The 'hidden' energy of change

Change feels impossible because the very patterns you want to escape are invisible to you. 

They operate beneath thought, beneath awareness, and yet they govern your life. But your patterns will teach you, if you let them. And while intellectual insights help us understand our behaviours and patterns, actually changing them requires a somatic (physical body) and energetic encounter.

For the sake of clarity, what follows is a simplified description drawn from personal experience and wisdom traditions. This is simply a practical way of understanding how our patterns move from deep organising assumptions into emotion, body, and behaviour. 

Many lineages describe this movement through what are often called the causal, subtle, and gross bodies – different layers through which consciousness expresses itself. I explore these bodies in more detail elsewhere. It’s also important to note that the boundaries between the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious are not perfectly fixed. 

The key realisation is that your patterns operate across multiple densities simultaneously, and you must understand which dimensions you’re working with.

The ego operates at the conscious psychological level where you can articulate the beliefs and narratives you hold about yourself and the identity you claim. Outside of conscious awareness sit survival templates that are partly or completely outside your perception. It’s these templates that ultimately shape your behaviour. They contain survival logic and implicit assumptions about how reality works, adaptations that formed early and now run automatically. They function through the subtle and causal bodies. The subtle body holds the emotional and psychological patterns that shape how you experience life, often operating beneath language and conscious thought. Beyond this sits the causal body, which carries the deeper organising structure, the seedbed from which those patterns arise before they ever reach awareness or expression.

In short:

Causal – subtle – gross (physical)

Seed – pattern – expression

These layers are not separate compartments but interwoven aspects of the same energetic systems, constantly influencing one another. It’s important to note that the causal body is still not the deepest layer of consciousness, but in this piece we will only explore these three of templates. 

The somatic dimension expresses the subtle patterns in your physical body. Here, energetic imprints densify into form as chronic tension, nervous system states, cellular memory, and a bodily knowing that precedes and often contradicts conscious belief. Most people primarily access the conscious psychological layer, what they can think and say about themselves. They remain largely unaware of the deeper templates driving their behaviour, and only partially attuned to what their body communicates through sensation.

So, the causal body generates the seed, the subtle body carries the pattern as an energetic-emotional imprint, and the physical body expresses the behaviour. True transformation means you don’t just work with emotional imprints, you question the deeper organising assumptions that generate them.

To know something in terms of comprehending it, to understand with your intellect, primarily touches the conscious mental layer of the subtle body. It helps you see the pattern, name it, and contextualise it. This is valuable because it creates a kind of space, a witnessing capacity that’s essential for further work. But to integrate the root of the pattern, you need to engage the other energetic dimensions. You need somatic practice that renegotiates your nervous system’s threat responses and relational experiences that provide new internal templates from which new beliefs can form – showing your system that different outcomes are possible.

You also need to recognise how your consciousness itself participates in creating the reality you keep encountering – how your patterns aren’t just responses to life ‘out there’, but active co-creators of it. See my post here for more on that. 

Let’s look at some examples, which I’ll base on common, recognisable patterns. 

Consider people-pleasing behaviour, a pattern that sits on the anxious side of attachment. At the conscious level there’s a belief of ‘I love helping others’. This is the narrative someone can articulate, the identity they claim, maybe what they’d say when describing themselves. But beneath this conscious belief sits the deeper template that generates the pattern, which is more like, ‘I must be seen as good and helpful to receive love’ or ‘My worth depends on what I give’. This is a survival logic that formed early, often pre-verbally, encoding itself as an energetic imprint in the subtle and causal bodies. This imprint then operates automatically, generating responses before thought arrives.

Then there’s the somatic dimension, the physical body, where those subtle energetic patterns densify into physical form. This is where your people-pleasing behaviour feels confirmed and validated when helpfulness is seen. It’s also where you feel the chest contraction when you witness someone else receiving freely without providing anything in return. It’s where your throat tightens when you try to say no, where tension grips your solar plexus when you’re not being needed. The body holds what the mind doesn’t consciously know. You might feel that physical contraction without understanding it’s connected to the unconscious belief about your worthiness, without recognising it’s your system responding to a perceived threat to your survival strategy. Most people live life primarily through the conscious realm, aware of their surface beliefs and behaviours, while remaining largely unconscious of their deeper templates, and only partially aware of their somatic signals. They know they like helping people, they might notice they feel uncomfortable saying no, but they don’t see the entire structure: how the conscious identity of ‘Good helpful person’ is built on an unconscious terror of being unloveable, which expresses in the body as felt experiences like chronic tension and contracted breathing, for example.

