Energy Medicine

and their potential health benefits

Potential health benefits
of Reiki

Promotes Relaxation

The most well-documented benefits of reiki revolve around the relaxation response, which practitioners say invokes the body’s natural healing process.

Dr. Rachel Lampert, M.D., a professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine, and her colleagues studied 37 patients after having a heart attack. The patients were randomized into three groups: patients who simply rested, those who received a single session of reiki treatment from a nurse trained in reiki and those who listened to relaxing music. The researchers measured activity of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which regulates heart rate, breathing, blood pressure and digestion.

Lampert’s team zoomed in on heart rate variability (HRV), a measure of the pattern of heartbeats that’s controlled by the ANS. The higher the HRV after a heart attack, the better the outlook for the patient, explains Lampert.

In the Yale study, patients who received reiki had a higher HRV and improved emotional state. “Our study was a very nice demonstration that doing things that are relaxing has benefits,” says Lampert. “We showed increased activity of the healthy arm of the nervous system.”

Boosts Mood and Sleep

Researchers at Harvard Medical School followed 99 patients at multiple sites to determine the effects of a single reiki session. The study—a single arm effectiveness study published in 2019 in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine—found statistically significant improvements in anxiety and depression symptoms, as well as pain and nausea.

Additional research suggests reiki helps with depression and insomnia. A 2012 study in the Indian Journal of Positive Psychology looked at 40 women who suffered from depression and anxiety. Half of the group received a reiki treatment twice a week for 10 weeks and the other half received no treatment. The women who received reiki saw significant improvements in both their depression symptoms and sleep quality.

Eases Physical Pain and Improves Quality of Life

A range of studies address reiki’s role in pain alleviation after knee surgery, the restoration of range of motion in injured shoulders, post-cesarean section recovery, hypertension management and the improvement of quality of life for patients with rheumatoid arthritis or patients undergoing various cancer treatments.

Portuguese researcher Zilda Alarcao and her colleagues looked at the impact of reiki treatment versus sham or fake reiki in two groups of patients with blood cancer. Each group contained 58 patients who received an hour-long treatment once a week for four weeks—either someone trained to administer reiki worked on them or someone pretending to do reiki (sham reiki) spent an hour with them.

The researchers found the patients who received real reiki showed significantly more improvements than the other group in general, physical, environmental and social dimensions of quality of life using the Portuguese version of the World Health Organization’s Quality of Life survey (WHOQoL-Bref), a well-regarded research tool that measures pain and other quality of life issues after undergoing an intervention. They published their results in 2016 in the European Journal of Integrative Medicine.

Potential health benefits
of Sound

Sound Therapy is effective in not only achieving a state of relaxation but it also has a way of moving through blockages in the body. Sound Therapy has been known to help treat such conditions as stress, anxiety, high blood pressure, depression, sleep disorders, pain and much more.

It may be considered new age wellness but sound healing is hardly a new form of therapy. The ancient Greeks used music to cure mental disorders and throughout history, sound has been used to help people work faster, influence, and boost morale. Many also believe that sound can heal the body. That’s because humans have a natural instinct for sound therapy. Just think about how a favorite song can lift your mood.

"Sound healing synchronizes brain waves
to achieve profound states of relaxation,
helping to restore
the normal vibratory frequencies
of the cells in our bodies"

Malbert Lee, a Hong Kong-based Crystal Bowl and Gong Master, says vibrations are especially useful for healing the body. “The adult body is 75% water, and water is a great conductor for sound vibration,” he notes. “When vibrations travel through the body, they promote circulation, energy flow, and rejuvenation. The frequency of the sound synchronizes with the brainwaves and activates destress responses in the body.”

Sound healing can help you clear energetic blockages and thus facilitate healing on a physical and mental level. Some of the benefits of sound therapy include:

lower stress levels
fewer mood swings
lower blood pressure
lower cholesterol
improved sleep

Over the years, sound healing has also been used to treat a number of conditions including anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, and dementia.

Singing bowls have been used in Tibetan culture since the 12th century. These metal bowls come in different sizes and each one produces a deep sound that relaxes and heals the mind. Because each bowl produces a unique vibration that works on separate parts of the brain, different sized bowls are often used together. Of course, they can also work on different parts of the body. Bowls elicit a light dream state, and can be placed on the body to promote healing.

“Vibrations move through water in the body,” says Dr. Buathon Thienarrom, a Thai wellness practitioner who offers sound healing with Tibetan singing bowls. “When this happens, it helps stimulate circulation to allow muscle relaxation and improve lymphatic flow.” This particular type of sound healing has been found to reduce stress, anger, depression, and fatigue.

Potential Health benefits of Meditation

Physical Benefits of Meditation

When meditating, the body undergoes a structural change, which demonstrates the profound impact of simply sitting down to meditate with eyes closed. In fact, MRI imagesshow a complete change in the brain’s different compartments, which results in a relaxation response in the rest of the body. When meditating, beta waves, which indicate a state where information is being processed, decrease and are replaced by alpha waves, which are associated with total brain coherence. The frontal and parietal lobes, which deal with reasoning, planning, and processing sensory information, slow down. And without an abundance of incoming stimuli, the nervous system can rest, resulting in relaxation and improved functioning in the entire body.

In two studies from Harvard University, researchers found that long-term meditators have increased amounts of gray matter in the insula and sensory regions, and the auditory and sensory cortex. But what does all this science mean for the physical benefits?

Stress

The Mayo Clinic says meditation is a simple fast way to reduce stress. Many experts believe that you cannot find a better, natural way with no side effects, to manage stress than through a meditation practice.

That is unless you incorporate breathwork such as SKY Breath Meditation. Research shows that the stress hormone, serum cortisol, has a 78% reduction. Another popular meditation technique, without the benefit of incorporating breathwork, Transcendental Meditation, reports a 30% reduction in cortisol. Arguably, most meditation techniques should reduce stress hormones to some degree.

Anxiety

Mindfulness meditation has grown in popularity in recent years and may be beneficial for reducing anxiety. Explore various meditation techniques- Mindfulness to SKY Breath: Choose the Best Meditation for You Today for help with anxiety. Recently Yale published a study comparing breathing meditation to mindfulness, read here to see the results.

Sleep

When it comes to any health-related concern, doctors will always ask if are you getting enough sleep, what is the quality of your sleep. According to SleepFoundation.org, insomnia is a common sleep problem for adults. They also state, “Not only can meditationimprove your sleep quality, but it may also reduce blood pressure and ease pain, anxiety, and depression”.

Pain

A Wake Forest University study found that even with inducing pain while subjects meditated, “there was approximately a 40 percent reduction in pain intensity ratings during meditation when compared with non-meditation”. Chronic pain can be emotionally draining, but with meditation training, pain can lessen while the tolerance for pain can also increase.

Blood pressure

According to the Centers for Disease Control, CDC, “high blood pressure was the primary or contributing cause of death in 2017.” Another benefit of both mindfulness meditation and mantra meditation techniques is a natural lowering of high blood pressure but may require daily meditation to continue benefits.

Heart health

Just as blood pressure is a major contributor to death, heart disease is the cause of death in over a half-million lives every year in the U.S., that’s 1 in 4 deaths. In addition to poor diets, stress affects heart health significantly.

Immunity

Dr. Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied whether meditation could impact the brain and immune function. The study took place over an 8-week period and observed meditators and non-meditators response to an initial injection of flu. The group who were taught meditation for the 8-weeks showed an increase in their level of antibodies—responsible for reacting to and preventing illness.