Since I’ve started on the energy healing path, many of my friends and acquaintances have stopped me mid-conversation to ask “What is energy healing?”
It’s a fair question. In our age of medicine that is focused only on the physical sciences and pushes aside traditional healing arts, it has become normal for people to not even have the faintest wisp of knowledge about alternative healing modalities. It’s not something that can be easily explained in a casual chat at a BBQ or even over a long conversation with a glass of wine, as it requires a serious shift in our perception of reality.
Even this article will not be able to explain it fully, as this form of healing and its underlying principles is something that is realised, understood and felt from within, like the feeling of ‘love’ or knowing the existence of ‘God’. The best way to approach this article is to read it, and then let it percolate over weeks, so you can start to form your own ideas around energy healing and our non-physical spiritual existence. Meditating on the ideas presented here is probably the best way to allow them to sink in.
Of course, this won’t resonate with everyone, and many people will consider it bullshit or pseudoscience no matter how you phrase it or argue it. If that’s your opinion, fine. I’m not here to argue or force ideas, simply to present an alternative worldview and an explanation of the work that energy healers engage in.
What is Energy Healing?
Also known as hands-on healing or reiki, energy healing is a form of healing work that focuses on your energetic and spiritual bodies, rather than your physical body. Energy healing is not tied to any religion, although it builds upon esoteric and mystic knowledge that is also referenced in Eastern spiritual systems such as Yoga, Tantra, Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism.
There are several forms of energy healing modalities. While many people know about Reiki, this is just one form of energy healing. Other healing modalities include Ashati, Alsemia, Golden Dragon, Seichem, Kundalini Reiki and more. Some work on specific energy bodies and not others. While one healing modality may work for some dis-eases, it may not be the best for others. For instance, Reiki works on the physical and etheric body, while Ashati works on the emotional and mental bodies. I’ll explain what energy bodies are in a moment.
While it’s not necessary to believe in all this for the energy healing to work, it does help to be open-minded to it, if anything to give some context for why energy healers do the work they do. To properly understand what energy healing is, however, we need to rewind our ingrained beliefs around who we are – as humans, as physical beings, and as non-physical spiritual beings. That begins by understanding that all we are, ultimately, is energy.
What do you mean by “Energy”?
At the core of energy healing is the premise that everything is energy. That includes you, me, the chair you are sitting on, the ground you touch, the water you drink, the blood in your veins, sounds and fragrances, the air you breathe… everything you experience in life is energy. Even your emotions and thoughts are fields of energy that can be built, altered, healed, and by some people even seen. This can be difficult to comprehend when we look at the objects around us, which seem solid as rocks.
Yet, physics tells us that matter is energy, and therefore we are energy. For instance, quantum physics has demonstrated that subatomic particles (the building blocks of all matter) behave in ways that are both wave-like and particle-like, suggesting that the boundary between matter and energy is not as clear-cut as we might think. When you drill down, no one is really certain what physical reality actually is, and it is certainly not as ‘solid’ as we once thought. For most people, this is a really difficult mental hurdle to jump over. If you want to learn more on this, I highly recommend reading ‘The Holographic Universe’ by Michael Talbot.
For energy healers, however, it goes even deeper than that. Understanding that matter is energy is one hurdle to overcome, but from an energy healer’s perspective reality extends even further beyond what most people experience in this physical reality. Here, we start to delve into the more esoteric and spiritual side of energy healing, with fundamental concepts that crossover with yoga, meditation, and other holistic healing practices such as acupuncture, ayurveda, cymatic therapy and homeopathy.
Energy healers see, experience and understand the world as energy and frequency. From the perspective of energy healers, you consist not only of a physical human body, but also several layers of energetic bodies that surround and penetrate your physical body. It is upon these subtle energetic bodies that energy healers do their energy healing work.
What are the Energy Bodies?
To understand the different energy bodies, consider the analogy of radio waves. In a single space you can tune into a large number of different radio stations. Although these radio waves occupy the same physical space, they occupy different frequency bandwidths in that space, which is why they can exist alongside each other but don’t conflict. Likewise, our different energy bodies (including our physical body) take up different frequency bandwidths within our same personal space.
Since these energy bodies are just different levels of our whole being, the human physical body is one of these energy bodies, too. All living beings have this structure, including humans, animals, plants, and even some minerals. The physical body has the slowest vibration of all the energy bodies, and as we move through the different energy bodies, the vibrations become faster.
It is not exactly clear how many energy bodies we have. However, it is generally accepted for healing purposes that we have 7 main energy bodies (not including our physical body), which are associated with each of the 7 major chakras. Chakras are energetic centres or ‘hubs’ spaced along our body, from our feet to the top of the head. Each chakra is connected to a specific energy body which governs different aspects of our being.
