What the Witches & the Physicists Have Been Trying to Tell You
On energy, the body's intelligence, and the systematic gaslighting of your lived experience.
By Amanda Leon · April 2026
As I sat on the yoga mat, watching three bodies randomly convulse to the music permeating the air while a pair of apparently magical hands attempted to contort them like puppetry, I did what any reasonable person would do: I began planning my exit.
The Catholic nuns of my all-girls education were very much present in the back of my head, screaming with considerable urgency: get out of there. Run. Do not drink the Kool-Aid from these random crunchy white people doing their witchery and sorcery on energetic bodies in the Balinese jungle.
Alas, by the time my brain had calculated its extraction plan, the instructor chose this precise moment to say: "Okay, lay down on your mats. Let's get started." I resigned myself to taking an hour and a half nap if need be. I was not going to be able to quietly slink out of this one.
What proceeded would be my first conscious experience with Kundalini Activation — the practice of receiving energy and allowing it to move through the body. Not to be confused with Kundalini Yoga, which is a Yang practice involving intense breathwork that raises the heart rate. Activation is the opposite: entirely passive. Entirely receptive. A surrendering.
Which, for anyone who has spent a significant portion of their life in corporate cubicles, polo helmets, and performance reviews — does not come naturally.
I lay on the thick mat. I stared at the vaulted bamboo ceiling. I waited, with the particular skepticism of a woman with a neuroscience background and a deep commitment to evidence, for nothing at all to happen.
Fifteen minutes passed.
And then something in my body began — slowly, irrefutably — to move.
"The nuns were screaming in the back of my head. The physicist was about to prove them wrong."
I. The Most Consequential Gaslighting in Western History
Before I tell you what happened on that mat, I need to tell you something about the architecture of the world in which you were raised.
Every civilization before the Industrial Revolution treated the body as intelligent. Energy as real. The connection between all living things as self-evident. The shaman, the yogi, the mystic, the healer — not fringe figures of superstition but the culture's designated experts in the invisible architecture of existence. The Hindu concept of prana. The Chinese concept of qi. The Japanese concept of ki. Ancient traditions on six continents pointing, with different languages, at the same fundamental reality.
Then came the Enlightenment's great divorce.
René Descartes, whose work I studied thoroughly in the philosophy classes that made up my Cognitive Science degree, drew the line in 1641: mind was separate from body. The body was a machine. The measurable was real. Everything else was religion, philosophy, or delusion. The Scientific Revolution built its cathedral on this premise, and Western medicine, Western education, and Western corporate culture all followed dutifully inside.*
*Simultaneously ostracizing women from all three sectors of human life.
What gets called spiritual, energetic, or felt — the gut sense, the inexplicable knowing, the body that shakes after a shock, the room that changes when a particular person enters it — these became officially classified as: unscientific. And therefore: not worth your attention. And therefore, if you keep insisting on them: perhaps you are a little unstable.
This is not a neutral intellectual position. It is the single most consequential gaslighting operation in Western history.
The witches burned for what they knew. The physicists, it turns out, spent the last century proving it.
II. What Animals Know That We Were Taught to Forget
Begin with something simpler than quantum physics, which we’ll get to. Begin with a gazelle.
A gazelle chased by a lion — caught, pinned, nearly killed — and then released does not develop post-traumatic stress disorder. It does not spend the next three years replaying the moment in a therapist's office. It does not lie awake constructing forensic timelines.
It shakes.
Literally, physically, completely — the body tremoring from the tips of the legs outward, discharging the biochemical storm that built during the threat until the nervous system returns to baseline. This is not a malfunction. Dr. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, spent decades studying exactly this mechanism and found it consistent across the entire mammalian kingdom.¹ Tremoring is the immune response of the nervous system. It is the body doing, automatically and efficiently, what it was designed to do.
Humans have the same mechanism. We suppressed it.
The shaking after a car accident, the trembling after terrible news, the body that wants to convulse in the aftermath of something overwhelming — this is not weakness. This is not breakdown. This is the gazelle response, available to you, attempting to complete its work. In 2021, I read the work of Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, whose research has documents how trauma physically reshapes the brain's limbic system, argues that the body records what the conscious mind cannot process — that traumatic experience encodes itself somatically, in muscle tension, in nervous system dysregulation, in the very cellular architecture of the body.² We carry what we were never allowed to shake off.
Dr. David Berceli built an entire healing modality — Tension and Trauma Release Exercises, known as TRE — on the simple premise of reactivating this suppressed mechanism. The exercises fatigue the leg muscles just enough to allow the psoas — the deepest muscle in the body, the one that contracts in threat response — to release and tremor. What follows looks, to the uninitiated, exactly like what I was watching in that Balinese jungle yoga shala.
Bodies that were finally doing what bodies have always known how to do.
And here is the piece that Mark Wolynn adds in It Didn't Start With You (one of my favorite books of all time), drawing on emerging epigenetic research: the trauma you carry may not even be yours. Traumatic memories transmit through generations via chemical changes in DNA expression. The fear that surfaces without origin, the anxiety you were born into, the patterns of suffering that seem to predate your own experience — these may be inherited from parents, grandparents, great-grandparents whose unresolved charge was encoded into the very cellular material from which you were formed.³ The body keeps the score, as van der Kolk writes — and it keeps a score that began before you arrived.
