Can water respond to emotions?

Exploring the work of Masaru Emoto, and the idea that thoughts and words can change the molecular structure of water

Lately I’ve been realizing just how deeply I’m connected to water. I feel my best when I’m near or on the water, and I know that’s part of why I’ve loved living right on the edge of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala for the past two months, soaking in the sound of the waves each day and often taking morning dips in its blue oasis.

I also resonate with the element of water a lot. Water tends to symbolize flow, emotions, fluidity, and cleansing — all things that I work often with, all things that flow through me constantly. Few things refresh me like a glass of water or a shower. I love water and feel so connected to it, to oceans and rivers, to their flow and their mutability. I relate to how it changes shape, and am in awe of how it slowly, very slowly, reshapes the world around it.

And when I think of God, I always think of an ocean. An ocean of which I am a single drop, falling and falling, containing bits of my vast origins in my small and formless form, bound one day to return to the whole.

So today’s post is about water. Specifically, it’s about a certain scientist whose work has come up for me many times in the past few months: Masaru Emoto, who theorized that human consciousness and intention could change the molecular composition of water.

I first heard of Emoto’s work from a friend who was weaving his ideas into her MFA thesis, which I was lucky enough to read. The thesis explores plant medicine, prayer, the power of intention, and much more, and also threads in some science, including Emoto’s work.

Emoto’s studies involved exposing water to different forces, including music, photographs, and various emotions. His research found that water exposed to harmonious and blissful emotions or music or photographs would form beautiful ice crystals — whereas water exposed to negative stimuli would dissolve into porous or blob-like shapes.

In a 1994 study, Emoto asked thousands of people in Tokyo to project gratitude onto water samples located in an electromagnetically shielded room in a laboratory in California. Then, a group of people unaware of the study were asked to rate the water’s ice crystals, as well as those formed by an un-blessed control sample of water, based on aesthetic appeal. The study found that the blessed water had significantly higher aesthetic ratings, and generated significant attention to Emoto’s claims.

Over the years, Emoto published several bestselling books, and in subsequent studies, he also found that positive thought and intention could even clean polluted water.

Of course, his work has also been heavily criticized and labeled as pseudoscience, and I’m not going to argue that it is or isn’t — that can remain a question. Yet I do want to note that Emoto is far from the first scientist or philosopher to propose that the makeup of the external world changes when we change our internal world, or that negative stimuli can generate negative consequences in the body.

We know that stress and anxiety can lead to illness in our bodies, whereas love and happiness can heal us. We know that discordant music or sounds literally makes us flinch or sweat, while peaceful music soothes us and sometimes makes us feel like we are flying.

We know that trauma can store itself in our DNA. We know that everything in the world is colored by our perspective.

Quantum physics tells us that just by observing a particle, we can fundamentally change not only its location in space, but the location of other particles that it is connected to by invisible threads.

Our bodies are 70% water. Is it so hard to believe that the water within us is somehow responding to input from the world around us?

Is it so hard to believe nature is listening? That it feels us, hears us? The earth is alive, after all, woven through with knowledge we humans cannot even dream of understanding — knowledge of the alchemy of death and rebirth, knowledge of propagation and creation, an understanding of how to survive on light and rain.

Emoto’s studies came up today in a workshop about manifestation magick I took at the farm where I’m staying. Manifestation is all about the idea that our internal actions help create our external realities, and it proposes that by aligning ourselves with our highest intentions, we can magnetize them towards us.

I personally know that my life has dramatically changed for the better since I moved to this farm, where I have started living more closely with water and nature, and where I have been surrounding myself with a community that lifts me up. Sometimes, I can almost feel the water within me reshaping itself from an oozing mass into some sort of crystal, its wings unfurling.

Does water have emotions? Do trees? Can fire hear our prayers and alchemize them? Can wind carry messages from the spirit world?

I see stranger things happen every single day. I see stranger things in the marvelous technology we humans have created, which is slowly devouring our brains and replacing us as we watch hapless and addicted. I see stranger things in the way that so many of us float numbly through existence, drowning ourselves in distraction and drugs. I see stranger things in the way we are destroying the very earth that is our mother.

Is it so strange to think compassion can reshape the water within us? When I approach a task with love, it always turns out completely differently and so much better than when I approach it with disdain or fear. People are the same. And so, I believe, is water.

Everything around us is listening. Everything around us is responding to the energy we give to it. Everything around us mirrors the world within us, aligning itself to the promises we make, adjusting to the flow of our habits and our integrity.

The water, I do think, is listening. Water is life — integral to every single living thing’s existence on earth — and we are also water, ever-flowing, ever-changing, always connected to the vessel that holds us.

So what are you saying to the waters within you? Have you been telling them kind things? Have you been allowing the beautiful snowflake patterns of your soul to unfurl? Or have you been shutting them down?

What are you saying to the waters around you? Are you wasting the waters, pouring waste into them? Or are you thanking the water for its cleansing powers and its life-giving hydration?

A phrase that has been coming back to me often since being at the farm is the holy waters were within you the whole time. This comes from a story I wrote as a child involving a girl who goes on a great quest to conquer a sacred, secret body of water only to find she’s been living alongside these very waters her whole life. The waters are within us; we need only to honor them and to open to them and to let them flow. Creativity is also a river and so is reverence. Everything is listening, from our fibrous fascia to the webs of energy lines that connect our chests to our teeth and our minds to our feet. Everything is listening, from the molecules of water to the spirits of the earth, which have been waiting for so many of us to realize what all the great sages have been telling us for so long: that it’s all connected, all interwoven, all a tapestry of oneness.

Or at least, that’s my running theory. And I would imagine Emoto would agree.

What do you think?

I’d love to hear from you.

May your waters, and all the waters of the world, flow ever-freely.