Silvia Hartmann: A Chronological Biography

Early Life and Education (1959–1970s)

Silvia Hartmann was born on August 23, 1959, in Detmold, West Germany. She spent her childhood in Germany before moving to England in the late 1970s. In 1978, at age 19, Hartmann emigrated to the United Kingdom. She initially enrolled in studies of behavioural biology but soon shifted her focus to animal behaviour research. This academic path reflected her deep curiosity about how living creatures learn, communicate, and respond to their environment.

Animal Behaviour Research (1978–1993)

Settling in Britain, Hartmann devoted about 15 years to the study of animal behaviour, particularly the dynamics between pets and their owners. Throughout the 1980s, she conducted research on companion animals and tackled puzzling behavioural issues in domesticated pets.

Notably, in 1987 she joined a team investigating “rage syndrome” in domestic animals – sudden, extreme aggression in otherwise tame pets. During this project, Hartmann discovered a measurable link between an animal’s attention seeking behaviour and its stress levels. This insight led her to formulate a new theoretical framework called The Harmony Program in 1993.

The Harmony Program was a revolutionary thesis proposing that energy exchanges in the relationship between mammals directly affect their behaviour. In other words, the emotional energy and attention flowing between an animal and its environment could influence that animal’s actions and stress. Hartmann presented her findings to the scientific community, but her ideas were quite ahead of their time. Emphasizing “energy” in animal behaviour challenged conventional theories, and her work was met with skepticism. She later noted that after introducing the Harmony Program, she was effectively ostracised by the mainstream animal behaviour research community.

Despite this setback, Hartmann did not abandon her discovery. On the contrary, being outside the orthodox circles gave her the freedom to continue her investigations independently. She suspected that the principles of the Harmony Program were universal – not only applicable to animals, but to human behaviour as well. This belief set the stage for the next phase of her career, in which she would turn her attention to understanding and improving human emotional experience.

Shift to Human Behaviour and Early Innovations (1993–1998)

In the mid-1990s, Silvia Hartmann pivoted from animal research to exploring human behaviour and personal development. After 1993, she immersed herself in studying human-focused disciplines to bridge the gap between her animal research and the human-centric applications of her discoveries. She conducted contextual research into General Semantics, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and traditional psychology, with a special interest in how thoughts are formed and how metaphor and language influence behaviour in the context of the effects of emotional stress from the energy system. Hartmann was essentially re-tooling her scientific background to apply it to the human mind, looking at how the energetic principles she observed with animals might manifest in people’s emotions and interactions with themselves and the world around them.

One of the first major outcomes of this new direction was Project Sanctuary, a book and technique set Hartmann created in 1996. Project Sanctuary introduced a unique creative visualization method for problem-solving and personal insight. In this approach, individuals transfer their consciousness to a personal “Sanctuary” space – a safe, dynamic dreamscape where they can interact with symbols and scenarios generated by their subconscious. Hartmann believed this helped forge a better connection between the conscious mind and what she called the “Energy Mind” (her term for the unconscious or subconscious mind. The technique allowed people to communicate with their deeper mind through stories and imagery, reflecting her conviction that metaphor and imagination can unlock real-life solutions. Project Sanctuary was notable not only for its innovative content but also for its format: it was one of the very early e-books sold online, foreshadowing the digital publishing revolution in self-help literature.

During this period, Hartmann also applied her behavioral expertise in practical ways. She authored hands-on guides for pet owners, such as Overcoming Dog Problems (published in the late 1990s), which provided advice on training and managing canine behaviour. This work bridged her past and present interests, translating her animal behaviour knowledge into accessible tips for families. At the same time, she was laying the groundwork for an entirely new field of practice focused on human wellness.

By the late 1990s, Hartmann became an early pioneer in the emerging domain of energy psychology – a field that combines traditional therapeutic techniques with concepts of the body’s energy system (like meridians, aura, or chi). In 1998, she co-founded the Association for Meridian & Energy Therapies (AMT), the first professional organization devoted to providing professional certification for modern energy techniques. Through the AMT (which would later be renamed The Guild of Energists GoE), Hartmann and her colleagues began training practitioners in novel methods of emotional healing that went beyond talk therapy. Around this same time, she worked closely with the founders of Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), a tapping therapy that was gaining attention. Hartmann wrote Adventures in EFT in 1998, which was the first comprehensive training manual for EFT and one of the earliest widely-read books on the subject. Impressively, Adventures in EFT was released as an electronic book and became a worldwide bestseller online, demonstrating how quickly these ideas spread when paired with new internet technology. Hartmann’s involvement in EFT helped standardize and professionalize the practice, blending it with her Harmony Program insights about stress and attention.

