The Mystery Of Life Energy
Evidence for the clinical benefits of energy-based therapies is revolutionizing our understanding of the human biofield.
Artwork©supatthanan/123rf
“The heart is a pump, the eye is a camera, and the brain is a computer.” These three metaphors are at the core of every American high school biology class and are used to describe the function of various organs in the human body. They’re certainly helpful as far as they go, but I don’t put these images in the one-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words category. In fact, I think they are wrong turns that have sent modern science and medicine (and even society itself) off in a mistaken and even dangerous direction. Of course, the metaphor of the human body as a complex machine is enticing and has led to many valuable medical and surgical advances. But it is a fundamentally short-sighted metaphor because it completely overlooks the essential component of being alive — the sea of invisible and intangible life energy that we literally swim in, the reservoir of vitality that infuses us with profound resilience. It is our most direct connection to the world at large and to each other, a connection we have been ignoring at our peril.
In fact, every healing tradition the world over — except for modern Western medicine — invokes the concept of an invisible healing force or energy. Many of these foreign terms for energy-based practices have even found their way into contemporary American culture — the Chinese exercise of tai chi, the qi that is stimulated by acupuncture needles, the yoga postures and mantra meditations, and so on. But Western medicine hasn’t yet embraced the idea that something invisible, apart from chemicals and cells, gives us our human essence. This disconnect is responsible in large part for many of society’s crises today — medical, interpersonal, ecological, and international. Many writers have already described in detail the shortcomings of this mechanical, materialist worldview. A completely different point of view (POV) emerges once we acknowledge that “energy” is real. And life, as a whole, looks very different when viewed through this lens.
How My Perspective Changed
To begin, it’s important to put my cards on the table and make a confession: I was brought up in the tradition of scientific materialism — not in the sense of lusting after the latest consumer goods, but as a believer that life’s essence is found in material structures, that every human experience can be reduced to matter, and that the only trustworthy source of information about the world comes from our five physical senses. I was the son of a scientist, an organic chemist turned immunologist, and I loved the excitement of the real-life not-on-TV microscopes and test tubes in my father’s research lab.
However, I didn’t realize that while I was being entranced by these powerful tools, I was also being indoctrinated into a very limited worldview. In school, I was good at math and science, so I got more than my fair share of approval and ego gratification for pursuing those interests. Studying medicine seemed to be the best way to harness and develop those skills while helping others in the bargain. I never thought too deeply about the big questions: the nature of illness, where consciousness came from (the brain, obviously!) or what love was (I hadn’t fallen in it yet), and so I looked forward to going to medical school and getting all the answers.
Fortunately, I made a crucial decision before starting that training. After college, I took a couple of years off to travel in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia. I saw enough of non-European cultures to realize that our Western approach was just one of many ways of looking at reality, each with their own integrity and validity. So, when I began med school in 1975, I had already gained enough perspective on the subject to suspect that my professors might not have as complete an understanding of health and illness as they professed. For example, I was disappointed to learn that many diseases were considered to be “idiopathic” (a term that was Greek to me — literally — until I found it was just a fancy was of saying that the cause wasn’t known), while common disorders like hypertension were “essential” (in other words, they just happened). There were no explanations to satisfy my sense of curiosity, but plenty of details to memorize; we were told early on that at least half of the material we were being taught would be obsolete in 10 years, but since the professors didn’t know which half was which, we should learn it all!
My classmates and I joked that Latin or Greek should have been a required course for pre-med students because so much of the mystique of medicine depended on the use of an impenetrable Greco-Latinate jargon. Would you have more confidence in a doctor who told you that he didn’t know why your skin was turning purple and you were running out of blood clotting cells, or in one who told you that you had a classic case of idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura? That mumbo-jumbo is a direct translation into medicalese of the Anglo-Saxon description.*
Bottom line: no one really seemed to know why things happened to our patients, or why they happened at the particular time that they did. So, they filled in the causal blanks by burrowing down into ever more microscopic levels of understanding. Genes were always the fallback explanation, but that left us feeling like we were just robots playing out the genetic hand we were dealt — not at all satisfying to my wish to understand at a causal level how health and illness were generated, where they came from, and how health could be sustained.
