Superb Owl

Energy Healing, Minus the Nonsense

The somatic field keeps the score

Minus the Nonsense is a series on valuable ideas that have been tainted by magical thinking. We’ll try to distill the good parts—the parts compatible with a scientific worldview—from the woo. Past subjects include Jungian Psychology and Taoism. Future subjects will include Karma, Tarot, and quantum theories of consciousness.

Many spiritual practices reference a “life force” that permeates and flows through the body.

It’s called qi in Taoism, prana in Hinduism and yoga, and goes by names like “energy” and “vibration” among the New Age crowd. Its flows are allegedly mapped by the chakra system and the meridians of acupuncture. Practices like qigong, reflexology and Reiki even claim to alleviate health problems—both mental and physical—by manipulating it.

There’s little scientific basis for all this. Even after a tremendous number of clinical studies, there’s no consensus as to whether energy-based therapies are truly effective, or just esoteric placebos. Worse, claims made by the most fervent believers (and the most shameless grifters) are overblown to the point of being dangerous.

Still, qi is a visceral bodily sensation, experienced by millions—myself included. To dismiss it as hallucination is to miss the point: there’s something going on here, something that sits at the squishy boundary between mind and body, between between science and spirituality. And no one has quite figured out what.

Outline

• (Don’t) Trust the Science

• The Subjective Experience of Qi

• See for Yourself

• Tactile Synesthesia

  • Sound

  • Sight

  • Emotions

• Mind Cure

• The Nonsense

  • Not a Treatment for Cancer

  • Energy Transfer

  • Remote Healing

  • Metaphysical Claims

Note: this article represents my own views, rather than the historical or contemporary views of Taoists, Hindus, Reiki practitioners, etc. I will use words like “qi” loosely.

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(Don’t) Trust the Science

The worst way to learn about energy healing is to consult the scientific literature. There you’ll find an amorphous ambiguity which readily conforms to whatever bias you arrived with.

Research this for too long, and you start to sound vaguely stoned. Is Reiki real? Does it matter whether Reiki is real? And whose definition of real are we working with: Is it real according to the presiding scientific and medical framework, which tells us that phenomena need to be measurable to be taken seriously, or is it real in the looser, unquantifiable way of spiritual practice?

—Jordan Kisner writing for The Atlantic, Reiki Can’t Possibly Work, So Why Does it?

Still, I’ll try to summarize: practices like Reiki and acupuncture do seem to provide stress and pain relief, especially when compared with a control group that receives zero treatment. But the effect becomes smaller (and sometimes disappears) when compared with “placebo” treatments that have the same form: a session with an enlightened Reiki master seems to have roughly the same effect as any care provider gently placing their hands on your skin. There are similar findings for acupuncture and reflexology.1

The Atlantic article above suggests a reasonable hypothesis: that the mechanism here is care itself—simply having another human being demonstrate concern for your well-being is itself healing:

Touch-based healing simulates the most archetypal care gestures. Several scientists I interviewed mentioned the way their mother would lay a hand on their head when they had a fever.

But this can’t be the whole story. It fails to explain the effects of more impersonal techniques like acupuncture, or why all these therapies focus more on the body than on emotional state. And many Reiki practitioners self-administer—it seems there’s no real need for another human’s involvement.

I’d like to propose an alternative explanation, one that coheres strongly with my own first-hand experience: these therapies “work” because they focus our attention on bodily sensations. They get us out of our head, away from the narratives we’ve constructed about our health, and into the raw data of felt experience. They teach us to navigate our afflictions from the inside, rather than trying to manipulate them from the outside.

Also from the Atlantic article, via Reiki convert Amy Fusselman:

What I wanted was to lie there and not use my brain, and believe someone was trying to help me, also not with his or her brain. I understand how this sounds. But you have to remember that I had been trying to use my brain on my problems for twenty years…I was over my brain. I was over everybody’s brain.

The Subjective Experience of Qi

I’ve spent nearly ten years exploring somatic2 phenomena, mostly by accident. I started meditating, and found that my hands were tingling, that my head was throbbing, that something was moving up and down my spine.

I never attributed these sensations to a mystical “life force”. I always assumed they were physiological: either tingling nerves in my body, or maybe signals moving through my brain’s bodymap.

But the sensations all followed similar patterns: arising, migrating, spreading, pulsating, vibrating, repeating themselves, responding to attention. They were begging to be united under a single concept—one I lacked entirely.

