Making a Case for Energy Healing and How It Can Help You
A friend recently recommended Reiki energy healing. Your doctor also thinks it might help. You’ve heard of it before but what the heck is it?
Reiki is a form of energy medicine. Energy medicine is based upon the belief that changes in the “life force” of the body, including the electric, magnetic, and electromagnetic fields, affect human health and can promote healing. Reiki energy healing is a practice where one uses focused intention to direct divine life force energy to a person, animal, place or thing to bring about positive change. If it were a mathematical equation, I believe it would look like this:
Life Force Energy + Intention – Ego = Energy Healing
What do we mean by “energy” in energy healing?
In order to understand energy healing, you first need to understand energy itself. Back in the old days scientists thought everything was made up of matter. Turns out they were wrong. Everything is energy, including your body. It may feel like a heavy solid mass, but it’s really just whirling vortexes of energy. We are beings of energy and vibration.
“Quantum physicists discovered that physical atoms are made up of vortices of energy that are constantly spinning and vibrating, each one radiating its own unique energy signature,” says Arjun Walia in Nothing is Solid & Everything Is Energy – Scientists Explain the World of Quantum Physics.
Energy healing goes way back
Although science is catching up, some ancient wisdom seekers knew all along that our bodies were made up of energy. Energy work is not a New Age phenomena, it’s been around for thousands of years. Reiki is a Japanese energy healing tradition that has been active since the early 20th century. Hindu texts describe the chakras, the 114 energy transmission centers of the body (7 of which are the most important to focus on), and the nadis, the 72,000 energy channels through which life force energy or “prana” flows. (1). The meridians, according to traditional Chinese Medicine, are the pathways through which life force energy or “qi” moves.
What do energy healers do?
Energy healing practitioners use focused intention to direct life force energy to a person or animal. All healing is self healing. The practitioners are not doing the healing rather they are channeling, via intention, life force energy also known as Source energy. Life force energy is highly intelligent and knows where to go and what to do. This is why the best healers are those that have perfected the ability to “get out of the way” and consciously have their ego-self/personality “step aside” to allow Source energy to orchestrate the healing. We call this type of healer “a clear channel.”
Life force energy (Reiki) + Focused Intention – Ego/Personality = Energy Healing.
Energy healing can be done in-person via light touch or no touch or over great distance. (Is distance healing effective? Keep reading, as I’ll share a research study on this later in this article).
Why do we need energy healing?
Disease is not what we were led to believe in the past. We’ve learned from mind-body medicine that the mind hugely influences the body and according to physicists consciousness creates our reality.
“A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction. Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual.” – R.C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University , “The Mental Universe”; (2)
Disease isn’t something in your body that is destined to happen. Accoding to Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, in a fascinating YouTube video,
“Our genes are not our destiny. Our genes load the gun but it is our environment (diet, stress, lack of sleep and physical activity, etc.) that pulls the trigger.”
Most often the real culprits behind these “environmental factors” are coming from within us in the form worry, fear, anger, negative beliefs, and past trauma. Each of these has its own energetic signature and is of a much lower vibration than our normal balanced state. When we don’t process or heal these issues, they build up in our energetic system and become denser. This blocks the flow of life force energy within our bodies and can open the door to sickness and disease.
How does energy healing help?
Reiki energy healing helps release the negative energetic patterns allowing ones life force energy to flow unimpeded. In addition, when energy healing is coupled with improving our thoughts (intentions) and behaviors, it also helps raise our vibration, making it less conducive for unwanted conditions to exist.
Hippocrates had it right, “The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well.”
Reiki wakes up and rebalances your innate healing resources, supporting the healing of acute and chronic disease as well as anxiety, fatigue, depression, addictions and other symptoms of imbalance.
What role does intention play in energy healing?
Some really cool scientific studies have been done on how healing thoughts (intentional energy) positively impact physical reality. Here are few examples:
Study #1: Intentions Changes the Expression of Water Crystals
Dr. Emoto, author of The Hidden Messages in Water, documented that water changes its expression after focused intentions are directed it at it.
Natalie’s side note: Up to 60% of the adult human body is water (the brain and heart are 73% water, and the lungs are about 83% water.), so your self-talk matters! Your subconscious takes everything you say to yourself literally, even if you’re being derogatory or just “joking.” Start noticing your negative self-talk and “rewrite” what you say to yourself so it empowers you.
Study #2 – Intention slows the death rate of red blood cells
A group experiment, directed by Dr. William Braud, Ph.D. at the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas, uncovered possible evidence that suggests the subconscious mind can be accessed to influence the body – down to a cellular level. In the experiment, Dr. Braud’s test subjects were able to slow the death rate of red blood cells by having the group focus on a single intention while meditating in the “Theta” state of consciousness.
Study #3 – Intention improves health in advanced AIDS patients
One of the most exciting studies was conducted by Elisabeth Targ, an orthodox psychiatrist, and Fred Sicher, a psychologist, in The Field by Lynne McTaggart. In their double blind study of forty advanced AIDS patients, twenty were given distance energy healing by a select group of religious and spiritual healers from across the country.
The healers were rotated to be sure the healing itself, not any particular variety of it, would be studied. The healers had no contact with their patients. All they were given was
a photo, a name, and a T-cell count. Each of the healers was asked to hold an intention for the health and well-being of the patient for an hour a day, six days a week, for ten weeks, with alternate weeks off for rest.
After six months, the treated group was healthier on every parameter – significantly fewer doctor visits, fewer hospitalizations, fewer days in hospital, fewer new AIDS-defining illnesses and significantly lower severity of disease! They also registered significant improved mood on psychological tests. On six of the eleven medical outcome measures, the group treated with energy healing had significantly better outcomes.
The future of energy healing
As an energy healer and spiritual life coach and teacher, I am excited that more and more research is being done on the efficacy of energy medicine, healing, and other alternative approaches to health and wellness. My hope is that every person in the world will learn Reiki or some type of energy healing. Imagine a world where rather than immediately reaching for pills or surgery, we place our hands over hearts and channel life force energy to ourselves, each other and the planet. What a wonderful world that will be!
About Natalie Eve Marquis, RMT, CH
Natalie Eve Marquis is a Reiki Master Teacher, Master Hypnotist, professional intuitive and spiritual life coach. She offers heart-centered healing and coaching, helping people connect to their inner wisdom and achieve optimal energy states that allow them to heal, align with their soul’s purpose, and sore!
