Demystifying “Energy Healing” 

If I can change your energy, I can change your health.  It’s as simple as that.  So why are we only just beginning to look at energy for its healing potential?  I believe it is because in order to understand why Energy Medicine works, one needs a surface level understanding of newer branches of physics.  

The idea that an Energy Healer can place their hands above your body and heal you (with or without physically touching you) many seem ‘magical’ but, in fact, the healer is simply trained in a technique that uses a tool that cannot be seen by the naked eye.  When you think about it, most things that seem magical are really just phenomenon that has yet to be explained by science.  For example, there is an energetic and chemical science behind why fires burn, yet in the eyes of ancient man fire was a magic miracle that allowed him to stay warm longer and eat better.  Until recently, mainstream science and medicine haven’t been too interested in Energy Healing.  In the most cynical circles it has been relegated to pseudo science in order to discredit a less invasive (sometimes faster or less costly) solution to common non acute ailments such as stress, headache and muscle pain.

If you want to understand why an Energy Healer can place their hands up to six feet from the body to heal you or why they may even be able to effect your emotional or physical wellness from thousands of miles away, it starts with understanding three things: (1) Thoughts and information have mass and mass is a form of energy; (2) All the energy that is and ever was is entangled and therefore connected; and (3) Everything in our world is a form of energy: so called ‘solids’ are simply vibrating slowly and other states are vibrating more quickly.   

If you’ve been in one fulfilling relationship in your life (romantic or otherwise) you know the effect that one person’s energy and presence can have on another.  You may even be aware of the energy of spaces and objects and how you feel when you are around them.  Still, when it comes to people, we tend to think that the other person’s chemistry is a great match for ours, rather than thinking about the energy that may lie just behind the chemistry. In order to activate positive chemicals in the body’s natural pharmacy (endorphins, pheromones etc.) something else first activates that; this may be a sensory experience (you like their eyes, their smell, the way you feel near them) followed by an energetic response (neurons firing in the brain and traveling through the body’s systems from muscular to circulatory).  As part of the process, our brain tells the body to release feel good chemicals including powerful ones like oxytocin and dopamine, depending on the stimuli.  When it comes to our physical body, falling in ‘love’ or even in ‘like’ with someone is a combination of energetic and chemical processes.  

Recent theories have suggested that feelings and emotions have mass. We are learning through quantum physics that, at the subtle level, newtonian physics is not always king, and that, as a result, all this empty space out in front of us may be a lot more than just oxygen molecules knocking around.  It may be that space around us holds the mass of information created by humans along with many forms of subtle communication that go far beyond Energy Medicine.  One day science may even be able to explain our sixth sense and our intuition as they learn more about how thoughts create mass.

According to Dr. Ralph Lewis M.D. in an article he wrote for Psychology Today in 2019, information, by extension thoughts, are physical and relational.  Physical means they have mass and relational means they are arranged in relationship to something else; in the mind that will be in relation to a neural tag (colloquially we may refer to this as a “trigger” in the way we experience it.)  If I am “triggered” to have an emotional response to the smell of chicken soup because my grandmother always made it to show she cared for me, I will generate positive thoughts when I rencounter chicken soup at a later time.  Those thoughts will have mass and will give me something ‘physical’ and ‘real’ in the moment.  They are ‘related’ to the neural tag in my mind labeled somewhere metaphorically as Grandma’s Chicken Soup. If a neuroscientist were to study the electrical impulses in my brain as I respond to the smell and taste of chicken soup, they would see neurons firing and sending energetic signals all over my body to do everything from release positive chemicals that produce relaxation in my body, to others that tell my facial muscles to smile and my eyes to close.  This is how we respond to information that comes in through our senses - we first sense and then the neurons fire.  The realization that thoughts are mass, in essence, means that human creation is ‘real’ (if invisible) at the subtle level, and this knowledge has lead to interesting developments in Psychology, Neuroscience and Energy Medicine. After all, if my thoughts are real at the level of subtle energy, then I may be able to recreate reality for myself after experiencing trauma.  The past and future are just thoughts after all; so if I change my thoughts and the energy behind those thoughts, then in theory, whether I’m participating in virtual reality, sitting in meditation or receiving a Reiki session, the “mass” that is my thoughts is being changed, my energy is be changed and so the body’s natural pharmacy may stop producing the chemicals associated with my trauma and start producing those related to my new sense of wellbeing.  Psychologists, Neuroscientists and Energy Healers are already using these techniques with victims of violence, soldiers and those who have experienced PTSD for other reasons and with great success!

