Many people only know Vitality as a changeable aspect of their body, or their physical energy level.  But Vitality is a lot more complicated than that, and at the same time, simpler!

We have to start at the beginning …

When people say that the universe/our existence is made up of energy, what they really mean is that it’s made of energetic potential. Because technically, energy is coming into and flashing out of existence all the time. The static “real” world that we experience is actually … static-y. And our amazing brains just piece it all together as if it was one marvelous reel of film for us to watch.

Our true existence is dual: it is both the energy that exists/doesn’t exist as well as the field of potential where that energy could/couldn’t exist.  That field of potential as well as whatever is created and destroyed within it is Consciousness. Not your consciousness and my consciousness – just Consciousness. A singularity. Consciousness soup. It’s where we come from, the truth that we exist within during our lives here, and where we return to when we sluff off these mortal coils that give us the illusion of individuality. 

There’s an ancient Sanskrit word: Namaste.  Namaste has Hindu roots that date all the way back to the Vedic period. It’s an expression that has been used for literally thousands of years. The translation of Namaste is “The light that shines within me recognizes and knows the light that shines within you”. This is a beautiful greeting people say to each other, acknowledging the singularity of Consciousness and that it is manifesting itself in each of us … and the flow of that manifestation is our Vitality.

In order to be a living, breathing thing we need to have dynamism or the ability to change. If we didn’t change, we’d be a rock. And before you argue that everything is always changing and even rocks can change, that change happens EXTERNALLY or superficially from the causation of physical forces on particles (like friction and the laws of thermodynamics, etc). The lump of mica doesn’t spontaneously release oxygen and change into feldspar. Any changes are usually very slow like the millions of years it took for a river to carve out the Grand Canyon, again because the changes are physical force changes that only affect the external form of something.

A human body (or an animal body or a plant body) are continuously changing from the moment it is no longer an egg (or seed).  The ability to change, or to be “animated” is from Vitality, Flow of Consciousness.  And because it is Consciousness, it too is an absolute without any quantitative quality. You HAVE Vitality, period. If you didn’t, you’d be dead. 

So why does Vitality get misused? It’s not that using it to describe whether or not you can lift a 500 lb. weight is wrong, that’s just lower-case “v” vitality. You can be conscious and vital (meaning awake and able to lift something heavy), but you can only “be” those things as the Vitality of Consciousness that you are.

 The next step is understanding why we perceive ourselves as having low energy, or low Vitality, when Vitality isn’t quantitative (having a specific quantity). The way that I explain this to my clients is like this: the Vitality is always there, we just limit our ability to fully experience it because of the choices we make in relation to our Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual Aspects. These Aspects are the facets through which we experience Consciousness manifesting. You could also call them filters. Any time a filter is dirty (unbalanced), it’s going to change our ability to experience our Vitality clearly.

You could look at Vitality as a “thing” having the ability to delete and write its own code from one moment to the next. Delete, write. Delete, write. Delete, write. All the while, still maintaining its “thing-ness” or sense of identity as the “thing” during that change.

Vitality:

Dynamic, ability to change from within (consciousness manifests from within)

Static things only change from causation

Vitality animates us, allows for change from moment to moment, rewriting of code