I’ve mostly settled for the new-agey term energy, or the more technical-sounding somatic phenomena, but the most precise term I can come up with is flows of tactile sensation.

Tactile sensation is a strange thing. It’s high-dimensional: you can pinch, stroke, or knead your arm to get a sense for the range of possibilities. And it’s ubiquitous: if I let my attention wander, I can feel the coolness of the air on my skin, the pressure of the chair supporting my back and butt, the roughness of my jeans, the tickle of hair against my forehead, the tightness of a full stomach. If I spread my attention, I can feel many of these things at once, arranged in a three dimensional scene.

Tactile sensation is also deeply intertwined with proprioception, your sense of the size, shape, and density of your body. If all tactile cues disappeared, you might feel weightless, or boundaryless, or even lose your sense of self completely.

See for Yourself

The easiest way explore somatic phenomena is to sit still, with your eyes closed, in a quiet room. (A sensory deprivation tank is even better, if you have access to one.)

At first, you’ll probably feel pretty normal, like a torso with four limbs and a head. But if you stretch your attention across the entire field of tactile sensations, that shape might start to feel fuzzier and rounder. You might find your hands and head take up a large amount of “touch-space”, thanks to a disproportionate number of nerve endings.

I call this space the tactile field—the set of all the touch-sensations you’re experiencing from moment to moment, spread out in three3 dimensions.

If you sit there long enough with your eyes closed, you’ll likely start to feel bits of motion in your tactile field. At the very least, you should feel it expand and contract with each breath. Sit quietly enough and you’ll feel your heartbeat as well, sending a cascade of pressure through your body once or twice per second.

With enough practice, you might start to feel some faster vibrations, or a tingling in your hands, or a cloud of sensation moving in circles around your torso. You can try generating and guiding tactile sensations with attention, scanning up and down your arms, legs, or spine. The sensations might even seem to extend outside your body.

If you want to speed things up a bit, I’ve left some fun exercises in the footnotes.4

Tactile Synesthesia

Of course, touch is only a small part of our total experience—sounds, sights, tastes, smells, and more abstract experiences like emotions take up a large part of consciousness.

But the more I attend to tactile sensations, the more these other senses seem like nothing more than sophisticated forms of touch.

Sound

It started with sound. After a few years of meditation, I found I could put on a good pair of headphones and feel my whole being vibrate in response to the music. I once said (blushing mildly) that “it feels like my is aura dancing”—as much as I hate to throw out woo-y words like “aura”, that’s the best description I can provide. My body lays perfectly still, but internally there’s tremendous movement, in time to the beat.

And it’s not just music. Once, after a peaceful guided meditation, the Zen-trained instructor broke the silence by violently clapping his hands together. I jumped at the shock of it—but not a physical jump. None of my muscles moved, but I felt something inside of me lurch forward in the direction of the sound. My body was still, but my tactile field exploded in response to that single, sharp clap.

And as another data point, here’s jazz musician and critic Ted Gioia describing his experience with singing bowls, a form of “sound healing” (emphasis is mine):

• …I found myself so overwhelmed by the experience of vibrations spreading through my body that I couldn’t really focus on anything except the moment-to-moment visceral feeling. Even in the most flow-inducing moments of performing jazz on stage, I’ve never felt so intensely that I had become the music itself.

• …Because the [intense volume of the bowls] is channeled into my body, I welcomed the intensity. It feels invigorating and energizing. I wouldn’t want it any less intense.

• …the vibration moves back in forth from different parts of my body in a set rhythm. The most typical situation is when the vibrations start moving back and forth between my right ear and left ear at predictable five-second intervals…

• In other instances, the music seems to move back and forth from my ears to my neck, or from leg to leg, or in some other pattern, but always with a marked and repeated rhythmic pulse.

I’ve always been musically inclined, but developing tactile-auditory synesthesia has completely changed my relationship with sound.

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Sight

When vision becomes linked to touch, things get even weirder.

For me, it typically starts with my pulse. If I sit quiet and still, I start to feel a ~1Hz jitter in my tactile field, with each jolt starting from my chest and expanding outward—the engine of my heart creating a steady biorhythm. If I then focus on my vision, I can see that same 1Hz pulse ripple through the visual field, as the pressure in my eyes rises and falls with blood pressure. With enough time and attention, higher frequency vibrations5 appear in both the visual and tactile fields, perfectly synchronized.

