Energy healing therapies, such as Reiki, Pranic Healing and Healing Touch, are becoming increasingly popular. What does it feel like to get an energy healing session? Both healers and clients report unusual sensations during energy healing, including:
- Feelings of heat or warmth
- “Tingling” sensations
- Sensing light pressure and a fluid-like substance
- Sensing something like an electrical current
- Feeling light or “lightness”
- Seeing colors, lights or images
- Hearing bells ringing
Investigators have speculated that healers, through practice and/or natural ability, have more electrical charge, more current flow, than the average person. Just as a car battery has a certain amount of stored electrical energy (12-Volts), so does the human body. By placing an electrode on a healer’s ear lobe, Dr. Elmer Green and colleagues (Subtle Energies, Volume 2, No. 3, 1991) were able to measure changes in the electrical potential of the healer’s body during healing sessions. Healers were able to produce electrical surges from 4-Volts to 221-Volts while healing a client without any physical touch between them. Dr. William Tiller (Journal of Scientific Exploration, Volume 9, No. 3, 1995) notes that the electrical signals produced by healers in the Green study (called the “Copper Wall experiments”) are 1000 times greater than normal physiological values. Tiller speculates that, “the training and practice involved in [Therapeutic Touch] develops in the healer a somewhat automatic internal power buildup…that discharges periodically and generates a very large electrical voltage pulse in the body”.
So what does it feel like to touch one of these high-voltage healers? In his book, The Uncommon Touch, journalist Tom Harpur describes the unusual sensations during energy healing he felt with the charismatic healer, Kathryn Kuhlman:
“…when the first [healing] session was over and the second had not yet begun, there was an interval during which Kuhlman remained on stage. Quite suddenly she turned around and walked over to me…she spoke my name and, holding out her hands, took both of mine…I will never forget the experience. The nearest I can come to describing it is to say that it was like holding onto the terminals of a strong battery or being plugged into some other source of electrical current. There was an unmistakable – and, for me, quite unexpected – surge of an electric-like current into my hands and up my arms. At six feet four inches in height, I towered over this elderly, petite woman. Yet she seemed at the center of a force or energy field that was palpably alive and much stronger than I was.”
Another example of a high-voltage healer is Bill Gray (deceased), who wrote Know Your Magnetic Field. Healer Rosalyn Bruyere has described her encounter with him while he was hospitalized with abdominal cancer (see How People Heal by Diane Goldner or the Pathways to Healing website by Jim Kepner and Carol DeSanto). As the story goes, Rosalyn was attempting to give Bill energy healing. In frustration at her apparent slowness, Bill placed his hand over her abdomen, and said, “Do it like this”, whereby she felt a jolt of current, that “nailed my feet to the floor”, and “felt like I had been plugged into a 220-volt socket”.
The average healer is not “high-voltage”. According to Bruyere, most energy healers work with “ethereal light energy” rather than “sound energy”. With “ethereal light energy”, clients report sensations of heat and warmth, rather than electrical charge or current.
Different types of energy healing, different healers, different sessions – all feel unique and different, depending on the needs of the client and the training of the healer. For example, some of the unusual sensations during energy healing: With Healing Touch energy therapy, I have experienced sensations of heat and warmth, as well as mild current, deep relaxation, and visualization of colors and images. With distant healing from a Reiki Master, I experienced a sweet, spiritual energy and reversal of my physical symptoms. With prayer from a Navaho healer, I felt my love of nature, which I had forgotten. After a Zero Balancing energy session, I felt “joy”.
Healer and physician, Richard Bartlett DC ND, has observed that the biofield of clients becomes more coherent with energy healing. The result is that the clients report, “feeling like myself again!”. I think that really captures what I have experienced with energy healing. The subtle benefits of energy healing are:
- Reduced stress
- Feeling more “whole”
- More like yourself
- Able to meet the challenges facing you
- Able to let go of past disturbances
- Moving forward with your life
Energy healing is healing, but it is often subtle and not immediately obvious. As one of the healers in Harpur’s book notes, most healings are not dramatic, but instead cause a shift in the direction of a person’s life, such that 6-months later they find themselves on a more positive path, largely forgetting the healing that helped get them there.