This is not mysticism. This is epigenetics.
"You carry what you were never allowed to shake off. And some of it was never yours to carry at all."
III. The Field
Now for the physics.
One of my favorite authors, Lynne McTaggart, spent years synthesizing the findings of quantum physicists working at the frontier of consciousness research into a single conclusion that should have rewritten every introductory textbook: the universe is not made of separate objects moving through empty space.⁴
Quantum physics discovered, early in the 20th century, something Einstein called spooky action at a distance: two particles, once entangled, remain in instantaneous communication regardless of the distance between them. Measure the spin of one and the other responds — not after a delay proportional to the speed of light, but immediately, across any distance. The two are not separate. They never were.
This is not a metaphor. This is a documented, replicated, Nobel Prize-winning experimental result.⁵
The Zero Point Field — the quantum vacuum that pervades all space and was once thought to be empty — turns out to be teeming with energy. Not potential energy waiting to be activated. Active energy, constant, everywhere, the substrate from which all matter and all consciousness emerges. McTaggart's synthesis of the research suggests that consciousness itself is not stored inside the brain. The brain is a receiver. The signal comes from the Field.
Jeffrey Allen, a beloved teacher of mine, who has spent decades working at the intersection of energy and human development, articulates the implication simply: we are not souls inside bodies. We are bodies inside a much, much larger soul. The soul does not live in the body. The body lives in the soul. And the soul, like all energy, cannot be created or destroyed.
Which means, as my best reading of the physics suggests: you do not actually disappear when you die. You simply change state.
The Hindu concept of Akasha — the primordial space from which all things emerge — arrives at this conclusion through direct experience. The Taoist Tao as the underlying unity of existence. The Buddhist śūnyatā, the emptiness that is paradoxically and infinitely full. Ancient traditions on six continents, using entirely different instruments, describing the same invisible architecture that quantum physicists spent a century measuring.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner wrote: "The content of consciousness is the ultimate universal reality."⁶
The mystics had better metaphors. The scientists had better funding. They were pointing at the same thing.
"The mystics had better metaphors. The scientists had better funding. They were pointing at the same thing."
IV. The First Activation
The actual first activation did not happen in Bali.
It happened before the jungle yoga shala, before the convulsing bodies, before my friend Saida had invited me to her Kundalini graduation and I’d unwittingly agreed to attend as a participant, before the Catholic nuns in my head reached their operatic crescendo. It happened in intimacy — in the particular vulnerability of two people present with each other in a way that the ordinary management of consciousness does not usually permit.
We both went somewhere that was not here. Not in our bodies. Not on earth. The silence of the room was so loud it registered as sound. Afterward, we looked at each other and asked the only coherent question available: where did we go?
Neither of us had a framework for it. My partner at the time googled what had happened. I contacted the witchiest, hippie, alternative friend that I had at the time.
She informed me that many people spend years on yogic retreats attempting to access what we had, in that particular quality of surrendered presence, stumbled into by accident.
And I could not stop thinking: why has nobody told me about this before?
The body as a portal. Intimacy as a technology for accessing states that mystics spend decades in silent caves trying to reach. An entire dimension of human experience — available, documented, real — that had simply never been handed to me as a possibility.
Because the same institutions that told me my trembling was weakness, my intuition was superstition, and my energy was not real also decided that certain forms of human experience were too unruly, too powerful, too impossible to commodify or control to be given a name and a framework.
The witches knew. They burned for it.
The physicists proved it. They were ridiculed for it.
And I lay on a yoga mat in Bali planning my exit from a room full of people who were simply, finally, using their bodies the way bodies were designed to be used.
V. What Surrender Actually Is
Fifteen minutes into lying on that mat, convinced I would simply fall asleep, something began. Areas of my body started to move. Not because I was moving them. I kept asking myself: is this me? Am I doing this? Am I just moving the way I think I should? Is this the placebo effect?
Each time the thinking brain intervened — analyzing, categorizing, seeking an explanation — I returned to the only available instruction: surrender. Surrender. Just surrender.
Surrender is not, as I had been trained to believe, passivity, nor abandon. It is not the absence of agency. It is the specific and courageous act of allowing the body's intelligence to operate without the thinking brain's continuous and exhausting interruption.
The prefrontal cortex — the seat of control, analysis, social performance, and the management of what others think of you — releases its grip just enough for the body's older and more ancient wisdom to do its work. The thinking brain steps aside. The energy body, the field, the vast nervous system intelligence that predates language — it does what it always knew how to do when it was finally given permission to do it.
In my book, How to Make Him Chase You, I write about a practice I call Safe Surrender — the discovery that pulling back the relentless management of outcomes, relationships, and the performance of self allows something more authentic and more magnetic to emerge in its place. What I did not fully understand when I wrote it was that I was describing, in the language of relationship dynamics, the same mechanism that operates on every level of human experience.