In some cases, my visual and tactile fields merge entirely, creating proprioceptive confusion: it feels like I am the things I’m seeing. I see the trees swaying in the wind, and I can feel that swaying viscerally, in my own body. I can feel “my” leaves fluttering. At an extreme, it feels like I’m “one with everything”.6 It’s a state of deep, almost psychotic empathy.

Emotions

It’s not just sight and sound. After enough introspection, even emotions start to feel like sophisticated tactile sensations.

Here’s Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score (emphasis mine):

In my practice I begin the process by helping my patients to first notice and then describe the feelings in their bodies—not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on. I also work on identifying the sensations associated with relaxation or pleasure. I help them become aware of their breath, their gestures and movements.

…Individuals who lack emotional awareness are able, with practice, to connect their physical sensations to psychological events. Then they can slowly reconnect with themselves.

Emotions, I will tentatively claim, are nothing more than correlated groups of bodily sensations. We feel a heaviness, a pressure welling up in our chest, tears forming in our eyes, and we say “I am sad.” We feel warm and fuzzy, and call it “happy”. But if you were to discard all those bodily sensations, there’d be no abstract “sadness” or “happiness” feeling left over. The sensations are the emotion, and vice versa.

This is a large claim, and one that can only be verified through introspection. So lately, whenever I feel a strong emotion, I go looking for it. I try to pin it down in space and time, so I can better understand its dynamics: where does it come from? how does it evolve? why does it go away?

When looking for the emotion, I’ve found my mind will go to one of two places:

• Sometimes it will focus on symbolic representations of the emotion. E.g. if I’m angry, I’ll hear my internal monologue describe my reasons for being angry, or just make little interjections like “fuck that guy.” I’ll see scenes of violence play out in my mind’s eye, or more archetypal images like fire or a red face.

• Other times, my mind will locate the emotion in a specific part of the tactile field. I’ll sense the anger as a tension between my eyebrows, or a clenched jaw, or a tightness in my chest. I’ll feel it pulsate and move, perhaps migrating to different parts of my body, or spreading between them.

Interestingly, focusing on symbolic representations seems to strengthen the emotion, while focusing on the tactile sensations seems to weaken it.

This makes the latter a difficult thing to explore. As you examine the sensations, they dissolve!7 But I’ve learned a simple trick to get around this: I can use words to conjure the emotion, then focus on my body and watch it fade away.

For the last year, I’ve been doing this exercise weekly with my therapist—he’ll suggest a statement that conjures a particular emotion, then I repeat it and spend a minute or two scanning my body.

It’s not your typical “energy work”, but it feels far more principled than Reiki or acupuncture. And it’s helped a great deal. Seeing those knots of tactile sensation fold and unfold, over and over, makes it easier to navigate the same emotions in daily life, when the stakes are higher.

For example, I’ve become much better at recognizing and repairing anxiety. When I’m anxious, I almost always feel a twisting sensation in my stomach, eventually forming a knot. Once I notice the twisting knot, I can focus my attention there to untie it, and the anxiety drops away. Lately, I’ve been able to see and undo the twisting before it becomes a knot—before it escalates to anything I’d label “anxiety”.

My baseline state is noticeably more relaxed, and I haven’t experienced a panicky peak of anxiety since I started this therapy a little over a year ago.

Finding this link between low-level tactile sensations and high-level emotions has been like discovering the command line prompt on a computer. It feels like I have access to the system’s internal state, not just the symbolic icons sitting on my desktop.

Of course, that internal state is harder to work with, but it’s far more powerful.

Mind Cure

Even the staunchest skeptic would probably admit that energy work might help psychologically. But what about physically?

Of course, there’s no firm line between the two: being sick is stressful, and stress can make you sick. So we should expect energy work to at least relieve some minor symptoms, and make psychologically managing any disease easier.

But some health issues are fully psychogenic. In these cases, energy work can provide immense relief.

Let’s take a personal example: I recently experienced two of the most stressful weeks of my career. The entire time, I also had…let’s call it “irritable bowels”.

I have no doubt this was a psychogenic problem. It began with the stress, and it died with the stress. It didn’t matter that I improved my diet, reduced alcohol intake, or quit coffee. Those things helped, but the underlying cause—the stress—was still there. I could literally feel it twisting around in my bowels, forming the same anxiety knot I described above.

More specifically, I would feel it twist clockwise, about two inches below and behind my navel, getting tenser and harder as the anxiety rose.

