Net Energetic Frequency (NEF)

What Determines the Frequency Band We Operate Within?

Your Net Energetic Frequency (NEF) determines the general Frequency Band in which you, your life, and your energy operate—and therefore the band of reality in which your life manifests.

Generally speaking, that is. Certain situations and variables can create temporary upward or downward movement in the Frequency Band you’re occupying. But more broadly, your NEF is the long-standing energetic dynamic that determines how high or low within the Frequency Band Spectrum your reality tends to express itself.

Think of your NEF as your buoyancy within that spectrum.

The higher your NEF, the greater your buoyancy—and the stronger the uplifting force holding you within higher Frequency Bands. The lower your NEF, the less buoyancy or upward force you have, making it easier to sink into—or perpetually live within—lower Frequency Bands.

So, what determines our Net Energetic Frequency?

The overall load of energetic density we carry.

Okay, well—what is that made up of?

Emotional Density and Your NEF

Let’s talk about the Emotional Frequency Chart. Have you seen this before?

This model was developed by David R. Hawkins, a psychiatrist, spiritual teacher, and author who created what he called the Map of Consciousness. It assigns numeric values to different emotions and states of consciousness, placing them along a spectrum from more contracted states to more expansive ones.

I love this model so much because it allows us to view our emotions through the lens of density versus lightness. Contraction versus expansion.

It demonstrates how the emotions we tend to experience as unwanted—guilt, apathy, grief, fear, and anger—occupy the lower end of the scale. They are more contracted states of consciousness. They are denser. They energetically “weigh us down.”

And lo and behold, shame sits at the very bottom.

Shame is the densest, most contracted emotion on the chart and therefore, in my opinion, the most destructive and distortive to our realities.

Now as we go through life, any time something happens that triggers an emotional response within us—grief, sorrow, anger, fear, shame—and we are not able to fully move through that emotional response (i.e. feel those feelings fully), we contract around it.

Maybe we weren’t safe enough to feel it. Maybe we weren’t resourced enough to process what was happening. Maybe feeling it fully would have threatened our belonging, our relationships, our identity, or our ability to survive the moment.

Whatever the reason, the emotion doesn’t simply disappear because we couldn’t deal with it at the time. It becomes trapped within us—held and stored in the body.

The stressor itself may be gone—the incident that triggered the emotional response may have passed—but the stress response and the emotion it activated have not necessarily been completed. This idea is explored through the concept of completing the stress cycle in the book Burnout. And if you want to go deeper into how trauma continues to live in the body, The Body Keeps the Score is another great resource.

But for our purposes here, what matters is this:

Anytime we are unable to fully feel and move through a dense emotional response—when we suppress it, swallow it, or shove it down—some of that energetic density remains trapped within us.

Over the course of a lifetime, we can accumulate loads and loads of unresolved emotional density. And because these emotions occupy the lower, denser end of the Emotional Frequency Chart, their accumulated density weighs down our Net Energetic Frequency.

The Hot-Air Balloon Analogy

Your NEF is not a mathematical sum of all your emotions. We aren’t adding 20 hertz of shame to 150 hertz of anger and then subtracting 540 hertz of joy to calculate an exact number. That isn’t how I understand or use this framework.

I see these emotions more like different forces acting upon us.

Those on the higher half of the Emotional Frequency Chart have an uplifting, buoyant force, helping to raise our NEF.

And those on the lower half have a heavy, gravitational force that weighs us down, lowering our NEF.

Now imagine that your entire energetic system is a hot-air balloon moving through the Frequency Band Spectrum.

The denser emotions at the bottom of the Emotional Frequency Chart—shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, anger—are like sandbags attached to the balloon.

These emotions are contracted. They are heavy. They don’t feel good, which is one of the reasons they become trapped within us in the first place.

But just because we’ve avoided feeling them, it doesn’t mean they aren’t actively weighing down our system. The sandbag is still attached to the balloon.

And the more unresolved grief, fear, anger, and shame we accumulate, the more sandbags we carry. Each one contributes to the overall downward force acting upon our system, decreasing our energetic buoyancy, lowering our NEF, and ultimately dragging us into lower Frequency Bands.

The more expansive emotions and states of consciousness—love, joy, peace, pleasure, play, connection, inspiration—are like the hot air filling the balloon.

They create upward force. They increase our buoyancy and raise our NEF, which naturally lifts us into higher Frequency Bands.

Whether the balloon rises or sinks depends on the dynamic relationship between these forces: the amount of density weighing it down and the amount of expansive energy lifting it upward.

How Your Frequency Band Shapes Your Reality

Now, imagine that the height of the hot-air balloon represents the Frequency Band in which you, your energy, and your reality are currently operating.

The higher the balloon rises, the higher the Frequency Band you experience. Your perspective expands. You can see farther, perceive more possibility, and recognize connections that were invisible from below.

You are closer to the heavens—closer to love, beauty, pleasure, inspiration, and the divinity woven through it all.

But now imagine that the hot-air balloon has barely enough uplifting force to keep it off the ground—it’s flying so low that it is dragging through a forest.

Instead of an expansive view, you can only see the tree directly in front of you. Branches are hitting you. The basket keeps catching on things. Every time you free yourself from one obstacle, another appears.

Within these lower Frequency Bands, reality becomes more contracted, threatening, and painful—more governed by fear, shame, separation, and survival. There is little space for joy, love, or possibility because your system is consumed with making it through the forest.

It isn’t that love, joy, beauty, and connection have ceased to exist. The weight you are carrying is simply holding you within a band of reality where pain, contraction, and survival dominate your experience.

Raising Your Net Energetic Frequency

We increase the total buoyancy of our energetic system by working with both forces at once.

We release the sandbags by creating the safety and capacity to feel and move through the grief, anger, fear, shame, and other emotional density weighing us down. At the same time, we increase the uplifting force by actively seeking out joy, play, pleasure, intimacy, love, connection, inspiration, and spiritual awareness.

We reduce the density pulling us downward while generating more of the expansive energy lifting us upward.

There is one final piece to understand outside of the hot-air balloon metaphor: our energetic systems only have so much internal capacity.

When much of that capacity is occupied by unprocessed grief, fear, anger, shame, trauma, and incomplete stress responses, there is less space available for joy, love, pleasure, and connection. This is why raising our NEF cannot only be about adding more positivity on top. We also have to turn toward what has been trapped, create enough safety to finally feel it, and allow it to move.

As we release that density, we  create more room for the expansive energies that naturally raise our Net Energetic Frequency, allowing us to rise into higher frequency bands.