Safe surrender is not submission. It is the deliberate, boundaried release of control in a context you have chosen to trust. It is the practice of saying: the body knows something the mind doesn't. I am going to stop overriding it. If you want the full framework — applied to your relationships, your nervous system, and the art of becoming unmissable — you can find it in my ebook How to Make Him Chase You. The principle at work there and the principle at work on the yoga mat are, I have come to understand, the same principle.
"The body knows something the mind doesn't. Safe surrender is the decision to stop overriding it."
VI. What the Experience Actually Produces
I would do Kundalini Activation three more times after that first class. On the second session: white firework visions, an aura shift so pronounced that my monk-trained friend noticed it immediately. On the third: a dissolution of the boundary between where my body ended and the air began, which I noted with great curiosity and zero alarm because by then I had a framework. On the fourth: a sustained, undeniable sense of being held by something that did not have edges.
None of this is testable in a randomized controlled trial. And yet the enteric nervous system — the 100 million neurons lining the gastrointestinal tract, which neuroscientist Michael Gershon called the Second Brain in his landmark 1998 research — responds to stimuli faster than the brain does, before conscious awareness has formed.⁷ The gut feeling is not a metaphor. It is a neurological event in a second brain that predates language and operates below the threshold of conscious control.
The body has always known things the mind decided not to believe.
The room that changes when a particular person enters it — your nervous system measuring the electromagnetic field of another person's nervous system, because hearts generate an electromagnetic field measurable up to several feet outside the body, as the HeartMath Institute has documented for over two decades.⁸
The inexplicable recognition of a stranger — quantum entanglement does not require an explanation your culture has pre-approved.
The terror that seems to belong to a life you have never lived — possibly, as Wolynn's epigenetic framework suggests, because it does belong to a life you never lived: your grandmother's, your great-grandfather's, encoded in the expression of genes that formed before you took your first breath.
None of this is woo-woo. Woo-woo is the word assigned to things that cannot yet be measured — not to things that are not real. The instrumentation catches up. The physics is already there.
VII. What To Do with Any of This
I am not prescribing a Kundalini class. I am not telling you to find the jungle.
I am suggesting that the trembling is not weakness. Let it move through you instead of fighting it.
I am suggesting that the gut feeling is data. Your second brain is speaking in a language your first brain was trained to override.
I am suggesting that the anxiety you carry without origin might be worth tracing backward — through your parents, your grandparents, the family stories that were never told and the family silences that were never explained. It didn't start with you. But perhaps it could end with you.
I am suggesting that the quality of profound presence — in intimacy, in nature, in the particular stillness that arrives when you finally stop managing the performance of your experience — is not accidental and not rare. It is available. It has been documented. It was known before it was named and it will remain true whether you believe in it or not.
The witches were not wrong. They were simply early.
The physicists are not done. The instruments keep getting better. The conclusions keep pointing in the same direction.
You are not a soul inside a body.
You are a body inside a much, much larger soul.
And energy — as every physics class you ever attended correctly taught you — cannot be created or destroyed.
Which means you don't actually die.
Which means the thing on the yoga mat that moved without your permission was real.
Which means the nuns, bless them, were doing their absolute best with the instruments they were given.
Surrender. Take a sip of the Koolaid. See what happens.
With Love,
Amanda
P.S. If you’re curious about the upcoming polo book or want to join on upcoming polo adventures, I’d love to invite you to subscribe to my Youtube channel.
CITATIONS & NOTES
1. Levine, Peter A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books, 1997. On animals' innate tremoring mechanism for discharging trauma and the human suppression of this response.
2. van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books, 2014. On traumatic stress as an embodied phenomenon encoded in the nervous system, limbic system, and somatic architecture.
3. Wolynn, Mark. It Didn't Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. Viking/Penguin, 2016. On epigenetic transmission of traumatic memory across generations. See also: Yehuda, R. & Lehrner, A. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: putative role of epigenetic mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 17(3), 243–257.
4. McTaggart, Lynne. The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe. HarperCollins, 2001. On the Zero Point Field as a quantum substrate connecting all matter and consciousness.
5. Aspect, A., Grangier, P., & Roger, G. (1982). Experimental realization of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm Gedankenexperiment: a new violation of Bell's inequalities. Physical Review Letters, 49(2), 91–94. The landmark experimental proof of quantum entanglement and non-locality.
6. Wigner, Eugene P. (1961). "Remarks on the Mind-Body Question." In The Scientist Speculates, ed. I.J. Good. Heinemann. On consciousness as the ultimate universal reality.
7. Gershon, Michael D. The Second Brain. HarperCollins, 1998. On the enteric nervous system's 100 million neurons and its function as an autonomous intelligence predating conscious awareness.
8. McCraty, R., Atkinson, M., Tomasino, D., & Bradley, R.T. (2009). The coherent heart: Heart-brain interactions, psychophysiological coherence, and the emergence of system-wide order. Integral Review, 5(2). On the heart's electromagnetic field measurable outside the body and its effect on the nervous systems of others.