Developing Energy Techniques (2000s)

Entering the 2000s, Silvia Hartmann focused on refining and expanding her energy-based methods for emotional wellness. One of her most significant contributions during this era was the creation of EmoTrance (short for Emotional Transformation) in 2002. EmoTrance is a systematic approach to understanding and releasing emotional stress by working with the body’s natural energy flow. Rather than analyzing feelings solely on a mental level, EmoTrance teaches people to notice where they feel an emotion in the body (for example, tightness in the chest when anxious) and to gently soften and dissolve that stuck emotional energy. The technique was born out of a five-year research project Hartmann undertook, building on her experience with meridian therapies and the Harmony Program principles. By 2002 she had developed EmoTrance into a teachable method and began training practitioners in how to use it to help clients let go of painful emotions in a matter of minutes. (In later years, EmoTrance was further evolved and rebranded as EMO – Energy in Motion, but the core idea remained the same: emotions are the true sixth sense; they are the feedback devices for the energy system, and they can be transformed through the application of intention.)

In parallel with new techniques, Hartmann introduced tools to measure and understand emotional states in terms of energy. In 2001 she developed the Emotional Intensity (EI) Scale. Traditional psychology often uses a distress scale (rating stress or pain from 0 to 10). In 2008, she refined this concept into the Modern Energy Chart (Objective) and the SUE Scale (short for Subjective Units of Experience), which became a cornerstone of her teachings. By giving people a way to gauge their energy states (not just their pain), Hartmann created a conceptual framework to understand the energy states of themselves and other people. The underlying message of these tools was simple and radical: to reduce stress, you don’t merely calm the person down – you need to add energy. More positive energy in the system naturally displaces stress and leads to better performance and well-being.

Throughout the 2000s, Hartmann published numerous books and papers to share her growing body of knowledge. She was a very hands-on innovator, often creating a new technique, testing the results with pilot study groups, then publishing her results in a guidebook or course. For example, after a years of practically researching EFT she wrote The Advanced Patterns of EFT (published 2003) to help practitioners deepen their tapping skills. Following the launch of EmoTrance, she compiled its principles and case examples into works like Oceans of Energy (2003), Living Energy (2004) and Energy Magic (2005).

As the decade progressed, Hartmann continued to break new ground. In 2008 she published Energy Events, a framework that examines how significant life events shape behaviour and life patterns. While traditional psychology zeroes in on traumatic events to explain problems, Hartmann broadened the view to include further types of formative events. She introduced the concept of “Guiding Stars”: unfinished positive experiences, which cause behaviour to loop, repeating the same pattern over and over again, and identified these types of events as the root of philias, fetishes and addictions. With the addition of further important life events, such as the “Healing Events”, often experienced by clients during energy sessions, and the inclusion of the “Missing Events” the trauma only story of psychology was broken, and an “Events Matrix” was beginning to unfold.

Along with this, she developed the Aspects Model, which encourages people to think of their past and future selves as “aspects” thus solving the “I of Identity” problem Korzybski had highlighted, replacing the various outmoded parts models with sequentially occurring aspects through time, and providing a methodology by which individuals in the here & now can interact with past and future aspects of themselves. These methods were incorporated into the training programs of the AMT/GoE, further enriching what practitioners could offer to clients. By the end of the 2000s, Silvia Hartmann had established a cohesive tool set for practical energy work, all rooted in her original discovery that energy is the key to change.

Modern Energy and Later Innovations (2010s)

By the 2010s, the tapestry of techniques and concepts Hartmann had developed was coming together as a cohesive philosophy she termed Modern Energy. In these years, Hartmann took on a very public role as an ambassador of Modern Energy. She served as the chairperson (and later president) of The AMT (renamed The Guild of Energists in 2016 to reflect the shift into a dedicated organisation focused on energy work), organizing international conferences and training events to share the latest developments, which she now placed into the Third Field in the body, mind, energy system (spirit) triad.

In 2011, she created Energy EFT, which updated the EFT tapping method with her modern energy perspective, which was updated in 2016 to MET Modern Energy Tapping, reflecting the shift from psychology's trauma work to Modern Energy's solution focused approach.

A pivotal moment came in her 2011 AMT conference plenary speech, where she officially repositioned Modern Energy outside psychology, establishing it within the “Third Field”—a triadic paradigm of mind, body, and spirit (energy). This shift rejected the dualistic mind-body model, arguing that energy is essential for human health and well-being, a foundational stance for her subsequent innovations.

In 2014, Hartmann unveiled a program that applied her energy-based approach to one of the biggest issues of modern times: stress. This program, called Modern Stress Management (MSM), provides practical techniques for individuals and organizations to handle stress by raising energy, not just reducing pressure. She authored a book titled Modern Stress Management that year, outlining exercises and strategies for boosting one’s energy level in the face of everyday challenges. These include energy exercises, and ways to foster positive connection in teams and families. Modern Stress Management has been taught to coaches, therapists, schools and large corporate groups, framing it as a 21st-century upgrade to how we think about workplace wellness and mental health.

