Energy Healing and Scientific Evidence: Why Experiential Science Matters in Holistic Healing
What If We're Asking the Wrong Question About Healing?
It's not uncommon for someone to emerge from a healing session with a feeling they can't quite describe. Sometimes it's expressed as a sound—a sigh, a hum, something wordless. Sometimes it's a gesture, like a hand moving to touch the heart or throat. And sometimes, it's just a look of quiet confusion, as if to ask: What just happened?
And then, almost immediately, the mind starts trying to make sense of it. The next question often becomes, What does this mean? We're conditioned to explain the unexplainable, to translate felt experiences into concepts our rational minds can grasp.
But what if that impulse to analyze and categorize is actually pulling us away from the healing itself? Are we really willing to dismiss something real—something we felt, just because we don’t have the language to explain it later?
Even with that direct experience we just had, we often find ourselves wanting to understand how and why it worked. What did I just experience? Why did I feel what I did?
This is where many of us live: in a culture that expects explanations for everything, especially when it comes to health and healing. There’s nothing wrong with that curiosity—it’s natural, even beautiful. But somewhere along the way, many of us who are drawn to healing work have gotten caught in what I call the validation trap: trying to explain mystery through a lens that was never designed to understand it.
The Validation Trap: When Proof Becomes the Problem
Here's what I've noticed: The harder we try to prove energetic healing through Western scientific metrics, the further we move from trusting the felt experience that's actually doing the healing.
Western medicine asks excellent questions:
What's the diagnosis?
What's the intervention?
Can we replicate this outcome?
But the deepest healing experiences don't follow that logic:
A sudden flood of grief during breathwork that brings years of resolution
The quiet peace that settles after ancestral healing work
A Reiki session that leaves someone feeling "lighter" without a clear "mechanism"
These aren’t problems to solve. They’re felt shifts—happening in the space between practitioner and client, in the quiet mystery of how energy moves through the body. These moments don’t easily fit into charts or clinical trials. They exist in a different language altogether.
Trying to understand energy healing purely through clinical research is like trying to taste music or solve a poem with mathematics.
Let’s take music as an example. Science can analyze the frequencies of a symphony, map every note, and measure the decibels. But none of that captures the way music shifts something inside your chest, or how a single lyric can carry you back to a moment you’d forgotten. The data tells you about sound; it doesn’t tell you about the experience of being moved.
The same is true for healing. We can measure brainwaves during meditation, track cortisol levels after Reiki, and document heart rate variability during breathwork. It’s fascinating. But it’s also like studying the sheet music instead of just hearing the song.
What if There's Another Kind of Science?
I’m not a scientist, and I won’t pretend to explain research like one. And if there’s a new study out there you can bet I’m brushing up on it.
I’ve been working with energy for nearly twenty years. I’ve seen what shifts when someone feels safe enough to relax. Sometimes it’s subtle like their breathing changes, or their shoulders drop. Sometimes it’s something deeper, like a moment of insight or emotion that rises up from somewhere they didn’t know they were holding or why.
That’s experiential science. And in many ways, it’s the most rigorous research of all.
Think about it. Indigenous healing traditions developed sophisticated systems over thousands of years not through microscopes, but through lived experience. Acupuncturists mapped energy meridians by observing how qi moved through the body across centuries of practice. Somatic practitioners learned which patterns brought regulation and which brought release by listening to breath and sensation.
This isn’t less scientific. It’s a different kind of science. One that uses the body as an instrument, sensation as data, and relationship as the research environment. It’s not theoretical. It’s lived.
Where Western Science Reaches Its Beautiful Limits
Western science excels at studying isolated variables, but holistic healing works through interconnected systems—many things coming together to support the whole. That’s part of why energy and somatic healing often don’t fit neatly into research frameworks. They’re not just about what can be observed or measured. They’re about what’s felt, what’s shared, and what happens in real time.
Science wants to study the physical, observable, and repeatable. But energy healing is often:
Relational (happening between people)
Internal (felt rather than seen)
Unique to the individual moment
Where science seeks control, healing requires space. Where science looks for replication, healing honors what’s alive—and unrepeatable.
That’s the nature of this work. It adapts. It responds to the person in front of you, the emotional landscape of the day, and the energetic readiness of the body. True healing isn’t a fixed protocol. It’s a living process. And that kind of nuanced, intuitive responsiveness can’t be standardized or scaled. But that’s what makes it so powerful.
This doesn’t make Western science wrong. It just makes it beautifully limited—a powerful tool with a specific scope, but not the only way of knowing.
The Bridge Sciences
Don't get me wrong—I love learning, I love data sets. My father was a chemist, and that analytical curiosity runs in my blood. I often find myself exploring those very validation traps not because I need to justify this work, but because I want to make it more accessible to the people who walk through my door.
So this isn’t a rejection of science. And it’s not a “convenient” claim that energy work can’t be studied. It’s an invitation to widen the lens.
If you’re someone who enjoys exploring, here are a few emerging areas that echo what experiential healing has long observed:
Epigenetics - How emotional and environmental factors influence gene expression across generations
Biofield Science - Investigating the body's electromagnetic and subtle energy systems through quantum healing approaches
Polyvagal Theory - How the nervous system regulation constantly scans for safety, affecting our capacity to heal
Somatic Psychology - How unprocessed emotions live in the body and can be accessed through awareness
Interpersonal Neurobiology - How relationships and presence reshape the brain through integrative medicine
Heart-Brain Coherence - Research showing how heart rhythms influence brain function and well-being
These are fascinating areas of study. But here's the key: we don't need them to validate what we do. They simply show us that science and sensation aren't at odds—they're part of a wider spectrum of understanding.
What Becomes Possible When We Hold Both
You don't need to choose between analytical understanding and felt experience; both can coexist. So if you've been curious about this work but waiting to fully understand it or justify it to yourself, I’d like you to consider that maybe you don't need to wait to allow yourself to experience what's available right now.
It's about trusting that some of the truths aren't found in studies—they're discovered through the direct impact of lived experience. Maybe the real question isn't "How does energy healing work?" Maybe it's "What becomes possible when I allow myself to try something new and learn to trust and validate my own experience?"
The research will continue to evolve and expand. But your healing doesn't have to wait for permission from external sources. Your curiosity, your openness, your willingness to explore—that's all the qualification you need to discover what's true for you.