My Recent Energy Healing Experience

Very strange, but true—and potentially telling of what's to come.

In recent years and decades, we’ve come to understand how emotional and mental harm (or dis-ease) shows up in the body. We understand that stress (in some of its iterations) is not good for us, particularly when it’s prolonged and incessant. We recognize how anxiety can make us feel terrible (and as Ellen Vora, M.D. argues, physical ailments can, in turn, stoke anxiety). And depression is debilitating in all of its forms. Rachel Yehuda’s research on Holocaust survivors and the epigenetics of trauma is another remarkable example of how our emotions imprint on the body as cortisol levels, the stress hormone, remain elevated in future generations (Galit Atlas and I discuss this in our podcast conversation here).

There’s also the slew of diseases–primarily autoimmune—that were long thought to be in our heads, a symptom of…hypochondria and hysteria (a word that has its roots in our “wandering uteruses”): In this family, we find Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia, and more. It’s only in recent decades that these have been accepted—not as fantasy or fabrication—but as real diseases. Many physicians, like Gabor Maté, don’t think that autoimmune diseases are in our heads, but he argues they might largely start there, with the suppression of trauma, our own voices, and our rage. (For his perspective on this, read When the Body Says No; we dip into this a bit in our podcast conversation as well.)

Our mental and emotional health has a significant effect on our physical bodies. There’s much here that we still don’t understand, and scientists, doctors, and healers are still working this out, but the connection is now accepted. The fact that the gut is a second brain is also a relatively mainstream understanding, though I was surprised to hear from Dr. Dan Siegel that we actually have a third brain as well: Our hearts.

As Siegel writes in Intraconnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging, “In fact, in our bodies we have three ‘brains,’ or parallel distributed processing (PDP) networks: one around the gut, one around the heart, and one in the head. The only PDP processor with linguistic abilities is the head brain, so later, as we grow and develop language, the head brain names itself, not surprisingly, the brain. …PDP processors can compute energy flow patterns into information. A parallel distributed computer, for example, can reason and learn from experience. (This is not what your serial-processing home computer is capable of doing, you might be relieved to know.) When we realize that our body has PDP network capability in more than just the head’s collection of neural networks, we gain insight into how the whole body is involved in our mind’s construction of information from energy flow—what we call cognition.”

This is really heady stuff, I know, but the important takeaway here is that we have multiple systems in our bodies that translate energy into information. Our “head” brains have dominated the conversation and our conception of the world for a long time. While we understand many mechanisms of how the brain, gut, and heart function, I think we’re at the very beginning of our understanding of how they sense and interpret the world. Those who are highly sensitive or empathetic likely have an instinct for this. And any energy healer—Reiki master or the like—would suggest that all of the above is obvious. In the coming years and decades, I think we’ll be able to parse how our multiple “bodies”—physical, mental/emotional, energetic, spiritual/soul—interact in ways that can be measured. I think we’ll also begin to understand how energetic wounds or disturbances, how “spirit” can show up in our “matter.”

I firmly believe this because I had a strange 2022 health-wise: I broke my neck and was concurrently diagnosed with lymphocytic colitis. I believe all of my “bodies” were ricocheting against each other. As I explain below, I think the neck break was the culmination of an old spiritual assault. Meanwhile, we couldn’t resolve the LC on the physical level; I didn’t find relief until I worked with another powerful energy healer. If I hadn’t lived it, I wouldn’t have believed it, as open-minded as I may be. I talked about this a bit in my episode with Dr. Dan Siegel, and I received a lot of questions via email, thus this more explanatory post.

(I’m putting the rest of this story behind a paywall—I plan on writing 1-2 longer pieces like this per month for paid subscribers. If you need me to comp you a subscription, respond to the email and let me know, no questions asked. Otherwise, thank you for supporting my work. I also want to note, as I don’t want to bait and switch anyone, that I am not revealing the name of the second healer after the fold as she doesn’t have a public profile and I don’t yet have her permission. When/if that changes, I’ll be sure to share.)