So why can an Energy Healer place their hands above my body and produce a healing effect? It isn’t as complicated as it seems.  We as humans, particularly Americans, have been sold the belief that we are separate from one another and that our energy stops where our body is walled with skin.  We often see ourselves as unique and separate and we tend to rely on Newtonian rather than Quantum physics when it comes to our understanding of the physical world and how it works.  If we shift however and take a Quantum approach, where our energy systems are connected and therefore where our energy extends beyond our physical body, we begin to ask questions like: could the mass and frequency of my thoughts affect the mass and frequency of someone else’s thoughts?  Could I channel other frequencies of energy through my own and transfer them to others?  Could I combine energy with many people and channel a multi powered stronger frequency into someone who is suffering pain and relieve them of that pain?  

When it comes down to it our bodies are closed circuit batteries.  If we learn how to use our thoughts to control that circuit, and then how to share that circuit with others, we can begin to affect other’s frequencies.  An article backed by the National Institute of Health called Measuring the Frequencies of Emotions published on the NCBI website, details how frequencies emitted by positive and negative emotions effect our health. SPANE (the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience) helps those that work with the brain to understand the frequencies of different levels of emotion and how these electrical pulses affect the brain, body and over all health. The article states that, “Various studies report positive outcomes of high well-being [ and conclude that] after an extensive meta-analysis… people with higher positive SPANE readings are healthier and show more adaptive healthy behaviors and are more productive at work.” In other words, experiencing positive emotions on a regular basis is correlated with better health and wellbeing. In many cases they showed better results on relative age studies that seek to determine how much poor mental and physical health may play into relative age verses actual age.

To put it as simply as possible, an Energy Healer is going to share, channel or infuse energy into the client at a more effective frequency than what the client who is seeking healing has been doing on their own previously.  This higher frequency is achieved through mediation, visualization, affirmation, vocalization, breath, spirituality and more.  In some cases a healer may channel a frequency other than their own.  They will then use their mind, body and spirit to transmit (much in the way a radio does) that frequency to the client. 

If you’ve experienced a healing session, then you know how the temperature of a healer’s hands changes during the process.  Their hands may become much hotter or colder (or even emit a kind of buzzing) all which are much different than would be expected while the healer was going about normal daily life.  While our observation of this phenomenon is common, science has yet to explain why the hands get so hot or cold and what exactly is in that hot or cold energy that is being exchanged. Many mistakenly believe that the hands of the healer are simply working like a hot/cold pack that you might warm in the microwave or chill in the freezer.  They believe that it is the temperature itself that is doing any healing.  This would certainly explain relaxed muscles and less tension but it doesn’t necessarily explain less pain, overall feelings of well being, reduced anxiety, lower blood pressure, less inflammation and more.  While the heating and cooling may be part of it; it can’t explain all of it.  So what is happening then?  I believe the temperature variation is a side effect of the massive energetic and chemical process taking place inside the healer as they create or channel the information (mass) we call”energy medicine” that will be transferred.  This is why a client, for example, who comes to the healer angry, frustrated, overwhelmed and shaking, may leave after an hour of infusion with the healing frequency (energy medicine) feeling centered, balanced, relaxed, refreshed, and energized.  One could say the healer is in fact “programming” the frequency of client through the subtle energy being channeled and that the ability of that energy to change the response of the client’s natural pharmacy is in fact a form of medicine.

Unfortunately, since many of us learned much more about Newtonian Physics than we did about Quantum Physics, the result is that we want to see action and reaction with our own eyes when it comes to choosing a healing plan in order to trust that what we are receiving is valid.  We are expecting to ingest a physical pill, be taught something, have our muscles manipulated, hear the tone of music as it is played, or feel the slight prick of a needle, to know that medicine is entering the body.  Still with energy medicine there is an action-reaction happening it is just so subtle (tiny) that we cannot see it with the naked eye.  As a result, even a client who has been healed this way may still leave the session feeling like something magical has happened when in reality the action-reaction simply happened at an undetectable level. There is always that concern that because we can’t see it, it either isn’t valid, isn’t working well, or worse, that we are being fooled.  

Energy Healing is the medicine of the future. My advice? The only way to figure out if Energy Medicine is right for you is to try it. Trust how you feel after you work with a healer.  If you feel well in comparison to how you were before you started, the medicine is working!  If after a few sessions you are showing real improvement, why would you want to stick with a more invasive option?  Be mindful that it could take a couple of times to find a healer who is a good fit for your personal needs but try it - it just might change your life and your health for the better!

Articles Referenced:

What Actually is a Thought and How is Information Physical? by Dr. Ralph Lewis M.D (2019)  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-purpose/201902/what-actually-is-thought-and-how-is-information-physical

Measuring the Frequency of Emotions by Tobias Rahm, Elke Heise and Mirijam Schuldt https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5298234/