In 2018, Hartmann published The Energy Revolution. This book in particular was designed to be a quick, accessible overview of Modern Energy principles. It lays out core ideas in a concise way for newcomers.

Around the same time, Hartmann’s focus on the high positive states of being on the Modern Energy Chart kept increasing. This culminated in one of her most recent and personal projects: Star Matrix. Launched as a pilot study (Project 11) in 2019, Star Matrix is all about revisiting and reclaiming the most positive memories of one’s life in order to create a more realistic self concept, particularly for those who had spent too much time in trauma explorations.

In Star Matrix work, participants actively compile their “Star memories” and reflect on how those peak experiences can guide them now. The results were striking; encouraged by these outcomes, Hartmann wrote Star Matrix (2021) to share the concept with a wider audience, and StarLine Therapy (2023) as an introduction to the methodology for therapists. She considers Star Matrix her legacy project, as it presents individual proof of concept through lived experience for what she discovered in The Harmony Program.

Writing, Art, and Other Creative Contributions

Silvia Hartmann’s exploration integrates writing, music, art, dance and all other creative human expression as essential research tools and practical applications within the Third Field—the energy domain of the mind-body-spirit triad. Far from ancillary pursuits, these endeavours are logical extensions of her energy-based frameworks, designed to investigate and harness energy shifts. For this reason, her bibliography spans technical manuals, fiction, and poetry, each serving to advance Modern Energy principles. Works such as Modern Energy Tapping, The Power of the Positives, The Trillion Dollar Stress Solution, EMO: Energy in Motion, and Infinite Creativity document her innovations, while her creative output demonstrates their application. Translated into multiple languages, these publications reflect her global influence.

Hartmann employs fiction and poetry as experimental modalities to move energy—i.e., evoke and transform emotions. The Golden Horse and DragonGold (fairy tale collections), Aromatherapy For Your Soul (pairing essential oils with images and energy-focused stories), and For You, A Star (pairing Modern Energy Art symbol paintings with uplifting poetry) are structured to engage the energy system, facilitating insight and emotional change. This aligns with her research intent: whether through a technique manual or a narrative, her conversational, practical style aims to catalyze positive, beneficial shifts in the reader’s energy state.

A key example is The DragonLords (2012), a fantasy novel Hartmann wrote and edited live in an online “cloud” document, with real-time reader interaction. Recognized as the first novel fully composed in the cloud, it was later included in the British Library’s The History Of Books In 100 Books (2014) for its publishing innovation. Beyond its narrative, The DragonLords served as a deliberate demonstration—“It can be done!”—of the Energy Mind’s capacity to generate complex creative output spontaneously, leveraging collective audience energy. Hartmann undertook this project personally to model the feasibility of her theories, not as a hobby, but as a proof-of-concept within her broader scientific inquiry.

Equally significant is Modern Energy Art (MEA), a methodology applying energy principles to visual expression. Hartmann uses her own abstract works—exhibited across the UK and beyond—as empirical examples, training others to create art that radiates positive energy. MEA is a structured approach, not a pastime, designed to shift focus from problems to solutions, aligning with her Power of the Positives paradigm. By engaging imagination systematically, whether through poetry, stories, or art, Hartmann demonstrates that creativity is a logical, replicable tool for emotional transformation, integral to the Third Field’s mission of enhancing human well-being.

Legacy and Current Direction

As of today, Silvia Hartmann is recognized as the leading thinker in the field of Modern Energy and the uncompromising advocate for The Third Field in the body, mind, spirit triad, advocating for the paradigm shift from the dualistic, reductionist materialistic mind/body paradigm to a more inclusive, more human-centric approach in the care of the citizens.

She continues to live and work in southern England, where the headquarters of The Guild of Energists is based. Hartmann served as the President of the GoE until 2024 and remains Head of Research of the Guild, actively overseeing training programs and new developments.

While Star Matrix remains her legacy project, her current focus is establishing the Third Field as a rigorous scientific discipline. This work aims to provide an empirical foundation for energy-based approaches to human well-being, building on her career-long integration of observation and innovation. In 2025, she published the Third Field Manifesto, which calls for a human-centric approach and includes ROLE (Reports of Lived Experience) as a core tool in energy research to discover meta patterns of humanity.

After decades of innovation, Hartmann’s mission remains remarkably consistent: to help people feel happier by realising the importance of energy, not as a vague idea, but as a reality. She calls Modern Energy as “our new science of love,” suggesting that in the future she envisions, the human energy body will be approached with the same focused, unconditional attention as any science.

“Love without logic is insanity – and vice versa.” Silvia Hartmann