Now, obviously my insides aren’t literally twisting in clockwise circles; my intestines are not literally tying themselves in knots. But the sensations do seem to go along with actual physiological changes inside my gut—a big twist is often accompanied by a burp, an audible rumble, even an urge to vomit. My best guess is that those twisting tactile sensations are an amplified map of what the smooth muscles in my gut are doing.

Surprisingly, I can modulate the twisting sensations by making subtle internal movements—mainly by guiding my attention.8 As a result, I not only feel less anxious—I have fewer digestive issues.

So it makes perfect sense to me that psychological approaches are so successful in treating Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). You’d probably want to do that in conjunction with dietary changes and medicine—in many cases, IBS might be due to something concretely physical, like a food allergy or damaged tissue. But 60% of IBS patients also have a psychiatric illness, mainly anxiety. I’m hopeful that if I continue to improve my skillfulness here—particularly my moment-to-moment mindfulness of anxiety—I’ll be able to navigate weeks like these without any psychological or physical discomfort.

I don’t want to overstate the potential here, but some physical ailments are psychogenic, or have psychosomatic components. In these cases, energy healing techniques—like the ones I’ve been using with my therapist—can have a huge benefit.

The Nonsense

Not a Treatment for Cancer

I want to emphasize, very clearly, that most illness has a physical cause. You should never treat a broken bone, a viral infection, or a tumor with energy work.

People do this sometimes! One study found a 250% increase in mortality for cancer patients engaging in alternative therapies. Famously, Steve Jobs died of liver cancer after trying to treat it with acupuncture and a strict diet.

Energy healing is a psychological intervention. It can only help physical illness to the degree that the illness is psychogenic. It can help you deal with the emotional stress of cancer, but it will not prevent the tumor from killing you.

Energy Transfer

A lot of energy modalities claim that qi can be sent outside the body, typically into another person. This is the basic claim of Reiki.

To some degree, if we define qi as “tactile sensation”, this is trivially true. If I touch your arm, I’m “sending” tactile sensation into your body—sensation that has a perfect correspondence to tactile sensations in my hand. And there’s indeed something magical about us feeling the same thing at the same time, despite the mundane mechanism.

But this idea is often taken too far. At extremes, you get things like this credulous documentary showing a man igniting a newspaper with his qi.9

I will say, I’ve had some experiences with romantic partners that stretch my imagination here. And the body does generate and respond to electromagnetic disturbances. I’m default-skeptical on the subject of energy transfer, but would love to see more research.

Remote Healing

Many Reiki practitioners claim the ability to heal over a distance, even without the recipient’s knowledge. I hate to dismiss any idea purely on the grounds of “no plausible mechanism”, but it’s pretty hard to imagine this being real, for any sensible definition of the word real.

Of course, a placebo is a placebo. If the recipient is aware they’re getting “remote Reiki”, we should expect the effects to be similar to in-person Reiki: so long as they’re paying more attention to their body, they’ll feel better.

These testimonials for Focused Life Force Energy™ are a great example of how positively some people react to simply being told they’re getting treatment.

Metaphysical Claims

Empirically, all we can say about qi/prana/energy is that some people experience flows of tactile sensation. But that hasn’t stopped experiencers from speculating about the source of those sensations.

Most commonly, it’s described as an animating “life force”, which flows through and between all living things. It’s often taken to be primordial, something that predates and prefigures biological life.

There are more esoteric interpretations as well. Kundalini yoga interprets one particularly strong energetic flow as a store of “divine feminine energy”, which rises from the base of the spine to the head, taking the form of a coiled snake.

Metaphysics, as always, should be understood metaphorically. If visualizing tactile sensations as a life force or as a divine snake helps you, by all means, go ahead. But remember that it’s just a provisional model of reality, not reality itself.

I much prefer the term “somatic work” to “energy work”. It leaves metaphysics out of the equation—we’re just studying and working with sensations in our body.

I’d love to see some enterprising neuroscientist prove, once and for all, that the sensation of qi is correlated with an electrical pulse in the associated body part, or with a tiny seizure in the cortical homunculus, or with some other physiological indicator. Until then, any description of qi is entirely anecdotal, and all we can do is compare anecdotes.

But there is a lot of correspondence between those anecdotes! Anyone who takes the time to introspect their tactile field seems to find these flows, and to agree on at least some of the shapes they can take.

It’s unfortunate that language demands every verb have a corresponding noun. It would be uncontroversial for me to say “when I sit quietly, I can feel movement”. But we’re left with the obvious question: what, exactly, is moving? Is it my nerves? My muscles? My awareness? Me?

For now, I guess I’ll continue to call it energy.

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