Another example is high-achieving or perfectionistic behaviour, a pattern that can sit on the avoidant side of attachment. At the conscious psychological level, the belief might sound like, ‘I just have high standards’ or ‘I’m driven and disciplined’. This becomes part of the person’s identity, the story they tell about themselves and the trait others often praise. From the outside it appears admirable: competence, productivity, reliability, ambition. But beneath this conscious narrative sits a deeper organising template, something more like, ‘My value comes from what I achieve’ or ‘If I’m exceptional, I can’t be rejected’. This survival logic often forms early in environments where approval or safety felt conditional upon performance or self-sufficiency. Rather than moving toward others for reassurance, the system learns to secure worth through accomplishment. At the subtle level this template operates as an energetic-emotional imprint: a constant internal pressure to perform, improve, optimise and stay ahead of failure.

In the physical (gross) body this pattern becomes visible as the somatic reality of chronic striving. The nervous system rarely settles because rest feels unsafe when worth is tied to output. There may be tightness through the jaw or shoulders, shallow breathing, difficulty relaxing, or a persistent sense of urgency even when nothing is wrong. Success briefly relieves the pressure but never resolves it, because the deeper template remains intact. On the surface the person appears confident and capable, yet the structure beneath it is organised around avoiding the vulnerability of needing others. Achievement becomes the strategy that protects against the deeper fear: that without performance there may be nothing loveable to offer.

So how do we actually begin to change at the root level? 

Your work is bringing conscious attention to the body’s felt experience, staying present with sensations and emotions that your system has deemed intolerable. Your nervous system starts to learn, through direct experience, that these feelings won’t destroy you. The pattern begins to lose its necessity as your system learns the threat it was designed to manage is no longer active in the same way.

The witness consciousness is what makes transformation possible, but it’s not the same as understanding. The witness can hold your entire psychological structure – ego, shadow, pattern, defence – without needing to fix it, change it, or even fully understand it. It’s the awareness that can be with your behaviours and feelings as they arise, that can notice the sensation in your chest, the impulse to accommodate, the fear underneath, all without collapsing into identification with any of it. This witnessing is an active presence that creates the very space in which change can occur.

Understanding names what’s happening, witnessing holds what’s happening, and feeling allows what was previously suppressed to complete itself. All three are necessary, but understanding alone is insufficient. You can know everything about why you are the way you are, but knowing why doesn’t teach your body that it’s safe to be different.

True transformation happens in the repetition of choosing differently while staying present to all the survival anxiety that choice triggers. It’s setting a boundary, saying no, choosing to sit in what’s uncomfortable, or receiving freely. All while remaining conscious as every cell in your body screams that you’re about to be abandoned – staying with that feeling, breathing with it, and discovering through lived experience that the catastrophe your system predicted doesn’t occur. It’s allowing yourself to be vulnerable and tracking what actually happens in your body when someone meets you there with presence rather than rejection. It’s tiny moments of relearning, accumulating over time into a genuinely different way of being.

This is why transformation is slow. Your patterns were built moment by moment, repetition by repetition, across years or decades. They won’t dissolve through a single insight, no matter how profound. They dissolve through patient, persistent engagement with the underlying material, countless small experiences of staying present when the old pattern would have you flee. The work is through the gradual accumulation of somatic evidence that you can survive without the familiar defences.

So understand your patterns, yes. Name them, trace them, see them with clarity. But know that this understanding is a beginning. The journey of transformation asks you to actually walk the terrain not just map it, to feel the ground beneath your feet, to encounter what you’ve spent a lifetime avoiding. It asks you to become intimate with your own direct experience in a way that thinking about yourself never can be. And it invites you, again and again, to the humbling recognition that knowing yourself and transforming yourself are related but distinct practices, both necessary, neither sufficient alone.