Raise Your Vibration? I Don't Think That's How This Works

Why one of the spiritual community's favorite phrases has never quite resonated with me, and what energy work, frequency, and resonance actually have to do with it...

There are certain phrases in the spiritual community that have been repeated so many times that nobody seems to stop and question what they actually mean anymore. We hear them in classes, see them plastered across social media, find them printed on everything from T shirts to coffee mugs, and eventually they become part of the vocabulary people use without giving them much thought. And sitting very comfortably near the top of my personal list of phrases that make me question things is "raise your vibration."

I swear, you can't scroll through social media for five minutes without someone telling you that the secret to happiness, abundance, spiritual enlightenment, successful manifestation, or apparently finding a decent parking space is to raise your vibration. Having a bad day? Raise your vibration. Feeling overwhelmed? Raise your vibration. Struggling with something difficult? Well, obviously, your vibration must be too low. Apparently, somewhere along the way, the spiritual community decided that the answer to just about everything was to keep moving upward on some invisible energetic scale, and I'm still waiting for someone to explain exactly what we're measuring.

Now, before anyone gets their crystals in a twist, let me clarify something. I absolutely believe in energy work. I've spent more than thirty years practicing witchcraft, studying different spiritual traditions, working with energy, and teaching people how to develop their own abilities. I'm a Reiki Master Teacher, a High Priestess, and a chaos witch. Energy work is an important part of my personal practice and something I've dedicated a considerable portion of my life to understanding.

My issue isn't with the idea that we can work with, influence, or consciously direct our energy. My issue is that the phrase raise your vibration doesn't accurately describe what I believe we're doing.

And the more I think about it, particularly when considering what we understand about frequency, resonance, and harmonics, the less sense that phrase makes to me.

Because why, exactly, are we assuming that higher is always better?

What Are We Supposed to Be Raising, Anyway?

When someone tells you to raise your vibration, what are they actually asking you to do? That's a genuine question, and one I think deserves considerably more attention than it usually receives.

Depending on whom you ask, you might be told that it means becoming happier, thinking more positively, connecting with your higher self, attracting abundance, releasing negativity, or reaching some elevated state of spiritual awareness. Other people describe it as changing the frequency of your personal energy field, although explanations of what that means tend to become rather vague once you start asking specific questions.

And this is where I begin having problems with the terminology.

In physics, vibration refers to repeated motion or oscillation, and frequency describes how often that oscillation occurs within a particular amount of time. Frequency is generally measured in hertz, while amplitude describes the size of the oscillation. In acoustics, intensity relates to the amount of energy passing through a given area over time. These are different properties, and they don't all increase together simply because the frequency becomes higher.

A higher frequency sound isn't automatically louder or more intense than a lower frequency sound. A lower frequency sound isn't automatically weaker. The effects of a vibration depend on several factors, including its amplitude, intensity, duration, the material it's traveling through, and how it interacts with that material.

So when someone tells me that I need to raise my vibration, my first question is usually, "Why?"

What is the intended result? What are we trying to accomplish? And why have we decided that increasing frequency is necessarily the appropriate way to accomplish it?

I can already hear someone preparing to tell me that spiritual energy isn't the same thing as physical sound waves, and I agree. They're not the same conversation. But if we're going to borrow terminology from physics to describe our spiritual practices, I think it's reasonable to understand what those terms actually mean. Otherwise, we're just throwing around scientific sounding language because it makes something appear more impressive.

And frankly, after several decades in witchcraft, I've become considerably less impressed by impressive sounding terminology and much more interested in whether someone actually understands what they're talking about...

Higher Doesn't Automatically Mean Better

One of the things that makes this discussion particularly interesting is that, in certain physical systems, lower frequencies can accomplish things that higher frequencies cannot accomplish as effectively.

Take medical ultrasound, for example. When ultrasound is used for imaging, higher frequencies generally provide better resolution, allowing medical professionals to see smaller details more clearly. However, those higher frequencies also tend to lose energy more rapidly as they travel through tissue. Lower frequency ultrasound generally penetrates farther, which is why different frequencies are selected depending on how deeply a structure needs to be examined.

In other words, higher frequencies can provide greater detail closer to the surface, while lower frequencies can reach deeper structures. Neither is inherently superior. The appropriate frequency depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

Now, before someone runs off and announces that Jennifer said lower spiritual vibrations are better because ultrasound can penetrate deeper into tissue, please don't. That's not what I'm saying, and I would rather not spend the next six months explaining that distinction to strangers on the internet...

What I'm saying is that even in measurable physical systems, the relationship between frequency and effectiveness is far more complicated than simply declaring that higher is better. The frequency that serves one purpose beautifully may be completely inappropriate for another.

