow/blockage, rising/descending, you have tools for noticing coherence dynamics in real time. This enables more precise practice:

Instead of vague instructions like "relax," you can work with specific sensations: "Notice where you feel contraction... Can you breathe into that space?... What happens to the quality of energy there?"

Instead of abstract goals like "be more present," you can track concrete phenomenology: "Can you feel the downward quality of settling?... The warmth that comes with deeper embodiment?... The way energy gathers when attention stabilizes?"

The vocabulary creates resolution. It allows you to distinguish between different kinds of activation (rising energy that feels expansive versus rising energy that feels constricting), different kinds of release (the warmth of genuine letting-go versus the coldness of collapse), different kinds of calm (the aliveness of settled presence versus the deadness of dissociation).

The Practice of Feeling Energy

You don't need years of training to start working with energy as felt coherence. Try this:

Sit comfortably. Bring attention to your hands. Notice whatever sensations are present—warmth, coolness, tingling, pressure, nothing in particular. Don't try to create sensations; just notice what's already there.

Now rub your hands together vigorously for ten seconds. Stop and hold them apart, facing each other, about six inches apart. Again, notice sensations. Many people report tingling, warmth, a subtle pressure or magnetic quality between the hands.

This is energy in the tantric sense—not a mysterious force, but the felt sense of arousal, blood flow, and neural activity. The sensation is real. The interpretation as "energy" is a useful frame for working with it.

Try moving your hands slowly closer and farther apart. Can you feel the quality of sensation change with distance? Try turning your attention more fully toward the sensations. Does the felt intensity increase?

This is the basic move of tantric practice: directing attention toward somatic sensation, noticing qualities and changes, learning to work with felt experience directly rather than through cognitive mediation.

As practice deepens, the vocabulary becomes more refined. You start distinguishing between different qualities of warmth, different textures of contraction, different flavors of flow. You develop sensitivity to subtle changes that precede larger shifts. You learn to track the energetic dimension of emotional states, relational dynamics, and cognitive processes.

None of this requires mysticism. It's sophisticated interoception—the perception of internal bodily states—applied systematically to track coherence dynamics.

Limitations and Misuses

Working with energy has pitfalls. The main ones:

Reification. Treating energy as a thing rather than a description of felt experience. This leads to ontological confusion—arguing about whether energy "really exists" rather than whether the vocabulary usefully tracks coherence dynamics.

Bypassing. Using pleasant energetic states to avoid difficult material. Energy work can become another form of spiritual bypassing if it's used to maintain expansion and avoid contraction, to seek transcendence and avoid embodiment.

Inflation. Mistaking strong energetic experiences for genuine transformation. Intense sensations (heat, bliss, kriyas, visions) can accompany genuine shifts, but they're not the shifts themselves. Coherence is measured by integration and function, not phenomenological fireworks.

Projection. Attributing one's own energetic states to others or the environment. "Bad vibes" might reflect your own dysregulation more than the actual context. Energy sensitivity without discernment leads to reactivity.

Good practice maintains empiricism: energy language is useful insofar as it helps you track, understand, and work with your actual experience. The moment it becomes dogma or mystification, its utility collapses.

What Comes Next

This article introduced energy as the felt phenomenology of coherence dynamics. The next step is to examine how tantric traditions map this phenomenology into spatial structures—the architecture of the subtle body. Not as literal anatomy, but as a functional map for tracking and working with coherence across different scales and domains.

Because once you can feel energy, the question becomes: feel it where? And that's where the chakras and nadis come in.

This is Part 2 of the Tantra Epistemology series, exploring tantric philosophy and practice through the lens of coherence geometry.

Previous: Tantra Beyond the Bedroom: What the Tradition Is Actually About
Next: The Subtle Body as Coherence Architecture: Chakras, Nadis, and Phenomenological Mapping

Further Reading

• Gard, T., et al. "Pain Attenuation Through Mindfulness Is Associated With Decreased Cognitive Control and Increased Sensory Processing in the Brain." Cerebral Cortex, 2012.
• Mehling, W.E., et al. "Body Awareness: A Phenomenological Inquiry Into the Common Ground of Mind-Body Therapies." Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 2011.
• Varela, F.J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press, 1991.
• White, David Gordon. Sinister Yogis. University of Chicago Press, 2009.