The human brain has some 100 billion neurons that each connect electrochemically with up to 10 thousand other neurons. If you focus on the brain’s electrical impulses, it is an even more incomprehensibly complex energy system than if you concentrate on its physical structure alone. And it is a natural focus for psychology. Modern brain imaging technology is being applied to increase our understanding of almost any psychological process that is being seriously studied. Meanwhile, using non-intrusive and readily accessible methods for understanding and affecting the body’s electrical and other energies, energy psychology provides a direct approach for working with the body’s energy system.

Few concepts in the healing arts have been used more loosely than energy. While energy takes many forms, it is commonly defined as a force that produces a physical change (“the capacity of a physical system to do work”). Locomotives were propelled with the thermal energy released by burning coal. A bowling ball scatters the pins with the kinetic energy it delivers by virtue of its motion. Chemical energy, released as different substances react to one another, can be harnessed in the batteries that play a walkman or start a car. Nuclear energy, until it is released to power a submarine or devastate a city, holds together the nucleus of an atom. Whereas nuclear energy originates in the core of an atom, electrical current involves the flow of electrons that normally orbit that core.

Wherever there is an electrical current, it creates and is surrounded by an electromagnetic field. Each cell of the body functions like a miniature battery, with chemical reactions producing electrical current and an electromagnetic field. The negative polarity is outside the cell membrane; the positive polarity is inside. The human body is composed of seventy-five trillion such “batteries.”  From the cells to the organs to the entire body, we are electromagnetic fields within fields within fields.  Instruments for identifying and measuring the body’s electrical and electromagnetic energies, from the voltmeter to the MRI, have long existed and are ever being refined.

The "Energy" of Energy Psychology

Stimulating an acupuncture point in the toe affects blood activity in the brain. No nerve, vascular, or other physical connections are known to exist, but somehow an electrical impulse has been transmitted that reliably sets certain events into motion. Such signals, and the brain wave frequencies they affect, are energies that are targeted within energy psychology. While they are not the only energies that are of concern, this “signal and brain wave” hypothesis explains a great deal about the sequence by which

1) an irrational fear (or a range of other psychological problems) is mentally
    activated,

2) certain points on the skin—that send impulses to the brain when they are
    stimulated—are tapped, and

3) the symptoms rapidly diminish.

While the "signal and brain wave" hypothesis provides a plausible mechanical explanation for the actions of such clinical outcomes, many practitioners of energy interventions feel that other kinds of energy are also involved. Although introducing them brings us ever further from established paradigms, these practitioners argue that other cultures have been more astute than ours in exploring the energies that are the very foundation of life. In non-technological societies, for instance, healers are often far more attuned to subtle forces that surge through the body and employ natural means to influence them to increase health, from suggestion and hypnosis to herbs and healing touch. Chi, the basis of acupuncture, is among the most well-known terms in the West for describing energies that cannot be experienced directly through the senses, yet which are believed to influence people’s lives. Most cultures, however, have analogous concepts, such as ki (in Japan), prana (in India and Tibet), baraka (in Sufism), waken (in the Lakota Sioux tradition), megbe (in the Ituri pygmy culture of the northeastern Congo forests), and yesod (in Jewish Kabalistic tradition).

Another kind of energy, the “biofield,” can readily be measured by existing instrumentation, but it also exhibits some unusual properties.  The electromagnetic field produced by the heart can be detected anywhere on the surface of the body using an electrocardiogram (ECG). This field also extends a number of feet away from the body, radiating in all directions, as can be measured by an instrument called a SQUID-based magnetometer. When two people are within conversational distance, fluctuations in the heart signal of one correspond with fluctuations in the brain waves of the other.

Far more than just electrical fluctuations, your heart’s energies carry information that influences your mood, personality, and preferences. Moreover, the body’s “brain” is not just in the brain. Cells throughout the body receive and transmit informational molecules that impact emotions. The degree to which organs besides the brain carry psychologically relevant information is vividly evidenced in transplant patients. Documented Reports on dozens of people who have received a donor heart have revealed unanticipated shifts in the recipient toward tastes and behavioral patterns that were characteristic of the donor.

