What Gives a Place Its Energy?

There are places where I feel different almost immediately.

When I first arrived in Bali, for example, the moment I stepped out of the airport I remember thinking: What is this place? What is this feeling? Those questions, together with a million others, slowly found their answers during the time I spent here. They made me return, and eventually decide to move here.

A temple, a forest, an ancient site, an entire city or even a particular room. We often call it the energy of a place, but what are we actually sensing?

And more importantly: is that energy something inherent in the land, something created by people, something happening within us or a combination of all three?

The physical place comes first

Altitude changes how we breathe. Humidity, temperature and light affect the body. Water changes sound and air. Dense vegetation creates a completely different sensory environment from an open desert. Mountains alter scale and perspective. Caves change acoustics, temperature and our sense of orientation.

Our nervous systems are constantly receiving information from our surroundings, much of it without our conscious attention.

Research in environmental psychology looks at how natural environments, architecture, sound, light and design influence our attention, stress, mood and behaviour.

Then humans add another layer

A place where people have prayed, danced, mourned, celebrated, meditated or gathered for generations carries layers of human meaning.

I think of this as collective memory and cultural association. Over time, the physical place and human practice become almost impossible to separate.

There is also a layer of time. When I visit an ancient place, I often think about the people who lived there and realise that, despite the centuries between us, many of their questions were probably not very different from ours. How do we live well? How do we protect the people we love? How do we find our place in the world?

A place can connect us not only to a culture or landscape, but also to the people who came before us.

For this reason, cultural immersion interests me when visiting places. Understanding what people have been doing in a place and why can completely change how we experience it.

Humans have been trying to understand place for a long time

Cultures have developed different systems for understanding the relationship between people and place.

Chinese feng shui considers the movement of qi through landscapes and built environments. Indian Vastu Shastra connects architecture with orientation and natural elements. Thousands of years ago, monumental structures such as the Pyramid of Giza were built with alignment to the cardinal directions.

The systems differ, but the observation is similar: Where something happens matters.

In 1921, Alfred Watkins became interested in something similar while observing the English countryside. He noticed that ancient landmarks appeared to align across the landscape. When he began plotting them on maps, he identified what he called ley lines.

Watkins originally thought these were ancient pathways or navigation lines. The idea that they represent currents of Earth energy came later, and there is no scientific evidence establishing ley lines as energetic channels.

But Watkins interests me for another reason.

He was, in his own way, asking a version of the same question:

Is there a pattern here that I can feel or observe before I fully understand it?

Place, intention and timing

Perhaps what we call the energy of a place is not one thing. It may be where geography, sensory experience, history, culture, ritual and our own perception meet. And perhaps there are parts of that relationship we still don’t fully understand.

I don’t need to decide whether every powerful experience of place is geological, psychological, cultural, spiritual or energetic. I am more interested in noticing where these explanations overlap and what happens when we design experiences with that awareness.

What happens between a place and us when we enter it?

This is also why place matters so much to me in retreat design and meaningful travel. A location is not simply where an experience happens. It can be part of the experience itself.

So when I choose an event place, one of my first questions is: Why here?