Earlier this year, a wonderful therapist I’ve been working with looked at me through the Zoom screen towards the end of a session where we had been talking about my childhood (because therapy) and said:
“You know you’re a survivor, right?”
At some level I had known that. I’ve been doing healing and trauma-informed work long enough to recognize that my childhood existed in a field of developmental trauma. But I had never considered myself a survivor.
Over the next few days, a new layer of awareness and felt sense of my younger years dropped in. Although my therapist had said I was a ‘survivor,’ I began to doubt that I had emerged from my childhood intact. Physically, I felt depleted and empty.
“What if,” I shared with my wife, “I didn’t survive. What if part of me died and didn’t make it out?”
Weirdly, it became a joke for a few days. “You married a corpse,” I’d say. We’d laugh. What else can you do when your entire self-narrative is rewriting itself in real time based on newly recovered and recontextualized information.
Within about a week, I felt vitality returning. Colors seemed a bit brighter. I had more energy.
It’s no coincidence that this is almost exactly the moment that Vibrational Intelligence as a term and field of practice entered my conscious awareness. My sense is that it had been there, beneath the surface, biding its time until I had enough access and bandwidth to engage. As a deeper layer of my childhood revealed itself and the bits of soul that had scurried away to protect themselves returned, I was able to enter into dialogue with the frequency of consciousness that wants to be called VQ.
I just started using it in conversation. Tentatively. Then with greater excitement as, with each use, it felt like VQ was generating its own momentum. The first time I used it publicly was in a LinkedIn comment, half as a joke. A couple of folks responded that they loved the term and, as I learned during a brief stint in stand-up comedy in Los Angeles, every joke has at least one foot firmly planted in truth. So I decided to take it seriously.
My own experience of VQ has been one of profound relief.
It has offered me a bridge between the energetic and strategic. A semantic container that can hold the great mysteries of energy and spirit (which are, after all, different frequencies of information and experience), neuroscience, physiology, trauma work, healing, strategy, team building, organizational and personal vision, and more. My nervous system loves it because I no longer have to search for language that is acceptable both to clients and, honestly, to the parts of my own Western-educated mind that still balk at the language of spirituality.
At a broader level than my internal shifts, I don’t think it’s an accident that VQ is emerging at this moment. The individual reflects the larger system and vice versa.
None of the systems Western culture has relied on for meaning and navigation are stable. Political institutions, economic structures, ecological systems, the social fabric itself are all shifting simultaneously. The emergence of AI intensifies these pressures while raising fundamental questions about the role of the human and the nature of ‘intelligence.’
But story systems, like all systems, seek balance.
The further a culture leans toward disembodiment, abstraction, speed, and head-level processing, the more forcefully the body, the land, and the felt world push back. The explosion of somatic therapy and nervous system work. The renewed interest in indigenous wisdom traditions. Breathwork going from fringe practice to mainstream. Plant medicine moving from counterculture to clinical trials.
VQ is part of that counter-movement. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that VQ is the story system generating language for capacities it needs us to recover so that it can come back into balance.
What story might we weave from that place of remembrance and recovery?