A fourth kind of energy field referred to in energy psychology—and this one is far outside established paradigms—is the thought field. Thought affects not only the neurons in the brain, it can affect physical events outside the body. Studies at a number of centers, from the Department of Engineering at Princeton to the Department of Physical Sciences at Stanford to the HeartMath Institute in California, have provided impressive empirical evidence that human intention can alter the activity of material, electrical, and biological processes.   Some concept of subtle energy or of a “thought field” is often posited to explain these observed phenomena.

Energy and Thought

Energy psychology focuses to a large extent on the way that the stimulation of specific acupoints or other energy centers send electrical impulses that produce neurological changes which can curb psychological problems or support behavioral goals. Energy interventions occur, however, within a larger context. Some facts about the body and its energies: 

About footnotes: Click on the "footnote" number in the body of the text to go to the corresponding footnote. Click on the footnote's number to return to the text.

1. Each molecule in your body vibrates approximately 3,000,000 times per second,¹ another hint that subtle energy vibrations may be the fundamental building blocks of matter.²
    

2. Electronic instruments are able to detect “energy systems” that have been worked with in the healing traditions of other cultures but not generally recognized in ours, including the meridians,³ the chakras,⁴ and the aura or biofield.⁵
    

3. Your heart has its own information processing system (“the little brain in the heart”) which is closely linked through the vagus nerve to areas of your brain that process emotions.⁶ The electromagnetic field of your heart is 60 times stronger than the electromagnetic field of your brain and extends several feet beyond your body.⁷
    

4. When you are near another person, the electromagnetic field of your heart influences the electromagnetic field of the other person’s brain in ways that can readily be detected by an EEG.⁸

Not only can the signals sent out by your heart influence another person’s brain, the thoughts you think can influence substances and energies that are beyond your body. Some facts about thought, matter, and energy:

1. When your emotions change from happy to scared, the strands of your DNA become more taut than when you were feeling happy.⁹
    

2. If a few cells are scraped from the roof of your mouth with a cotton swab and placed in a device that measures changes in the structure of the DNA within those cells, and you are brought into the next room watching a movie that causes your feelings to shift from happy to scared, the DNA of the cells in the machine will instantaneously change, just as they would if they were still part of your body. This resonance occurs even if the cells have been moved many miles away from you.¹⁰
    

3. Individuals who were instructed in how to use visualization to inhibit the breakdown of red blood cells in a test tube located in a different room were able to successfully slow the rate by which the blood cells deteriorated.¹¹
    

4. Laboratory studies have demonstrated, to an extraordinarily high degree of scientific confidence,¹² that some people can, by simply using their intention, impact someone in another room. Through the use of calming or activating imagery, they can influence the relaxation or anxiety level of targeted individuals, unawares, in other locations, as gauged by spontaneous changes in the targeted individual’s galvanic skin response activity.
    

5. Violence and crime decreased significantly and other quality of life indicators improved when groups of meditators were brought into troubled areas.¹³
    

6. Numerous laboratory experiments have demonstrated that some people can mentally influence the growth of plants, fungi, and bacteria.¹⁴
    

7. Prayer and focused intention have been shown to enhance the healing process in a wide variety of settings.¹⁵ One of these studies, where patients in a coronary care unit who were prayed for, without their knowledge, made significantly better progress than patients who were not prayed for,¹⁶ was replicated in another coronary care unit with similar results.¹⁷

All of this falls within the domain of energy psychology. We are only beginning to establish the ways intention can be focused to produce desired changes, not only in our own neurons and overall health, but in the world around us. And we are only beginning to formulate concepts for the “subtle energies” or “thought fields” that may be involved in these cause-effect relationships.

