Near Enemy #3: Energy Healing

By-
HAREESH WALLIS, March 12, 2020

The “healing” industry is booming and its profits are soaring. I put the word “healing” in quotes here because I’m not talking about actual healing of mental and physical illness through still-inadequate but well-vetted and well-regulated modalities (such as physical therapy, psychotherapy, somatic experiencing, etc.), I’m talking about the countless forms of so-called spiritual, emotional, and “energy” healing that so far have no compelling evidence of consistent efficacy and yet claim to solve countless real and imagined problems of both mind and body.

Countless people are being sold a lie. An expensive one. Because the fact is that most of the “energy healing” industry is BS. (Note the word most.) The majority of people don’t need healing, they just need to learn to digest their emotions and experiences. The minority of people that do need healing often waste their money on techniques that make them feel a little better for a little while, but do not usually bring about healing.

I’ll explain. Even if I just offended you, please try to stay open to possibilities, because IF I’m right I’m possibly going to save you a lot of money and a lot of heartache and a lot of mental-emotional energy.

First let’s address the majority of humans, who actually don’t need healing but think they do. I propose to you that in truth, your issue most of the time is the same issue that most humans have: emotional indigestion. A little background is necessary to understand this. In Tantrik Yoga, we teach that the energy-body (also known as the subtle body or emotional body) digests emotions and experiences in the same way that the physical body digests food. However, since most humans receive zero coaching in how to be with their emotions in childhood, or indeed at any other time, a portion of many of their emotional experiences remains undigested in the form of what we call samskāras, unresolved pieces of past experience that hang around in the subtle body as ‘packets’ of undigested energy. Since this energy is a form of prāṇa, or life-force, the more undigested experiences one has, the less life-force one has available, resulting in fatigue/depletion, or ennui, or loss of passion, or a sense of meaninglessness or pointlessness, or some combination thereof. Furthermore, these ‘packets’ of undigested experience can, if unaddressed, start to ‘toxify’ in the energy-body, resulting in bitterness, hatred, inability to feel compassion or empathy, and other symptoms. In more extreme cases, these undigested samskāras can be misdiagnosed by self-appointed ‘shamans’ as foreign ‘entities’ which must be removed by a professional (for a fee, of course).

To be clear, I’m here talking about the normal human experience, not that of exceptionally wounded or traumatized people. Emotional digestion is not healing, it’s just a normal part of life, or rather it should be, and would be if we had a sane society consisting mostly of adults. Since most people don’t know how to digest their challenging emotions and experiences, they tend to dump them on others (through blaming, shaming, emotional off-loading, etc.) or they hold them inside, unintegrated & undigested, as they slowly toxify. Additionally, if they believe others are to blame for what they feel, that inhibits digestion, and they are likely to try to enlist those others to do their emotional labor for them.

Emotional digestion happens fairly easily and naturally in the following context: a) you can take responsibility for your feelings (without blaming others or yourself); b) you value yourself and your process enough to take some time every day to fully be with whatever you feel; c) you can recognize that your stories about what you feel are just that, stories or mental fabrications that seek to explain the feeling and thus gain power over it, and you recognize that believing your stories inhibits the necessary emotional digestion; and d) you can lay the stories aside and bring the raw feelings in close, welcoming them into your heart (however ‘negative’ your conditioned mind thinks they are), while affirming your ability to digest them.

Healing is a different matter. Healing is necessary when someone has a physical or emotional wound sufficiently deep that it needs special attention. (Here I’m using the word ‘wound’ to mean a deep and painful samskāra.) Without such attention, it becomes life-threatening. (Emotional wounds become life-threatening when they sap the joy out of life and begin to paralyze one’s life-force; I don’t mean that they are physically life-threatening, though in extreme cases they can be.) Someone with a very strong energy-body can heal themselves of deep emotional wounds; but most people need some assistance and support. For example, the inability to forgive yourself and/or another person who co-created a painful experience with you can totally inhibit the normal digestion process, and in this case one often needs a therapist who can facilitate the understanding that makes forgiveness possible and thus makes digestion possible. For another example, if one is consciously or subconsciously terrified of the intensity of one’s undigested feelings, a somatic therapist might be needed to help you access the feeling and feel it fully so it can move through and resolve itself. (Note: a therapist is of course a highly trained and certified professional, and even then they might not actually be good at their job. A self-appointed “energy healer” operating in a totally unregulated industry cannot substitute for a therapist.)

Less deep emotional wounds can often be healed without professional intervention. The best person to facilitate this type of healing is a trusted friend who is emotionally intelligent. If they can hold space, witness you, and reflect back to you without distortion, some healing can happen that might not happen on your own. Additionally, if that friend is a yoginī, she might (instinctively or consciously) know how to connect her energy-body to yours in which case she can help you digest your samskāra on the purely ‘energetic’ level as you feel it together. No special technique is needed for this, just the intuitive knowing of how to connect up the energy-bodies and feel through stuff together. There are of course those who intuitively know how to do this without being a yogin(ī) as well. But it doesn’t make sense to charge money for this, because a) it only tends to work when there is already a bond of trust and friendship, and b) there’s no guarantee of it working at all (and it takes a few days to be sure that it has).

A less esoteric but still powerful method is to have a trusted friend with a strong singing voice sing mantras into the place in your body where the emotional energy is ‘stuck’ (if you know where that is). An even easier method is to have a trusted friend rock (and possibly tap) your body all over while you moan and vocalize whatever needs to come out (your friend needs to be cool with weird sounds coming out of you).

