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Self Energy, Shared: IFS and the Ancient Practice of Spiritual Transmission

Writer: Kevin Finn
Kevin Finn
Sep 24
7 min read

Updated: Sep 28

Silhouette of a person meditating before a glowing orange light

There's a thing that happens sometimes in the room that I've never quite known how to name clinically. A client arrives activated, a part of them is flooded, pacing the inside of their own chest. I settle into as much Self energy as I can find that day, calm, curious, unhurried, and within a few minutes, without either of us naming it, something in the room itself seems to settle. Not because I said anything particularly skillful. Just because I was there, in that state, and they were near it.

Internal Family Systems has a name for the state I'm reaching for: Self, with a capital S, and the quality it radiates when it's present is what Richard Schwartz calls Self energy. What's less discussed, at least in the clinical literature, is the part that's harder to explain away as co-regulation or just good bedside manner: that Self energy doesn't stay contained inside one person. Schwartz himself has described Self as "an active healing presence inside and outside people," and has written that when someone is Self-led, the people around them tend to feel it too, they "feel immediately at ease in a Self-led person's company," sensing it's safe to lower their own guard (IFS Institute). That's a modest, clinically respectable way of saying something that older traditions said far more boldly: that a settled, awakened state in one person can be directly transmitted to another.

My own meditation lineage happens to sit inside the Kashmir Shaivite tradition, so before I ever had clinical language for "Self energy," I had this as direct, first-hand experience. What I'm about to describe isn't a concept I encountered in a book and then went looking for parallels to. It's something I've received, more than once, not so much from the teacher but the shared universal tuning fork that we can resonate with and tap into. And yet, a person, a teacher, can embody this energy and transmit it not unlike a walk through nature can. That personal starting point is what sent me looking for where else this shows up. What I found was a genuinely old and geographically scattered practice, described in strikingly similar terms by traditions that had no contact with one another.


Shaktipat: the Descent of Grace


In Kashmir Shaivism, this transmission has a name: shaktipat, from shakti (power) and pāta (to fall or descend). It's described explicitly as a transfer, not a teaching, an act of grace the disciple cannot generate on their own, delivered through touch, a glance, a word, a thought, or, in some accounts, at a distance through an object the guru has held. The tradition actually grades it by intensity, from a mild version that unfolds over lifetimes to an immediate, overwhelming awakening. Swami Muktananda's memoir Play of Consciousness is the most detailed firsthand account of receiving it; the physicist-turned-mystic Itzhak Bentov later described measuring physiological changes in people during kundalini awakening, an account that lives within that community's own literature rather than peer-reviewed science, but is a lovely example of someone trying to locate the experience in the body at all (Wikipedia: Shaktipata).


Pranahuti: the Offering of Life Force


A close cousin shows up in Sahaj Marg, the Heartfulness lineage founded on the transmission Ram Chandra of Fatehgarh ("Lalaji") said he rediscovered in the late nineteenth century. They call it pranahuti, prana (life force) plus ahuti (offering), and describe it almost exactly the way I'd describe wanting to offer Self energy to a dysregulated client: not advice, not technique, just a state, made available. One of the lineage's teachers, Babuji, put it this way: "The soul lives by transmission which we can think of as the essence of Divinity." Another, Chariji, called it "the highest gift of life's life itself." The organization's own materials use an image that's hard to improve on: transmission flowing "as water flows through a water pipe... from the heart of the Master into the waiting heart of the aspirant" (Sahaj Marg / Heartfulness).


Tawajjuh: Heart to Heart


Sufism has its own version, tawajjuh, sometimes translated as "spiritual attention" or "orientation of the heart." A sheikh transmits a state, associated with one of the six subtle centers (lataif) of the Sufi body-map, directly to a student, historically through touch, sometimes through a shared Divine Name held in mind by both people at once. It's described across multiple Sufi schools as a heart-to-heart transmission that bypasses ordinary instruction entirely (Wikipedia: Tawajjuh).


Tibetan Buddhism's Mind-to-Mind Lineage


Dzogchen, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, formalizes three distinct types of transmission, one of which is direct mind-to-mind transmission between master and student, realization communicated, as one source puts it, "beyond conceptual understanding," through symbol and direct pointing-out rather than explanation (Rigpa Wiki: Three Lineages of Transmission).