Subtle Energy

The physical world appears through the eye of nuclear physics to be a latticework of energies; the atomic building blocks of matter vibrate dynamically and resemble waves as much as particles. The body’s complex network of electrical and electromagnetic energies seems to intersect with an even more complex network of subtle energy systems that permeate the body. Subtle energy is energy that we do not know how to detect directly but which, like gravity, we know by its effects. Most basic is the "life force." When it is there, you are alive; when it is not there, even if your cells are still alive, you are dead. While an intuitively easy notion, neither the life force nor other forms of subtle energy have been registered by even our most sensitive physical instruments.

In fact, while kinetic, thermal, chemical, electrical, and nuclear energies have been well-mapped, the subtle energies that are of concern to energy psychology still remain largely outside the Western scientific paradigm. Detailed expositions about specific kinds of subtle energy found in the literature of numerous cultures are, however, beginning to stand up to scientific scrutiny (see Collinge, 1998; Gerber, 2001; Hunt, 1995; Oschman, 2000; Radin, 1997; and Tiller, 1997 in References). Organizations such as the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine (www.issseem.org) are producing newsletters and professional journals that scientifically investigate subtle energy.

While it is not necessary to accept the subtle energy hypothesis to understand how stimulating an acupuncture point can send electrochemical signals that affect brain wave patterns, it is not possible to introduce energy psychology without addressing the concept of subtle energy. The term is often used if vaguely defined. Subtle energy is, in fact, most well-established as a scientifically elusive concept, from the unsuccessful searches of 19th-century scientists for the "ether" that acts as a medium for the transmission of electromagnetic waves, to Einstein’s failed attempt to discover the "unified field" hidden behind all other forms of energy. Subtle energy hypotheses keep being introduced, however, in attempts to account for phenomena that elude established understanding. It is the phenomena we cannot explain, the anomalies, that cause us to expand our paradigms.

In a fascinating series of experiments, researchers at several independent centers have found that readings of a random event generator (an electronic device which uses a random physical process such as radioactive decay to generate random events or random numbers) reveal different patterns when in the presence of a group of people whose attention is focused (as when watching a touchdown during a football game) than with a group whose attention is scattered. Attempts to explain this often replicated phenomenon tend to require some concept of subtle energy or organizing field (a field is a “region of influence”) to account for the way that the attention of the individuals in the group appears to produce patterns in the output of a random number generator.  Likewise, the impact of visualization, intention, and prayer on material, electrical, and biological processes, as mentioned earlier, requires that conventional scientific paradigms be expanded.

The two photos below provide a vivid demonstration of the possible impact of mental activity on physical matter.  The first is a microscope’s magnification of an ice crystal. The second is the magnification of an ice crystal after a prayer was offered in the presence of water from the same source. The water was subsequently frozen and photographed.

These images are taken from a provocative two-volume study of the effects of various conditions on water crystals, including the source of the water (crystals derived from a spring in Saijo, Japan, do not resemble crystals taken from a polluted section of the Yodo River in Japan), the effects of music (crystals derived from water that was exposed to Bach do not resemble crystals from water that was exposed to heavy metal music), and exposure to different emotions (appreciation leads to beautiful symmetrical crystals, hatred to disfigured patterns). 

Although these findings have not so far been replicated, if subsequent research does show the procedures to be sound and the findings to be reliable, the series of photos would constitute a vivid demonstration of the impact of thought on physical matter.  Given that the human body is over 70 percent water, these demonstrations have caused many people to think twice about what they think.

Increased attention to the presumed effects of subtle energy is leading to new models within the healing arts. These “new” models echo, however, the insights of healers, seers, mystics, and spiritual adepts throughout the ages. While the notion that the physical body is coupled with an energy field, a subtle body, or energy body is not new, what is new is that these energies are being examined scientifically. In energy-based psychotherapy, dysfunctional patterns of thought and behavior are understood to be in the client’s nervous system and, hypothetically, carried by the client’s “energy field” as well.  Psychological problems are treated in part by shifting the electromagnetic and other more subtle energies that are maintaining them.  As with Chinese medicine, to which some of its roots trace, the theoretical core of energy psychology is simple: 

Whatever the presenting problem, it has a counterpart in the client’s energy system and can be treated at that level.