And that brings me to something I find much more interesting than the concept of constantly raising anything: resonance.

Resonance occurs when a system responds particularly strongly to certain frequencies, generally near one of its natural frequencies. Under the right conditions, repeated input at an appropriate frequency can produce a significant response. That response isn't determined by which frequency happens to be the highest. It's determined by the relationship between the frequency and the system involved.

Think about that for a moment...

The important factor isn't necessarily how high something is vibrating, but how effectively it interacts with what it's encountering.

To me, that's a far more useful concept to contemplate when discussing spiritual energy work. I'm interested in how we connect with an intention, how we direct our focus, and how we approach a particular working. I'm interested in whether the method we're using is appropriate for the purpose we've chosen.

I'm not particularly interested in treating spirituality like a competition to see who can climb to the highest number on an imaginary energetic scoreboard...

There's a Reason Music Has More Than One Note

If you've ever listened to a musical instrument, you've experienced harmonics, whether you realized it or not. When a string vibrates, it can produce a fundamental frequency along with higher harmonics, and the relationship between those frequencies contributes to the instrument's distinctive sound. It's part of the reason a guitar, violin, and piano can play the same note while sounding completely different.

The fundamental frequency provides the foundation for that harmonic series. The higher harmonics contribute to the overall character of the sound, but they don't make the fundamental unnecessary or inferior. They work together as part of a larger relationship, creating richness and complexity that wouldn't exist in quite the same way without them.

And this is where my brain starts wandering into the magical implications of the terminology we've chosen...

If you listen to an orchestra, you don't hear a beautiful piece of music because everyone is desperately trying to play the highest note possible. You hear something beautiful because different instruments, tones, frequencies, and harmonies are working together. The lower notes provide depth, the middle ranges contribute body and warmth, and the higher notes bring their own qualities to the composition.

Can you picture an orchestra where someone decides the bass section is dragging everyone down spiritually?

"Sorry, gentlemen, your instruments are simply too low vibrational. We're going to need you to leave so the piccolo section can manifest abundance."

Good luck listening to that performance without developing a headache...

The richness comes from the relationships between the different parts. And while musical harmonics don't establish a scientific model for spiritual enlightenment, I think they offer a useful way to examine the assumptions behind the language we're using.

When I work with energy, I'm not attempting to make every aspect of myself operate at some supposedly elevated frequency. I'm trying to become more aware of what I'm working with, establish a clear intention, and direct my energy in a way that supports that intention.

Sometimes that means becoming calmer and more grounded. Sometimes it means building focus, determination, or momentum. Sometimes it means sitting quietly with something uncomfortable long enough to understand it.

The appropriate approach depends on the working.

And I find that a much more meaningful way to think about spiritual practice than simply telling everyone to keep moving higher.

Higher Frequencies Aren't Automatically Safer, Either

Another thing worth understanding is that higher frequencies aren't automatically harmless or beneficial simply because they're higher.

Ultrasound is a useful example here as well. It's an incredibly valuable technology in medicine, and diagnostic ultrasound has a long history of helping healthcare professionals examine structures inside the body. But ultrasound is still a form of mechanical energy, and under certain exposure conditions it can produce physical effects in tissue.

Depending on factors such as frequency, intensity, exposure duration, and the properties of the tissue involved, ultrasound can produce heating or mechanical effects, including cavitation. In fact, carefully controlled high intensity focused ultrasound can deliberately produce changes in tissue as part of medical treatment.

And lower frequency sound can also cause undesirable effects under certain conditions. The point isn't that high frequencies are dangerous and low frequencies are safe. That would simply be replacing one oversimplification with another.

The point is that frequency alone doesn't tell us whether something is beneficial, harmful, effective, or appropriate.

Context matters. Intensity matters. Duration matters. The system being affected matters.

And while I wouldn't use medical ultrasound to explain someone's spiritual condition, I do think it illustrates why the assumption that higher must always be better is so misleading.

We have an entire spiritual vocabulary built around the idea that moving upward is automatically desirable, yet the physical concepts we're borrowing don't support such a simple hierarchy.

I find that fascinating... I also find it a little ridiculous that we've managed to turn something as complex as energy and resonance into a motivational catchphrase that fits neatly on a coffee mug...

Your Emotions Are Not an Energetic Report Card

Now we get to the part of this entire discussion that bothers me even more than the questionable terminology.

Somewhere along the way, the phrase "raise your vibration" became associated with the idea that certain emotions are spiritually superior to others. Love, happiness, gratitude, and joy are supposedly high vibration emotions, while anger, fear, sadness, and grief are labeled low vibration emotions.

