Energy and Healing, Honestly

What I've Witnessed and What the Science Says

I used to struggle to charge for energy healing. It felt like asking people to pay me so I could play around in my imagination. The work felt genuine, instinctual, and nurturing, but I honestly didn't expect the person on my table to feel anything. It took a lot of beautiful experiences, validation, and gratitude from clients for me to trust this work. So believe me, I understand the skeptical mind.

I also love understanding the science behind what I do. I've studied anatomy and kinesiology in college, massage school, yoga teacher training, and beyond, and I try to keep up with current research, because the more I know, the more I can help my clients. I'm not a medical doctor, and I won't get into the theories behind each modality here (that's a rabbit hole for another day). What I want to share is what I've seen, what science can explain right now, and where the two meet.

The Moments That Made Me Wonder

When I'm intentionally sending joy to a client and they immediately smile, with a single happy tear rolling down their cheek, I start to wonder a little.

When I feel like I'm pulling something heavy out of a client's left hip, and they jolt up with their eyes still closed, point to the exact spot, and ask, "What did you just do there? That felt wild!" it stops feeling like imagination.

Once, I nervously shared an image that came to me during a session. It was a little boy in a sandbox who lifted his pail to reveal a single daisy, and he looked peaceful and happy. My client teared up. Her brother had recently passed, and her grandmother's name was Daisy. She took it as reassurance that he was safe with her grandmother. Could it have been a coincidence? Absolutely. I don't "see" things like this every session. But these coincidences happen a lot.

I once worked on an advanced ALS patient in his hospice bed, just hoping to ease his suffering. His family later wrote to tell me that after I left, he regained some lucidity, came off the vent for a while, and communicated more easily than he had in months. They had a lovely evening with him before he passed gently in his sleep. Experiences like this really start to deepen my belief in the value of this work.

Can I measure any of this? No. Has it happened many times? Absolutely. Each time, I've understood more and believed more. Our ancestors understood the mechanics even less than we do, but they knew what worked, and they chose to trust it as long as it was doing good. I've made that same choice.

There is still a lot we can explain, though, and it starts with the nervous system.

Your Nervous System Has Two Gears

Every session I give, whether it's deep tissue or hands-off energy work, is talking to the nervous system. The body has two main gears. The sympathetic gear is fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. The parasympathetic gear is "rest and digest," where the body clears waste, heals, and rebuilds what survival mode used up. The vagus nerve is the main line between them. When it's engaged, the body can come out of defense mode and into repair mode.

This matters for more than how relaxed you feel walking out the door. As massage therapist Marian Wolfe Dixon writes in MASSAGE Magazine, prolonged stress drains the very resources your body needs to recover (Dixon, 2026), and that applies all the way down to the cellular level. Vagal tone also helps regulate inflammation. When the vagus nerve is active, it signals immune cells to dial back inflammatory chemicals, while chronic stress and poorly regulated arousal are linked to slower recovery (Lopez Blanco & Tyler, 2025). A dysregulated nervous system isn't just uncomfortable; it's a slower-healing one.

Touch, and the Space Beyond It

Touch is a biological need, almost as basic as food or sleep. Harlow's attachment research, and later studies of children in understaffed Romanian orphanages, showed that a lack of physical contact disrupts cortisol patterns and development (Harlow & Harlow, 1965; Carlson & Earls, 1997). That's why skin-to-skin contact is now standard in neonatal units.

Some energy work doesn't involve touch at all, though. It falls along a spectrum:

• Full touch: massage, acupressure, polarity holds

• Light touch: hands resting still on or near the body

• No touch: hands-off Reiki or distance healing

Here's what's solid. Living tissue produces measurable electromagnetic fields. The heart's magnetic field was first measured in 1963 (Baule & McFee, 1963), and hospitals now use magnetometer-based tools clinically. Where it gets murkier is whether a practitioner can sense or influence that field in someone else. A 2021 review found measurable benefits in some non-contact studies but noted the mechanisms are still largely undocumented (Matos et al., 2021). A blinded test found some Reiki practitioners detecting a hidden hand above chance, though it still needs replication (Moss et al., 2022).

Some questions may never get a clean answer, but somewhere along the way, I've stopped needing it to. When people receive focused intention, feel nurtured, and spend an hour near someone modeling a regulated nervous system, they feel better. That likely happens through the same stress and attachment pathways that touch works through.

What the Research Says (and Can't Say Yet)

I want to be honest here, because overselling does a disservice to both the science and the work. The evidence is mixed, but mixed isn't the same as unsupported.

On the encouraging side:

• Reviews have found moderate to large pain reduction from Reiki in cancer patients and older adults (Thrane & Cohen, 2014).

• One trial found Reiki combined with Reconnective Healing comparable to physical therapy for shoulder pain and mobility (Baldwin et al., 2013).