The field’s promise is in its claims to have developed a set of readily accessible procedures for shifting the energies that are believed to maintain dysfunctional habits of thought, emotion, and behavior.

¹ Oschman, op. cit., p.xi.

² Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe : Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: Vintage, 2000).

³ A discussion of various investigations into the meridian system, such as injecting solutions with radioactive isotopes into traditional acupuncture points and finding that the liquid’s flow paralleled the ancient descriptions of the meridian pathways, can be found in Richard Gerber’s, Vibrational Medicine, 3rd ed. (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Co., 2001), pp. 122 – 127.

⁴ Neurophysiologist Valerie Hunt carried out a series of meticulous investigations over a 20-year period at UCLA’s Energy Field Laboratory. In one study, electrical oscillations in the skin above the areas where the chakras are traditionally believed to be located were shown to have frequencies of 100 to 1,600 cycles per second, as contrasted with 0 to 100 in the brain (and usually in the 0 to 30 range), up to 225 in the muscles, and up to 250 in the heart. Reported in Gerber, ibid., p. 133.

⁵ Another study coming out of UCLA’s Energy Field Laboratory compared descriptions by those who could "see" auras with neurophysiological measures. Descriptions by eight "aura readers" not only corresponded with on another, they correlated exactly with electromyography (EMG) wave patterns picked up by electrodes on the skin at the spot that was being observed. Valerie Hunt, Infinite Mind: The Science of Human Vibrations (Malibu, CA: Malibu, 1995).

⁶ David Servan-Schreiber, The Instinct to Heal : Curing Stress, Anxiety and Depression Without Drugs and Without Talk Therapy (New York: Rodale, 2004).

⁷ Rollin McCraty, "The Energetic Heart: Bioelectromagnetic Communication Within and Between People." In Paul Rosch (Ed.), Clinical Applications of Bioelectromagnetic Medicine, (New York: Marcel Dekker, 2003).

⁸ McCraty, 2003, op. cit.

⁹ Glen Rein, "Effect of Conscious Intention on Human DNA," Proceedings of the International Forum on New Science (Denver, CO, October 1996).

¹⁰ Julie Motz, "Everyone an Energy Healer: The TREAT V Conference in Santa Fe," Advances in Mind-Body Medicine, 1993, 9(4), 95-98.

¹¹ William G. Braud, "Distant Mental Influence of Rate of Hemolysis of Human Red Blood Cells," Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1990, 84, 1 - 24.

¹² William G. Braud, "Human Interconnectedness: Research Indications," ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness and Transformation, 1992, 14, 140 - 149. The significance level was 2.6 x 10^-14.

¹³ This extraordinary statement is based on a series of well-designed and replicated large scale studies that are summarized in John Hagelin’s Manual for a Perfect Government (1998). Taken as a group, the odds of the findings having occurred by chance were less than one in 19 billion, making this, according to Hagelin, a physicist whose doctorate is from Harvard, "the most thoroughly tested and rigorously established phenomenon in the history of social science," p. 92.

¹⁴ Daniel Benor, Spiritual Healing: Scientific Validation of a Healing Revolution (Southfield, MI: Vision Publications, 2001).

¹⁵ Larry Dossey, Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine (San Francisco: Harper, 1993).

¹⁶ R.C. Byrd, "Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit Population." Southern Medical Journal, 1988, 81, 926 - 929.

¹⁷ W.S. Harris, et al., "A Randomized, Controlled Trial of the Effects of Remote, Intercessory Prayer on Outcomes in Patients Admitted to the Coronary Care Unit." Archives of Internal Medicine,1999, 159: 2273-2278.