Abstract
Although the roots of healing and energy healing are old, the implications of the advancements in the field of quantum physics are strengthening the sense of a paradigm shift from reductionistic and fragmentary methods towards holistic and participatory approaches to health and healing. The boundaries between transformation, growth and spirituality are more fluid and with the focus on finding one’s own life purpose, the gap between modern integrative psychotherapies and holistic healing is narrowing. The aim of this qualitative research was to explore in detail the humanistic - integrative psychotherapists’ personal experiences of integrating non-invasive energy healing in their clinical work and how they perceive the impact on their own and on the client’s process. The investigation was supported by an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Three themes emerged: energy healing as process; intersubjectivity as energetic assimilation and dissociation as energetic misalignment. The study finds that the concept of process has a central role in both the participants’ professional and personal lives. Their respect for the client’s process and their perceived role as a facilitator is evident throughout the study which reflects their humanistic stance and values. The participants also offer their insight from an energetic perspective into what is commonly referred to as intersubjectivity. When working energetically with clients, they support the client’s unconscious healing mechanisms through the mobilisation of subtle energies guided by their increased extrasensory perception and ability for conscious energetic attunement into the intersubjective therapeutic space. The study also sheds more light on the dissociative state, which, according to the participants observations, coincides with a misalignment between the person’s energy body and physical body while a shift occurs in the person’s conscious awareness. The process reflects modern consciousness research findings on Out-of-Body Experiences and resonates with ancient holistic views of a person as an embodied spirit. The finding is further substantiated by an account describing the final separation process from the physical body at the time of death. Energy healers are therefore capable of integrating human experiences that are often diminished or pathologized by mainstream psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy and organised religion which are slow to embrace the new scientific paradigm about the nature of reality and human consciousness. Energy work offers a gateway and an experiential avenue to life beyond the physical world and in turn can promote new insights, meaning and purpose in a wider, universal context