• A 2025 meta-analysis of 661 participants found a modest but significant improvement in quality of life (Liu et al., 2025).

• Even a review limited to strict placebo-controlled trials found Reiki outperforming placebo, with high-grade evidence for clinically significant stress and depression (Zadro & Stapleton, 2022).

• An NIH-funded trial of Polarity Therapy, one of my favorite modalities, found real reductions in stress and depression in family caregivers (Korn et al., 2009).

More of my clients are also being referred to me by medical providers who say it's worth a try.

On the skeptical side: the NIH's complementary health center says Reiki hasn't been clearly shown to be effective for any health purpose. It cites inconsistent results and low study quality, and says there's no scientific evidence for the energy field Reiki is based on (National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, n.d.). An earlier, stricter review reached similar conclusions (Lee et al., 2008).

Here's my take. A randomized trial can standardize a technique, but it can't standardize the relationship in the room. Two practitioners using identical hand placements on the same client will get different results, because the client is also responding to being truly seen and given an hour of undivided attention. That's a mismatch between the research tool and the thing being studied. It isn't proof that the thing isn't real.

What clients report is real data too: less pain, better sleep, a nervous system that finally settled. The FDA recognizes patient-reported outcomes as a legitimate standard in drug trials (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2009). The moments I've witnessed are data my clients gave me directly, even if no one has built the instrument to measure them yet.

The Bottom Line

Whether the entry point is Reiki, Polarity, or a simple relaxation massage, the well-evidenced mechanism underneath is the same. Vagal tone goes up, cortisol comes down, and the body shifts from defense into repair.

The research gives us a real floor to stand on. What gets built on top of that floor, in the room with a particular person, is something years of hands-on work have taught me that no study has measured yet. Neither one needs to prove the other.

You don't have to believe in energy healing for it to be worth trying. Let the experience make up your mind.

References

Baldwin, A. L., Fullmer, K., & Schwartz, G. E. (2013). Comparison of physical therapy with energy healing for improving range of motion in subjects with restricted shoulder mobility. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 2013, 329731. https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/329731

Baule, G. M., & McFee, R. (1963). Detection of the magnetic field of the heart. American Heart Journal, 66(1), 95–96.

Carlson, M., & Earls, F. (1997). Psychological and neuroendocrinological sequelae of early social deprivation in institutionalized children in Romania. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 807, 419–428.

Dixon, M. W. (2026, April 1). The vagus nerve, stress response, and the power of massage therapy. MASSAGE Magazine. https://www.massagemag.com/the-power-of-massage-therapy-276505/

Harlow, H. F., & Harlow, M. K. (1965). The affectional systems. In A. M. Schrier, H. F. Harlow, & F. Stollnitz (Eds.), Behavior of nonhuman primates (Vol. 2). Academic Press.

Korn, L., Logsdon, R. G., Polissar, N. L., Gomez-Beloz, A., Waters, T., & Rÿser, R. (2009). A randomized trial of a CAM therapy for stress reduction in American Indian and Alaskan Native family caregivers. The Gerontologist, 49(3), 368–377. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnp032

Lee, M. S., Pittler, M. H., & Ernst, E. (2008). Effects of Reiki in clinical practice: A systematic review of randomised clinical trials. International Journal of Clinical Practice, 62(6), 947–954.

Liu, K., Qin, Z., Qin, Y., Li, Y., Liu, Q., Gao, F., Zhang, P., & Wang, W. (2025). Effects of Reiki therapy on quality of life: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Systematic Reviews, 14, 72. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-025-02811-5

Lopez Blanco, C., & Tyler, W. J. (2025). The vagus nerve: A cornerstone for mental health and performance optimization in recreation and elite sports. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1639866. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1639866

Matos, L. C., Machado, J. P., Monteiro, F. J., & Greten, H. J. (2021). Perspectives, measurability and effects of non-contact biofield-based practices: A narrative review of quantitative research. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(12), 6397. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18126397

Moss, G., Wang, G. M., Bristol, B., Momotaz, H., Li, M., & Lee, R. T. (2022). Assessing the ability of Reiki practitioners to detect human energy fields. OBM Integrative and Complementary Medicine, 7(3), 033. https://doi.org/10.21926/obm.icm.2203033

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. (n.d.). Reiki. National Institutes of Health. https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/reiki

Thrane, S., & Cohen, S. M. (2014). Effect of Reiki therapy on pain and anxiety in adults: An in-depth literature review of randomized trials with effect size calculations. Pain Management Nursing, 15(4), 897–908.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (2009). Guidance for industry: Patient-reported outcome measures: Use in medical product development to support labeling claims. https://www.fda.gov/media/77832/download

Zadro, S., & Stapleton, P. (2022). Does Reiki benefit mental health symptoms above placebo? Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 897312. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.897312