And apparently, the goal is to spend as much time as possible in the upper half of that imaginary emotional hierarchy.

I've seen charts circulating online that assign specific numerical frequencies to different emotions, as though someone took a highly sophisticated instrument, pointed it at a person experiencing gratitude, and announced that they'd discovered the exact frequency of spiritual enlightenment.

But what exactly was measured? What instrument was used? Under what conditions? Are we discussing electrical activity, mechanical oscillation, sound, or something else entirely?

If someone presents those numbers as scientific measurements, those are reasonable questions. And if they can't explain what was actually measured or how, perhaps we shouldn't be treating the chart like a scientific reference.

Human emotions are complicated. They involve neurological, physiological, psychological, and social processes, and they aren't adequately described by assigning each one a single universal frequency in hertz.

But even setting the scientific questions aside, I have a serious problem with the spiritual implications of this belief...

What happens when someone is grieving the death of a loved one and they're told they need to raise their vibration? What happens when someone is struggling financially and another person suggests that they're attracting poverty because they're operating at a low frequency? What happens when someone is being mistreated and they're encouraged to become more positive rather than address what's actually happening?

We're taking perfectly understandable human experiences and turning them into supposed evidence of spiritual failure...

And I think that's incredibly irresponsible...

Grief isn't a failure. Anger isn't automatically destructive. Fear isn't proof that someone lacks spiritual awareness. These emotions exist for reasons, and learning to recognize and understand them can be an important part of personal development.

Anger can tell us that a boundary has been crossed. Fear can alert us to potential danger. Grief reflects the significance of something or someone we've lost. Frustration can motivate us to examine situations we've tolerated for far too long.

Of course, emotions can also become overwhelming, disproportionate, or influenced by experiences we haven't fully processed. That's precisely why awareness matters. We need to understand what we're experiencing and decide how to respond rather than allowing every emotion to dictate our behavior.

But awareness isn't the same thing as forcing ourselves to be happy...

And I'd much rather see someone acknowledge an uncomfortable emotion, examine where it's coming from, and decide how to work with it than watch them plaster a smile on their face because they're terrified that a bad mood might interfere with their manifestation ritual.

Witchcraft Isn't Always Sunshine and Rose Quartz

Let's talk about witchcraft for a moment, because apparently some people have forgotten that not every magical working involves love, light, rose petals, and feeling wonderful about absolutely everything.

There are entire areas of magical practice devoted to protection, banishing, uncrossing, shadow work, grief, ancestral relationships, death, transformation, and confronting things we'd rather not deal with. And those workings aren't necessarily comfortable, nor should we expect them to be.

Sometimes we're examining painful memories or acknowledging patterns that have been holding us back. Sometimes we're establishing boundaries with people we love, even though doing so is difficult. Sometimes we're working through grief, recognizing something uncomfortable about ourselves, or finally finding the determination to change a situation we've been tolerating for far too long.

And sometimes we're simply angry.

I know. Apparently, witches are human beings... Who would have thought?

I've never believed that anger automatically makes someone incapable of performing meaningful magical work. What matters is whether they understand what they're feeling, how it may influence their decisions, and whether they're approaching their working with sufficient awareness and intention.

The same applies to grief, frustration, determination, and any number of other emotional states.

As a chaos witch, I'm interested in examining what works within a particular situation. That means considering the practitioner, the intention, the methods being used, and the circumstances surrounding the working. I don't believe every ritual needs to be performed from the same emotional state, and I certainly don't believe that someone needs to manufacture happiness before they're spiritually qualified to accomplish anything.

There are times when calm, centered focus is exactly what I want. There are other times when determination, righteous anger, sorrow, or a profound desire for change may be part of the work.

The important thing is understanding how those emotions influence what we're doing and whether we're directing them constructively.

And frankly, I'd be a little concerned about a practitioner who believed they could only perform effective magic when they were in a fantastic mood...

Life has a nasty habit of being inconvenient. If your entire spiritual practice falls apart because you woke up cranky, you might want to revisit your foundations...

Grounding, Centering, and Actually Understanding Your Energy

One of the reasons I spend so much time teaching grounding, centering, visualization, and energy work is that these are foundational skills. They're not particularly glamorous, they don't always make for exciting social media content, and nobody is going to become an overnight internet sensation by announcing that they've spent twenty minutes practicing how to maintain their concentration.

But these skills matter.

Within my practice, grounding helps establish stability and connection, while centering helps bring our attention back to a deliberate point of focus. Visualization allows us to develop and maintain a clear mental representation of an intention or energetic working, and energy work involves learning to recognize, direct, and work consciously with what we're experiencing.

