Activities designed to elevate our energy level, mood, and emotional well-being.

What Is “Vibration”?

“Vibration” is a metaphor we use for our emotional state, our mood, how we feel. Emotions exist on a spectrum. At the top — what we call high vibration — are feelings like love, gratitude, joy, enthusiasm, freedom, and peace; they feel light, expansive, open, alive. At the bottom — what we call low vibration — are feelings like fear, shame, anger, numbness, and distress; they feel heavy, dense, contracted, dim. Most of our day-to-day emotions live somewhere in between: contentment, hope, frustration, boredom, irritation, satisfaction.

Raising our vibration means deliberately shifting up our place on the emotional spectrum: moving from a heavier emotional state toward a lighter, more open, more alive one. It does not mean forcing yourself to feel “happy” when you don’t, or pretending that everything is fine. It means holding a deliberate intent of taking the next reachable step up, e.g. from despair toward anger, from anger toward frustration, from frustration toward hope, from hope toward optimism, and so on. Each small step matters.

Why does this matter? Our deliberate intention to raise our vibration is critical to our success. This is because our emotional state is not just how we feel — it shapes what we can notice and think about, and it dramatically affects our abilities, the choices we make, and the people and opportunities we are able to draw toward us. A person operating from appreciation sees possibilities and acts with courage. The same person operating from fear sees threats and shrinks back, and may not even see the possibilities or may get stuck in fear about them. The emotional state we are in is the lens through which we live and shape what we experience.

It is very natural for the mind to focus on problems, because it wants to solve them. But if our vibration sinks too low, that same focus can work against us: we may not be able to think clearly, stay creative, or hold enough optimism to actually find and carry out a solution. Deliberately shifting our emotional state is not about suppressing what we feel. It is about expanding our inner room — moving to a state where we are more capable of meeting the challenge, not pretending the challenge is gone.

The activities below are designed to lift the emotional climate of the group, both in the moment together and as a practice we carry into other areas of our lives. Many activities on The Menu also raise vibration as a side effect; the practices listed here are the ones we run as deliberate, focused emotional-state rituals.

Gratitude Circle

In a gratitude circle, each person takes a turn naming something they are grateful for. It can be large or small: a person, a moment, a lesson, a body that works, a roof, a joke that landed, sunlight, progress on a hard thing. The point is not to perform positivity or to compare whose life is “better” — it is to spend a few minutes deliberately steering attention toward what already supports us, which our minds often skip over when we are stressed or scanning for problems.

Sharing aloud matters. Hearing others name their gratitudes widens what counts as valid: someone may mention something you would never have thought of, and you borrow a bit of their lens.

In Positive Psychology, gratitude practice is one of the better-studied ways to nudge mood and outlook. It does not erase difficulty, but it trains the same “next step up” move described above: from fixation on lack or worry toward recognition of what is also true — care, beauty, effort, luck, connection. Done regularly in the group, it becomes a shared habit: we normalize looking for the good as well as facing what is hard, which supports the emotional climate we want for actualization work.

Celebrating Wins

When someone in the group achieves a goal, such as getting a job, initiating a difficult conversation, asking someone out, completing a project, the group marks it deliberately and enthusiastically.

Celebration is not just a nice gesture. It is a tool. When we celebrate together, we help each other’s brains associate effort and persistence with a rush of positive feeling, carried inside our bodies through the happiness hormones: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. Over time this creates new neural pathways that strengthen our resolve to keep going even when things are hard, because the nervous system has learned that success and uplifting celebration follows effort. The energy of one person’s win becomes positively contagious, inspiring and raising everyone’s sense of what is possible for them too.

Compliments Circle

One person sits in the center of the group. Everyone else takes turns offering that person genuine, true compliments, what they like about the person, and positive observations about them.

After receiving the compliments, the person in the center shares what their “inner critic” voice, if any, is telling them - the nagging voice that is trying to dismiss or discount what was just said (“yes, but…”, “they’re just being nice”, “that’s not really true”, disqualifying the positive, etc.).

By naming and exposing this critical inner voice out loud, its hold on us is reduced. The person is then better able to actually absorb and internalize the positive things the group reflected back to them.

Laughter Yoga

Laughter Yoga consists of exercises using playful techniques to trigger genuine laughter. For example, faking laughter until real laughter occurs, or imagining creating and drinking a “laughter shake.” Some exercises involve deliberately doing silly things like pulling faces, which can feel uncomfortable or awkward at first, but can grow into playful pleasure.

That mild discomfort is the point: it breaks through social conditioning and self-consciousness. The key is calibrating the silliness to the right level: enough to stretch people a little bit beyond their comfort zone, but never crossing into anything close to humiliating or disrespectful.

Movement and Exercise

  • Stretching: Gentle stretching exercises to release tension and increase flexibility. We can also pull and stretch each other to increase the stretching range.
  • Tai Chi and Chi Gong: Gentle, flowing movements to release tension and increase flexibility.
  • Dancing: Free dancing, “ecstatic dance”, dance therapy, authentic movement, folk dancing, 18th-century-style English court group dance, etc.
  • Hiking: Outdoors in a beautiful park or nature
  • Jumping exercises: to raise heart rate and energy level
  • Partner workout: Two people leaning on each other for the exercise. Example.
  • “Second Wind” meditation: With uplifting energizing music (such as this one), you continuously jump and raise your hands in the air. When you start getting tired, other people gather around you and make movements to encourage you to continue. At some point, just after you feel exhausted and your mind thinks you must stop, you suddenly feel a burst of new energy, like a “second wind” that powers your body. It’s surprising and exhilarating.