All this is the stuff friends can and should do for each other in any healthy community. It shouldn’t be paid for because it requires no special skill or training. If holding space effectively seems to some like a special skill, that’s only because we are still so very far from a sane society.

Now let’s contrast this to what’s going in most “energy healing”. If the practitioner knows how to hold space well and focus loving/non-judgmental awareness, s/he can provide symptomatic relief, in the same way a pill does for physical pain. This is great, but it shouldn’t really cost more than a pain-relief pill. On rare occasions, a practitioner of one of these disciplines can intuitively facilitate actual healing (in which case the discipline itself is usually just a kind of pretext or smokescreen for something that really happens mostly spontaneously). If actual healing happens, the difference from symptomatic relief is substantial and obvious: the wound is gone. It’s, y’know, healed. With symptomatic relief, it can feel as if it’s gone, only to return full-force a few hours or days later. If that happens, and the person you paid calls themselves a healer, then by rights you should get a refund, because you’re not healed. (If they call themselves a “symptom reliever” then that’s a different story!) My attitude might seem shocking to you, but it’s the only way we’re going to put an end to the snake-oil industry. Would you not demand a refund from a medical doctor that failed to perform the needed procedure, leaving you no better off than before? (Of course, sometimes medical doctors *do* charge people despite accomplishing nothing, and that’s messed up too!)

Let’s reserve the word healing for situations in which healing has actually demonstrably taken place. Remember, a synonym for ‘healed’ is ‘cured’. Now, having said that, it is of course possible that partial healing takes place in one of these healing sessions (if you’re lucky). But that, too, should be demonstrable: the wound is palpably smaller. If you aren’t sure whether healing has happened (after a few days), then it probably hasn’t. And you certainly shouldn’t be paying big bucks for something that you’re not sure worked at all, beyond the temporary symptomatic relief.

Doubtless many paid “energy healers” will be upset by my analysis and will come up with all kinds of counter-arguments. So I’ll go ahead and upset those folks even more: you’re in an unregulated industry precisely there’s nothing to regulate. None of these energy-based modalities (other than acupuncture) has been proven to have any effect beyond therapeutic placebo, i.e. beyond the temporary symptomatic relief that happens when a) one wants to believe the treatment will work, and b) one receives the loving touch and/or benevolent intention of another human. And a significant part of the symptomatic relief is often due to the fact that the person receiving the treatment enters a meditative state that, with a little practice, they could actualize on their own.

Now, some people will want to point out that many traditional cultures, including Tibetan Tantrik culture, teach some kind of spiritual healing or energy healing. To be clear, these are modalities whereby shaman-type figures attempt to heal actual ailments of the mind or body (like malaria or schizophrenia) through magical or supernatural means (as well as, sometimes, through herbs etc.). Despite being a traditionalist, I’m also something of a rationalist, so with regard to traditional magical healing practices, I likewise argue that they are complete hokum unless they can be shown to work consistently and demonstrably. In other words, we must apply the same critical standard to traditional hokum and modern hokum.

“But,” I hear some of you objecting, “don’t you teach energy-body practices as part of Tantrik Yoga??” Yes indeed. The difference—and it’s a huge difference—is that there are no irresponsible claims of healing power being made. I don’t teach that the energy-body practices of traditional Tantrik Yoga will bring about this or that result. I invite people to practice them and find out what the results are for them, because I know that results of any given practice can vary widely from person to person, and what seems to work miraculously well for one does nothing at all for another. Additionally, I want to avoid the affects of priming as far as possible, whereby someone primed to have a particular kind of experience and who wants to have it imagines they do have it (this is a central pedagogical problem in Kundalini Yoga), but with no actual lasting impact. Indeed, the purpose of Tantrik Yoga practices is not to have an experience at all, but rather to bring about a gradual, inexorable, powerful, indisputable paradigm shift that is non-conceptual and so difficult to describe. However, in that process, moments of spontaneous emotional digestion and even moments of healing can and do occur as a side effect of the process.

What Are ‘Near Enemies of the Truth’?

Borrowing this phrase from Buddhism, I use it to refer to slightly distorted versions of spiritual teachings—statements that are close to a profound and subtle truth, but are distorted just enough to make a big difference over time. When we’re talking about deep and fundamental truths, getting it a little bit wrong doesn’t matter in the short run, but it does in the long run, just like a tiny adjustment to the rudder of your boat makes little difference at first, but after 1000 miles, it lands you on a different continent.

Now, some people object to the use of the word ‘wrong’ in the previous sentence, subscribing as they do to the idea that the only necessary criterion for truth is it feels true to me. This view is as dangerous in spirituality as it is in politics, because it usually means I want it to be true, so I’m going to believe it, regardless of the facts. If you don’t see how dangerous this is, or if you doubt whether there really are facts or universal truths, please read the second half of the first blog post in this series.

Understanding the Near Enemies to the Truth, and why they are near enemies and not the truth itself, is hugely important for any spiritual seeker who wants to get past the beginner stages and into the deep (and deeply fulfilling) spiritual work. Having said that, it’s important to note that if a Near Enemy is near enough, it can be a Temporary Ally for a beginner. But as the stakes get higher in spiritual practice, there is no such thing as ‘close enough’ anymore, and your comforting affirmations must be sacrificed on the altar of truth, or else your spiritual progress stalls.