The 7 energy bodies consist of an etheric body which forms the blueprint for our physical body, a soul body, two emotional bodies, two mental bodies, and a relationship/social body. The emotional bodies relate to our emotional health and maturity, the mental bodies to our thought patterns and intellect, and the relationship/social body to our relationships with other people. These are very real energetic bodies that carry your emotions and thoughts, and some people with clairvoyant abilities can see these thought forms and emotions around your body as though they are watching a movie.
While most people are only ‘tuned into’ the physical ‘bandwidth’ of our existence and raised to only think of reality in terms of the physical, some are ‘tuned into’ the other energy bodies as well. There are many examples of people who have the ability to see these energy bodies in the form of auras, while others can feel or hear it. Some rare individuals can see and identify diseases, injuries and cancers in the human energetic body that are later confirmed by medical doctors, a phenomenon that conventional science has so far been unable to explain.
Everyone is capable of perceiving these subtle energies, but for most people this ability was turned off at some point during our human evolution. This skill can be re-acquired through focused training and practice, however, and this is part of the training that energy healers go through.
What do Energy Healers do?
Energy healers work to restore balance in our energy bodies, which in turn brings health to our physical body. We do this by bringing the energy bodies back into their natural alignment, to facilitate your body to then carry out its own self-healing.
To achieve this, we carry out a ‘laying on of hands’ on your body, particularly on your chakras, to channel through high vibration healing energies that have been activated in us. There are several different energy healing modalities; at the time of writing, I personally have access to three: Ashati, Alsemia and Reiki.
Energy healing delves into the root causes of an illness, which may at first seem unrelated to the physical health issue. Ultimately, when you peel back all the layers, every illness has some origin in the mind. Energy healing works on those imbalances in the emotional, mental and other energy bodies to heal the root cause of the issue, which then trickles throughout the rest of your being.
All of the energetic bodies are linked and influenced by each other. Illness in one energy body will eventually expand to the energy body next to it if it is not fixed, and eventually into the physical body where it will manifest as physical illness. As energy healers, we work on healing damaged aspects of these energetic bodies, to bring health to you as a whole, including your physical body.
Energy healing is considered especially helpful for illnesses and injuries with a psychosomatic element, or for people who have been told that their illness is “in their head”. If you’ve been told that an illness is “just in your head” energy healing can help you dissolve whatever caused that so-called “imaginary” pain or disability to manifest in the first place, so that you can release it.
Unlike some therapies, energy healing does not require you to relive the original trauma to release it. Instead, energy healers work directly on the energy body where the damage is, which usually lies outside your conscious awareness. For this reason, you may experience some irritability, fatigue and discomfort for a few days after an energy healing session, as your body works to subconsciously integrate the healing and fix those damaged aspects of yourself. Energy healers don’t need to know or expect you to tell them your problems or traumas.
To understand how this works, I find it helpful to think of humans as software and energy healers as coders or programmers. Energy healers identify and fix the broken code in your software, without needing to ever know why or how it got broken in the first place. Their aim is to simply repair or remove the broken bits of code that are causing your software to work incorrectly, so that your system can run like it is meant to. This ‘code editing’ happens outside your awareness, and once it is done, you will start to notice your system operating once again like how it was designed to.
You would be right in thinking that this is an impossible responsibility, far beyond the capability of any human. That is why energy healers work with spirit guides and your higher self, to carry out healing work. More accurately, you could say it is these spirit guides and higher self that are doing the hard work in rebalancing and repairing your energetic bodies, and energy healers are simply the channel for those healing energies to come through and reach you. If you are not already spiritually inclined, you are probably freaking out about what spirit guides and higher selves are.
Spirit guides are benevolent non-physical beings that exist to guide and help humans in their journey through life, which can take various forms including angels and spirit animals. Your higher self is another aspect of your being that is much greater than your conscious awareness and energetic bodies, but guides your life. Like a bouncer in a night-club, your higher self also protects you from any energies that are not for your highest good at that point in time. As energy healers, we actively invite your higher self to participate in the healing ceremony, to ensure you are protected and that the healing experience you receive is for your highest good as directed by your own higher self.
Depending on the circumstances, you may need several sessions to properly clean house. Like any other healing modality, energy healing is not a magic pill, and should be used as one part of your healing plan. Energy healing works alongside and complements all other healing modalities, and does not require clients to stop taking medication or change their diet, therefore you should always continue to follow the advice of your doctor or therapist while receiving energy healing.