Let’s talk energy. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear that word?  I’m guessing that for most of us, that would be fuels for making things run. Gasoline, electricity, food for your body: these create motion and possibilities on the surface of our lives. When you dig a little deeper, you understand that certain laws and principles guide the behaviors of all fuels. Thus we have categories of energy–electrical, magnetic, mechanical, chemical, thermal are most familiar to us—which are behind the possibilities created by fuels of all kinds. All these categories are now being explained in terms of a small number of universal forces (four!), no matter what the outward appearance.

Physicists who research existence on the sub-atomic level can’t seem to escape the conclusion that the entire universe is energetic. You might say energy is information, basically—information defined through vibratory qualities.  Every energy communicates something through its vibratory signature, to be picked up by some lifeform capable of receiving it. This is true of all those fuels so familiar to us, and of all the forms that we don’t seem to process through our senses.

Consider the vast electromagnetic spectrum (above) and how little of it we access through the senses. See that narrow band marked “visible?” That’s as much of this energy spectrum that we can see. In addition we can feel part of the infrared spectrum as heat.  The rest we don’t sense and yet it is very much there, sending information through the environment and indeed through our bodies. We just don’t perceive it through the means we as a culture accept as legitimate.

Thought, too, is energy, and so are feelings. This is more than a new-agey concept by now. As I said in an earlier page, cell membrane receptors receive information in both biochemical and energetic forms: information that tells them what it is they should balance themselves against. As Candace Pert and others proved, biochemicals carry emotional information received in this way. Brainwaves provide non-chemical messages, and our cells respond to those, too. (It can be useful to describe biochemical messaging more deeply in energy terms, but you’ll thank me for not touching that right now.)

As I wrote in the previous page, such energies are not subject to the boundaries of the body. As quantum physicist David Bohm wrote,

[V]arious energies such as light, sound, etc., are continually enfolding* information in principle concerning the entire universe of matter into each region of space. Throughout this process, such information may of course enter our sense organs, to go on through the nervous system to the brain. More deeply, all the matter in our bodies, from the very first, enfolds the universe in some way.

(If you’ve read about quantum physics at all, you won’t find this as terribly odd as others might! Bohm writes with a century-old scientific underpinning but that part of science has escaped most of us.)

Over time (and particularly in the twentieth century, driven by war pressures), scientists developed ever more sensitive instruments for understanding energy. These helped them form the theories that made so many of our beloved technologies possible. The technological offspring of scientific understanding, from radios and televisions to fMRIs, suggest the rightness of the science behind them, and we are in awe!

However, please note: thousands of years ago people were clued into energetic information using their inner senses. They clued into the presence of energetic fields, channels, structures, and frequencies. They seemed to understand what Bohm learned scientifically, finding ways to manipulate these to help create the thing they thought of as wellness. Their understanding, just like that of our scientists, was powerful enough to produce  “offspring.” By that I mean they created physical healings powerful enough to inspire healing traditions that persisted through the ages.  Indeed many of these are used effectively today, scientifically verified and everything.

Now here is the kicker. With today’s sophisticated instruments, the energetic entities these healers have been observing can now be experimentally validated! I mean all those nut-case, unsophisticated and backward techniques, so denigrated by modern medicine.

I mean woo-woo chakras! Laughable energy channels! Invisible acupuncture points!

Our instruments now verify that there are energetic concentrations where chakras have been said to be located, as well as hugely raised electrical conductivity at stipulated acupuncture points. There is also a growing body of research documenting medical conditions reversed energetically. Such studies often take measures of a person’s health in Western medical terms before and after the healing. These studies follow standard rules concerning interviews, control groups, double blind techniques, ruling out of mitigating factors, and so forth.

So you see, it’s not correct to assume that only Western doctors have a clue about illness, something we are asked to do every day and in many ways. We can now return to the energy of emotion, so long ignored, and its physical repercussions. What a difference it will make to honor their place in human health right now, and always!

Love, joy, and trust are energies that feel fulfilling, creating safety, security, and health. Those emotions are measurably active and good for the body in genetic and immunological terms. Scientific studies proving this are readily available online (see resources). Stress, of course, does the opposite. Emotional energies have physical correlates. To truly grapple with this truth is vital for our health, individually and collectively.

All of the following techniques have a body of research supporting their efficacy. The list is far from exhaustive and I’m sure you’ve heard of others as well. The trick is to choose intuitively, like Turner’s cancer survivors did, and hopefully before you become that sick.

• Acupuncture and Acupressure
• Emotional Freedom Technique (my personal favorite, and something you can do for yourself)
• Biofield Healing
• Prayer
• Hypnosis
• Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
• Eye Movement Desensitization and Processing (EMDR)
• Reiki
• Therapeutic Touch
• Matrix Energetics
• Quantum Touch
• Healing Codes
• Biofeedback
• Healing with magnets
• Shiatsu
• Cranio-Sacral Therapy
• Qi-Gong
• Reflexology

To bring this back specifically to Covid 19: Dawson Church recently wrote in an email about a study of Ecomeditation workshop participants. (Ecomeditation is a practice with an EFT component.) The study showed an average increase to participants’ immunoglobulin levels of 27%. Immunoglobulin works on the cell-docking part of a corona-type virus to prevent it from attaching to a target cell. After deforming the virus so that it can’t dock,  the immunoglobulin summons cells to gobble up the viruses. This is extremely promising information, and it is only one example.

Going to the doctor to get a pill, injection, or surgery requires a minimum of agency. To look at yourself as an energetic and whole system in which feelings play a critical role, is a different proposition. As emotional energies affect cellular operations, it makes no sense to leave them out of the virus-solving equation.

* “Enfold” is a technical term Bohm created as part of his theory of implicate and explicate order. The implicate is the vast totality from which the reality of our human subgroup is perpetually “unfolded” and then “enfolded” back in a never-ending process.  I write more about that in the post called “Fragmentation and Wholeness,” and you can of course read Wholeness and the Implicate Order yourself. It will reward your time and effort handsomely.

Next: The Mind and Other Minds

Resources:

Dale, Cyndi. The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy. Sounds True, 2009.

Energy Medicine Research Network, National Institute of Integrative Healthcare. Energy Medicine Research References.

Oschman, James L. Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis. Churchill Livingstone, 2015.