And none of those practices require us to manufacture happiness.

If you're upset, you can ground yourself. If you're grieving, you can center yourself. If you're angry, you can take time to understand that anger before deciding whether and how to incorporate it into a working.

The goal isn't to erase your emotional state. It's to become aware of it and learn how to work responsibly with what you're experiencing.

That's a very different approach from telling someone they need to raise their vibration before they're capable of doing anything meaningful.

And while we're on the subject, being calm doesn't automatically make someone wise, just as being angry doesn't automatically make someone irrational. I've met some remarkably composed people who made spectacularly terrible decisions, and I've met people who were furious about an injustice and used that anger to accomplish something genuinely meaningful.

Human beings are complicated, and our spiritual practices should be capable of acknowledging that.

For me, this is where the language of resonance becomes much more interesting than the language of constantly raising something. When I'm working with a particular intention, I want to establish an appropriate connection with that purpose. I want to understand what I'm directing my energy toward and why. I want to be aware of my own state of mind and recognize whether the methods I'm using are supporting the working.

I'm not attempting to reach some arbitrary energetic altitude.

I'm attempting to work consciously and effectively.

And Can We Talk About the Spiritual Superiority Complex?

There's another aspect of this entire discussion that I think deserves attention, because somewhere along the way, the language of high and low vibrations became a convenient way for people to judge one another.

Someone disagrees with you? They're low vibrational. Someone questions your beliefs? They're operating at a lower frequency. Someone is struggling with something difficult? Clearly, they need to work on their energy. And apparently, if you manage to remain cheerful while dismissing everyone else's experiences, you've achieved some impressive level of spiritual advancement.

How convenient...

I've been involved in the metaphysical community long enough to recognize that spiritual vocabulary can sometimes become a very attractive disguise for ordinary arrogance. You can call someone low vibrational instead of acknowledging that you simply don't like them. You can describe yourself as energetically elevated instead of admitting that you think you're better than the people around you. And you can dismiss legitimate criticism by deciding that anyone who challenges you just isn't spiritually evolved enough to understand.

That's not wisdom. That's an ego problem wearing a crystal necklace...

One of the things I've always valued about chaos magic is its willingness to question assumptions.

We're encouraged to examine our beliefs, explore different methods, and recognize that our personal perspectives aren't necessarily universal truths. That includes questioning ourselves, especially when something has become so familiar that we've stopped thinking about it.

And I think that's exactly what needs to happen with this particular phrase.

If you tell someone they need to raise their vibration, what are you actually trying to communicate? Are you encouraging them to become more aware of their emotional state? Are you suggesting they take time to ground and center themselves? Are you talking about developing their ability to focus, direct intention, or work with energy?

Because if that's what you mean, why not say that?

Those are meaningful concepts with practical applications within spiritual practice. They deserve more than being reduced to a phrase that has become so vague it can apparently mean everything and nothing at the same time.

I Don't Want Higher. I Want Appropriate...

If I had to summarize my objection to the phrase "raise your vibration," it would probably come down to this: I don't believe the goal of energy work is necessarily to move upward. I believe it's to understand what we're working with and approach it in a way that serves our purpose.

When we're discussing physical resonance, the most effective frequency depends on the system and the desired response. When we're discussing music, richness comes from the relationships between different frequencies and harmonics. When we're discussing sound and ultrasound, the effects depend on frequency alongside intensity, exposure, and the properties of the medium.

And when we're discussing spiritual practice, I believe the most meaningful questions concern intention, awareness, method, and purpose.

If I'm performing a protection working, I want to be focused, grounded, and clear about what I'm establishing. If I'm doing shadow work, I want to be willing to examine the uncomfortable things that surface. If I'm working with grief or ancestral practices, I want to approach those experiences with respect, understanding, and the emotional honesty they deserve.

If I'm manifesting a goal, I want my intentions to be clear and my actions to support what I'm trying to create.

At no point do I feel the need to stop and ask whether my vibration is sufficiently high...

And I certainly don't want someone telling me that I need to suppress perfectly legitimate emotions because they're supposedly interfering with my spiritual development.

I want my magical practice to be effective, meaningful, and appropriate to the work I'm doing.

Sometimes that involves stillness. Sometimes it involves movement. Sometimes it involves joy, and sometimes it involves sitting with something deeply uncomfortable until I understand what it has to teach me.

There's room for all of that.

And I find that considerably more meaningful than chasing some imaginary state of perpetual energetic elevation.

Spiritual Energy and Scientific Frequency Aren't the Same Conversation

I want to make one more distinction, because I think it's important.