As a compromise, I decided to specialize in psychiatry because it had a different level of focus than straight internal medicine. At least psychiatrists talked about thoughts and emotions without trying to reduce them to chemicals (this was just before psychopharmacology and medication management took off as the field’s raison d’ être). I was fortunate enough to train with some of the founding fathers of psycho-neuroimmunology (PNI), Greco-medical, for “the study of mind, the nervous system and the immune system.” PNI was a definite upgrade from earlier psychoanalytic notions of “psychosomatic,” usually taken to mean that it’s all in your head, ie, imaginary. PNI was the thin end of the wedge because it showed how stress affected all of our body’s biologic functions, including immunity.
That’s a “Duh!” insight today, but 45 years ago it was a radical notion. So, in order to prove these insights were legit and gain acceptance in the halls of academic medicine, PNI became focused on reducing these behavioral patterns to hormones and neurotransmitters and nervous system responses, the sort of structures my medical colleagues had faith in. To be fair, they also believed in energy, but it was ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the chemical fuel that made cells go.
Discovery Of A New Healing Energy
It wasn’t until 1985, when a non-physician colleague invited me to a lecture on energy healing, that things really began to fall into place (or fall apart, depending on your POV). The term “healing” evoked images of the laying on of hands, which was too off-puttingly Christian even for my non-observant but culturally Jewish upbringing. I was fortunate enough, though, to hear an extraordinary speaker, the Rev. Rosalyn Bruyere, an LA-based healer who had earned the respect of her local medical community for the simple reason that she got results. Most puzzling to me, she had no formal medical training, having studied to be an engineer. Instead, she was able to assess the clinical situation using what she called her clairvoyance, her intuitive inner vision. Despite having my intellectual defenses triggered by all these red flags, it took all of ten minutes into the lecture for me to be hooked. She clearly knew her stuff and was talking about the missing ingredient that conventional doctors had been overlooking—the energy that linked thoughts, emotions, and the body. Nothing seemed idiopathic anymore.
For the next 7 years, I attended her regular healing intensives in western Massachusetts, where about 40 of us regulars learned the vagaries of energy healing, shamanism, spiritual growth, and the multidimensional nature of reality. I also learned, to my dismay, that intellectual prow- ess was not the be-all and end-all in this line of work. In retrospect, one of the most important lessons I learned from those workshops was humility; for the first time in my life, I was the dumbest kid in class. I spent so much time in my head that I couldn’t feel the energy moving through my body my classmates were busy sensing and modulating. My main challenge was learning how to put aside the steady stream of thoughts, judgments and analyses that had been so valuable in my medical training, and instead tune into the subtle messages from my body’s inherent energy-sensing systems.
I soon realized it was important to bring these energy-based approaches into my regular pain management practice, where I was part of a multi-disciplinary team that taught self-management skills to chronic pain patients. In that way, my patients could hopefully benefit from the healing forces I was learning about. But once I started looking at the world through the lens of invisible healing energies, everything shifted. It wasn’t just new clinical options opened up for my patients, but also other seemingly unrelated hobbies and interests began to make sense. As I would come to see, energy was the common denominator (or as they say in med-speak, the final common pathway) for everything from pain management to athletic performance, from team chemistry and fan energy to sacred sites, paranormal phenomena, and global consciousness.
We have some powerful new/old tools to help humanity deal with its current line-up of catastrophes. We can repair our damaged ecosystems by revitalizing Earth’s energy grid, we can resist a wide range of illnesses (including Covid) by using energy medicine techniques to enhance our natural immune resistance to disease, and we can reverse the energetic costs of social isolation by remembering and re-experiencing the web of invisible energy that connects and nourishes us all. When we acknowledge that we’re interconnected energy beings rather than separate machines, we can harness our innate healing gifts and benevolent interdependence to find a non-polarizing way forward that works for everyone. It is the birthing of our new paradigm that has room for both science and mysticism, a paradigm that can guide us to a future where we can all thrive together.
*Here are the Greek stubs, followed by their meaning, and in parenthesis a modern English word that comes from the same root: Idio-: unknown (idiot); –pathic: disease (pathetic); thrombo-: blood clot (lump); -cyto-: cell (hut); –penic: lack of (penury); purpura — bleeding under the skin (purple).
Excerpted from Mystery of Life Energy by Eric Leskowitz, M.D. © 2024 Bear & Company. Printed with permission from the publisher Inner Traditions International. www.InnerTraditions.com
Eric Leskowitz, MD is a retired psychiatrist living in western Massachusetts, who practiced pain management for more than 25 years at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston. He has published more than 50 articles, and is the author/editor of four books. His documentary about group energies and sports, The Joy of Sox, aired nationally on PBS in 2012.