The Christian Contemplative Thread


This same current runs quietly through Christianity too, once you know where to look. One of the most vivid accounts in any tradition comes from nineteenth-century Russia, from the Orthodox monk Seraphim of Sarov, in a conversation with his spiritual son Nicholas Motovilov. Motovilov had asked how a person could know, concretely, that they'd received the grace of the Holy Spirit. Rather than explain it, Seraphim gave it to him directly. He took Motovilov firmly by the shoulders and said, "We are both in the Spirit of God now, my son. Why don't you look at me?" Motovilov couldn't: "I cannot look, Father, because your eyes are flashing like lightning. Your face has become brighter than the sun, and my eyes ache with pain." Seraphim answered simply, "You are now in the fullness of the Spirit of God yourself; otherwise you would not be able to see me as I am." Motovilov, sitting in snow, described feeling warmth, "extraordinary sweetness," and "extraordinary joy" (Iconandlight: St. Seraphim of Sarov and the Vision of the Uncreated Light). It's shaktipat's corrrelate, arrived at from the other side of the world.


The Catholic tradition names this too, more formally than you might expect. The International Catholic Charismatic Renewal's own doctrinal body, CHARIS, uses the word "impartation" for the way "a grace of the Holy Spirit can be passed on from one person to another" through the laying on of hands, and roots it in scripture: Moses passing his spirit to the seventy elders in the book of Numbers, and Elijah's mantle, and the spirit that came with it, falling to Elisha in 2 Kings. They're careful theologians about it, impartation isn't treated as identical to the sacraments, but it's affirmed as real, an "overflow" of grace that moves through people, not just to them (CHARIS International). And in the Franciscan lineage, Richard Rohr has written about grace itself as fundamentally relational rather than private, something followers of Francis "picked up by osmosis, through the gospel and the Franciscan lineage," passed hand to hand across generations more than argued into existence (Center for Action and Contemplation).


Even in the more esoteric corners of early Christianity, the Gnostic tradition, you find the same intuition, gnosis as something given rather than derived through reasoning. The Gospel of Philip describes a rite called the Bridal Chamber, a ritual of union understood as the moment gnosis actually transfers. Much of what survives from this current comes to us secondhand, filtered through critics who wanted it discredited, so it's worth holding loosely. But the underlying shape, a state received in communion with another, rather than reasoned into alone, is unmistakably part of the same family.


The Shamanic Root


Zoom out further and you find the same claim in shamanic traditions worldwide: healers who blow smoke, breath, song, or power directly into a patient's body as part of treating illness or restoring a lost part of the self, and initiations in which an elder shaman directly transfers spirit allies or power to a novice, rather than simply teaching them. Mircea Eliade's classic Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy is the touchstone text here, though later scholars, particularly those working with contemporary Amazonian practitioners, have pushed back on how neatly Eliade fit enormously varied practices into one frame (Princeton University Press: Shamanism). That critique is fair. But the core claim, that a practitioner's own cultivated state can be directly given to someone else, not taught, given, survives it; it's documented across too many unconnected cultures to be an artifact of one scholar's editing. Practitioners trained through organizations like the Foundation for Shamanic Studies still describe soul retrieval and power restoration this same way today, as something carried back and delivered (Foundation for Shamanic Studies).


Two more familiar, more recent echoes are worth a mention. Reiki, popularized in Japan in the early twentieth century, is built entirely around this idea, a practitioner "attuned" through their own lineage transmits energy through the hands, sometimes even at a distance (Wikipedia: Reiki). Mainstream research hasn't yet found a way to measure what practitioners describe feeling in the room, which doesn't settle the question so much as leave it honestly open. Chinese medicine's external qigong tradition describes something structurally similar, a healer emitting cultivated qi directly into a patient. Both are worth naming not as proven mechanisms, but as evidence of just how persistent and widespread this intuition is: that a trained inner state is a transmissible thing, not a private one.


What I Make of This


An extraordinary number of unconnected traditions, separated by centuries and oceans, independently arrived at the same two-part claim: that a cultivated inner state is real enough to have effects on other people, and that those effects can move directly from one nervous system, one soul, one system of parts, to another, not just through modeling or instruction, but through presence itself. Max Weber had a word for a related phenomenon in his sociology of religion, charisma, and he spent real effort theorizing how it gets transmitted and "routinized" across a lineage once its original bearer is gone, which is, from a distance, a fairly good description of what all of these traditions are trying to formalize in their own language.


I don't think IFS needs shaktipat or pranahuti or the uncreated light to be legitimate as a clinical model, and it stands on its own. But I also don't think a client needs to leave their tradition at the door to do this work. If you grew up with a grandmother who prayed over you with her hands, or you've sat with a teacher whose presence alone changed the air in the room, or you've felt something move through you at a mosque, an ashram, a sweat lodge, a Divine Liturgy, that experience isn't separate from what happens here. It may be one of the oldest and most cross-culturally consistent descriptions we have of exactly what Self energy is trying to do. You're welcome to bring all of it into the room with you.



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© 2026 by Kevin Finn, LMFT 

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