When I discuss energy work within my magical practice, I'm speaking from a spiritual framework developed through decades of study, training, and personal experience. When I discuss acoustic frequencies, resonance, or the physical effects of ultrasound, I'm discussing measurable physical phenomena.

Those aren't automatically interchangeable.

Scientific findings about sound waves don't prove that a particular crystal attracts prosperity or that a ritual changes someone's spiritual frequency. Likewise, my experiences with magical energy don't establish new laws of acoustics.

And I'm perfectly comfortable acknowledging that distinction.

I don't need to pretend that every spiritual experience has been verified in a laboratory to find meaning in my practice. But I also don't think we should misuse scientific language simply because it makes a spiritual claim sound more impressive.

There's a difference between saying that a particular sound, rhythm, or ritual helps you feel grounded and claiming that it raises your body to a scientifically established frequency of enlightenment.

One describes an experience. The other makes a measurable claim that should be supported by actual measurements.

Understanding that difference doesn't make us less spiritual. I think it makes us more thoughtful practitioners.

We can appreciate the symbolism of resonance, the richness of harmonics, and the importance of personal energetic awareness without pretending they're all the same thing.

And personally, I find that considerably more interesting than another brightly colored chart telling me that gratitude vibrates at some magical number and anger is apparently hanging out in the energetic basement.

Maybe It's Time We Changed the Conversation

After more than thirty years in witchcraft, I have absolutely no desire to spend my time chasing some imaginary state of perpetual energetic elevation. I'm much more interested in understanding how things work, questioning what I'm taught, and helping other practitioners develop the skills and confidence to think for themselves.

I believe in energy work. I believe in intention. I believe in the value of ritual, spiritual exploration, and learning how to recognize and direct the energies we work with.

But I don't believe that higher automatically means better, and I don't think the phrase "raise your vibration" accurately represents the complexity of what we're actually doing.

I don't believe that unpleasant emotions make someone spiritually inferior, and I certainly don't believe that a person's hardships can be explained away by telling them their vibration wasn't high enough.

If you find the phrase meaningful within your personal spiritual practice, that's your choice. I'm not interested in policing the words people use to describe their experiences. But I am interested in encouraging people to question the assumptions behind those words, particularly when they're presented as universal truths.

Because when you start looking at frequency, resonance, and harmonics, you discover something far more complicated and fascinating than the idea that everything worthwhile exists at the top of some invisible scale...

Different frequencies serve different purposes. Resonance depends on relationships. The effects of vibration depend on circumstances. And human beings are considerably more complex than any chart dividing our emotions into spiritually acceptable and unacceptable categories.

So no, I'm not particularly interested in raising my vibration...

I'm interested in understanding my energy, developing my skills, respecting the full range of human experience, and choosing the most appropriate approach for the work I'm doing.

And if that means I'm not spiritually elevated enough for someone's exclusive high frequency manifestation club, I suppose I'll just have to live with the disappointment...

I'll be over here with my crystals, my coffee, my reptiles, and several decades of practical experience, continuing to ask questions that apparently make some people uncomfortable...

Because that's what I do...

And if your spiritual philosophy can't survive a few reasonable questions, perhaps it's not my vibration that needs adjusting...

P.S. I should probably mention that my husband, Uriah, is just as firmly opposed to the whole "raise your vibration" terminology as I am, and don't even get him started on the whole "sending good vibes" thing. Believe me, we've had some pretty spectacular discussions about both. Uriah is a practitioner himself, but his brain works a little differently than most people's. He has a very scientific, analytical way of looking at things, combined with a perspective that can only be described as... unique. And I mean that in the most affectionate way possible... He has this incredible ability to approach something from an angle that wouldn't even occur to most people, then ask one seemingly innocent question that sends an entire conversation down a rabbit hole neither of us expected. And I'll give credit where it's due, because it was actually his influence and our many discussions that made me start seriously questioning these terms in the first place. Between his unconventional thought processes and both of our decades of magical practice, we've spent an absolutely ridiculous amount of time dissecting phrases that most people toss around without a second thought. Some couples spend their evenings discussing what to watch on television... We're over here debating what the hell someone is actually sending when they say "sending good vibes," whether anyone knows what frequency they're supposedly operating at, and why the spiritual community seems determined to turn everything into a competition to see who can vibrate the highest. Welcome to our household... It's never boring, and apparently, even our casual conversations come with homework...

Jennifer Foley-Weaver

High Priestess | Chaos Witch | Rune Reader | Ritual Architect | Reiki Master Teacher

Founder of Witchy Wares

Witchy Wares: Elevate Your Craft

www.witchywares.net