Energy Work: An Ancient Understanding of the Body, and How It Can Help You Heal

Long before we had words like “nervous system” or “biofield,” human beings sensed something moving through them. A vitality. A current. The difference between a body that is merely alive and one that is vital — humming, flowing, well. Nearly every culture on earth has noticed this same quiet force and given it a name. And nearly every culture has developed gentle ways of tending to it.

That tending is what we call energy work. At The Healing Table, it sits at the heart of much of what I do — and I’d love to share with you where it comes from, what it actually is, and how it might support you.

What do we mean by “energy”?

When we talk about energy in a healing context, we’re talking about life force — the subtle, animating current that traditions around the world believe flows within and around every living thing.

In modern language, some researchers use the term biofield to describe the field of energy that surrounds and permeates the body. Energy-based approaches like Healing Touch work with this biofield directly. They are gentle, non-invasive techniques that use the hands to clear, energise and balance the body’s energy field, with the intention of supporting physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

To put it simply, energy work is a complementary practice. It isn’t a replacement for medical care, and it doesn’t claim to diagnose or cure disease. What it offers is something quieter and, for many people, deeply needed — a way to restore balance, soften stress, and come home to a sense of flow and wholeness in the body.

A thread running through human history

What I find genuinely moving about energy work is how old it is, and how many separate cultures arrived at the same understanding without ever speaking to one another.

In India, the yogic and Ayurvedic traditions — some of the oldest healing systems we know of — spoke of prana, the vital breath or life force, moving through the body along channels called nadis and gathering at energy centres called chakras. In China, the same essential force was called qi (or chi), flowing through pathways known as meridians; the whole edifice of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, thousands of years old, is built upon tending and balancing this flow. In Japan it was ki. The ancient Greeks spoke of pneuma, the Polynesian peoples of mana. Different languages, different lands, the same intuition: that health is, in part, a matter of energy moving freely.

For most of modern Western history this understanding was set aside. But in the twentieth century it quietly returned — often, interestingly, through nurses and healers working at the bedside.

In the 1920s, a Japanese practitioner named Mikao Usui developed Reiki, a hands-on method of channelling life-force energy, which later travelled to the West and became one of the most widely practised forms of energy healing in the world. In the 1970s, the nurse and researcher Dolores Krieger, together with Dora Kunz, developed Therapeutic Touch within nursing. And in the 1980s another nurse, Janet Mentgen, founded Healing Touch, which grew into a structured, internationally taught program now used in hospitals, hospices and clinics alongside conventional care. Around the same lineage of revival, the physician Dr Edward Bach created his flower essences in the 1930s, convinced that emotional harmony was the foundation of true health. (I am a Bach Practitioner).

So when you come for energy work today, you’re not stepping into something faddish or new. You’re stepping into a very old human practice, carried forward through countless hands.

The body’s energy anatomy

To understand how energy work helps, it helps to picture the subtle architecture these traditions describe.

Life force is said to flow through the physical body along pathways — the meridians of Chinese medicine, and the nadis of the yogic tradition. It also flows around us in a surrounding field of energy often called the aura, or in more modern terms, the biofield.

And it gathers, like pools along a river, in the chakras.

The word chakra comes from the Sanskrit for “wheel” — and the traditions describe each one as a whirling, vortex-like centre of spinning energy. There are seven main chakras, running from the base of the spine to the crown of the head:

• the root, at the base of the spine, our sense of safety and groundedness
• the sacral, below the navel, our creativity and feeling
• the solar plexus, above the navel, our personal power and confidence
• the heart, at the centre of the chest, love and compassion
• the throat, our truth and expression
• the third eye, between the brows, intuition and insight
• the crown, at the top of the head, our connection to something greater

When a chakra is balanced and open, energy moves through it freely and that area of life tends to feel alive and flowing. When one is blocked or out of balance, you may simply feel off — stuck, stagnant, as though a part of your life has lost its current. Clearing and balancing the chakras is gentle, and for many people, quietly profound.

How energy work happens in practice

Here are some of the ways this work unfolds when you come to see me.

Energetic healing and Reiki. Using light touch or the hands held just above the body, I work with the energy field — the chakras, meridians and aura — to gently clear what feels stagnant and restore positive flow to the areas that need it. There’s nothing you have to do but rest and receive. Many people describe a deep, almost surprising sense of release.

Chakra clearing and balancing. Where a particular centre feels blocked or depleted, we work specifically to free and rebalance it, so that energy can move through that part of you — and that part of your life — once more.

Smudging. I sometimes use smudging to cleanse the energy field at the start or close of a session. Smudging with sage is a traditional practice, used for centuries by various Indigenous cultures — particularly across North America — to cleanse and purify spaces, objects and people. The ritual involves gently burning a bundle of dried herb and allowing the aromatic smoke to drift through the space; it’s believed to dispel heavy or negative energy and to invite in healing and protection. There’s even some research suggesting that the smoke of certain plants carries antimicrobial properties, but for most of us the gift of smudging is felt rather than measured — a sense of clarity, calm and a deeper connection to spirit.

I want to honour this practice with care: smudging with white sage is sacred to the Indigenous peoples who have kept it alive, and I hold it with respect and gratitude for its origins rather than treating it as a mere accessory.

Vibrational medicine and flower essences. Flower essences are gentle energy remedies — Dr Bach’s original insight was that the subtle imprint of a flower could help restore emotional balance. They offer a safe, simple way to nourish your emotional wellbeing, easing negative states of mind and the uncomfortable sensations that so often accompany them. Subtle and kind by nature, they work quietly, over time.

What a session can feel like

People often arrive unsure of what to expect, and that’s completely natural. Most of an energy session is spent resting — fully clothed, comfortable, often lying down — while I work with light touch maybe hovering hands, tuning forks, pendulum, tapping and rocking. This is why energy work is built in to an Integrative Session – a session where you will receive what you need from my collection of modalities.

Sensations can vary enormously when working a persons energy field. Some feel warmth, tingling or a gentle pulsing. Some feel waves of emotion rise and soften. Many feel a profound relaxation, the kind the body rarely lets itself sink into in ordinary life. And some feel very little in the moment, yet notice the shift in the hours and days that follow — sleeping more deeply, feeling lighter, less reactive, more themselves. There’s no right way to experience it.

An honest word

I always like to be clear and grounded about this work, because I think integrity is part of good care. Energy work is complementary — it sits alongside the medical and psychological support you may need, not in place of it. Its gifts lie in the realm of balance, calm, emotional release and a restored sense of flow and wellbeing. For so many people, that turns out to be exactly the kind of healing they’ve been missing — the part that medicine, for all its brilliance, doesn’t always reach… and magic happens.

An invitation

If something in you stirred while reading this — a sense of recognition, or simply a quiet curiosity — that’s worth listening to. Your body has its own wisdom, and it’s often the first to know what it needs.

I’d be honoured to support you. Whether you’re drawn to a full energetic healing, some focused chakra balancing, or you’re simply not sure where to begin, reach out anytime and we’ll find the gentlest way in — exactly where you are.