Most of us are familiar with the feeling: You walk into a room and immediately sense something – comfort, heaviness, warmth, tension – before a word is even spoken.
In his book, Why Vibes Matter: Understand Your Energy and Learn to Use it Wisely, IONS Scientist Garret Yount, PhD, explores this phenomenon as “emotional residue,” the idea that spaces may hold subtle traces of the thoughts, emotions, and intentions that once filled them. You can often sense emotional residue through a sense of “vibes” upon entering a place.
In Why Vibes Matter, Garret walks us through both everyday and scientific explanations for why places can feel the way they do. Colors subtly shape mood. Clutter increases stress. Objects can unconsciously prime behavior. These “ordinary” factors already demonstrate how environments influence us beneath conscious awareness. But he also explores something more subtle: the possibility that emotions themselves may leave traces in the environment – what researchers have termed emotional residue.
Cross-cultural studies suggest that people intuitively feel these vibes. When given a choice, participants consistently preferred to enter rooms where others had previously recalled happy memories rather than sad ones. Even without measurable instruments to detect subtle energy directly, behavior tells a compelling story: we act as if emotions can imprint a place.
Science of Intention
Garret takes this further in his research on “conditioning” space – showing that focused intention and emotion may alter the local physical environment in small but meaningful ways. In laboratory experiments conducted at IONS, spaces steeped in sustained healing intention appeared to support the growth of cultured human cells and even influenced the behavior of random number generators. While these findings don’t prove a mechanism, they open an intriguing possibility: coherence in consciousness may create coherence in the environments around us.
But what if this idea doesn’t just apply to space? What if time itself – moments, seasons, even years – can also carry emotional residue?
As we move out of 2025 and step into 2026, just weeks after the winter solstice and the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, it’s a natural moment to pause. The darkness has peaked. The light is slowly returning. And many of us are carrying a year’s worth of experiences – joy, grief, uncertainty, growth – in our bodies, awareness, and consciousness. The question becomes: how do we relate to what lingers?
If space can hold residue, it’s not a huge leap to wonder whether time can, too. In fact, it’s barely a skip and a hop since, in established physics, space and time are inseparable, parts of a single structure called spacetime. So changes in energy, motion, or mass necessarily affect both. An action that alters space therefore alters time, and vice versa, as a matter of spacetime geometry. This is not speculative but a direct consequence of experimentally confirmed relativity.
We often talk about “carrying” a year with us. We feel echoes of past events when certain dates roll around. Collective moments – global crises, shared grief, profound breakthroughs – seem to ripple forward, shaping how we meet what comes next. Perhaps emotional residue isn’t limited to walls and rooms, but also settles into memory, rhythm, and expectation. Time, like space, may be something we move through – and something that moves through us.
This is where practice becomes important. Garret notes that cultures around the world have long used rituals to clear energy from spaces, long before modern science took an interest. One example he discusses is smudging – the burning of herbs such as sage, cedar, or rosemary to symbolically and experientially cleanse a space. Whether understood spiritually, psychologically, or metaphorically, the act itself marks a transition. It signals intention. It creates a pause.
And that’s something we can apply not just to rooms, but to moments in time.
As the light begins its slow return after the solstice, we’re invited into a similar kind of clearing. Not erasing the past year, but acknowledging it – and choosing what we carry forward.
Bridging Ancient Wisdom and Modern Inquiry
Garret explores many of these ideas more deeply in his course The Energy of People, Places, and Spaces, where he weaves together personal experience, cultural wisdom, and scientific inquiry. He looks at emotional residue, space conditioning, collective intention, subtle energy research, and the often-felt but hard-to-define “vibes” that move between people in shared moments. He also examines why certain places — and certain interactions — seem to amplify healing, creativity, or coherence. The invitation throughout his work is not blind belief, but curiosity: what shifts when we bring awareness and intention to the environments, relationships, and moments we inhabit?
Rather than leaving that question abstract, we can explore it directly – not just through ideas, but through lived experience. Enjoy the Clearing Space and Time experiential below.
An Experiential: Clearing Space and Time
Before beginning this short meditation, consider clearing the space you’re in.
If it feels appropriate, you might light a candle or gently smudge the room with an herb such as sage, rosemary, or lavender. Open a window or door, and set a simple intention – something like, “I’m creating space for clarity, release, and renewal.” Let this be less about doing it “right” and more about marking a transition.
Now, settle comfortably.
Close your eyes and take a few slow breaths.
Bring to mind the year you’re leaving behind. Notice what arises – emotions, images, sensations – without judgment. Imagine these experiences as impressions resting in time, like footprints in sand.
With each exhale, gently release what no longer needs to come with you.
With each inhale, invite in the returning light – clarity, steadiness, possibility.
Finally, imagine yourself stepping into this next period of time with awareness and care, carrying only what truly supports you.
When you’re ready, open your eyes – grounded, present, and oriented toward what’s next.
As we immerse ourselves in 2026, perhaps the question isn’t whether time does hold emotional residue – but how consciously we choose to meet it.
