Science Is Catching Up — And That's Okay

I'll be honest with you: I'm the kind of person who wants to understand the nuts and bolts of everything. I go deep. I read the studies. I want to know the mechanism, the pathway, the reason why. It's part of what makes me good at what I do — and it's also the part of me that has had to learn, over and over again, to surrender.

That surrender didn't come easily. I spent most of my life caught between two forces pulling in opposite directions. On one side: the religion I grew up with, which told me that intuition, psychic gifts, and anything that smelled of the mystical was dangerous — something to be feared and suppressed. On the other: the deeply science-minded, evidence-based path I carved out for myself. In my teens and early twenties I was firmly materialist. I followed that into a decade-long career in evidence-based policy. I was good at it. I believed in it. And I used it, consciously or not, as another reason to dismiss the thing inside me that kept insisting it knew things it had no rational right to know.

So I suppressed it. For decades. The intuition, the sensing, the inner knowing I'd had since childhood — I filed it somewhere quiet and told myself it wasn't real.

Then a friend invited me to her first Reiki session. She was newly passionate about it and I showed up to support her — not because I believed in any of it, but because I loved her and she needed a body on the table. I didn't know what Reiki was. I didn't expect anything.

What happened next I still don't have perfect words for. Waves of energy moved through my body — undeniable, physical, impossible to explain away. And when my friend focused on my crown chakra, it felt like the top had been blown off a soda bottle. Startling. Extraordinary. Real in a way I couldn't dispute, even though I desperately wanted to find a rational explanation.

I didn't admit belief that day. I'm stubborn — it would take years of gentle nudges from the universe, and eventually a serious illness, to finally wake me up completely. But I filed that afternoon away as something unexplainable and wonderful, and I never quite forgot it. That was the crack in the door.

I share all of this because I think about that version of me — the sceptic on the table who felt something undeniable and still couldn't let herself say it out loud — when I look at the research that's starting to emerge. Had this science existed and reached me then, I don't think the road would have been so long and bumpy. And maybe it can shorten someone else's.

I've made peace with that tension. And recently, it's gotten a little easier — because the research is starting to catch up in genuinely exciting ways.

Reiki vs. "Fakey": What Happens When You Control for the Placebo?

One of the most persistent criticisms of energy healing research is the placebo problem. How do you know it isn't just the warmth of human attention, the expectation of relief, the ritual itself doing the work? It's a fair question — and scientists have been getting creative about answering it.

Enter "Feiki" — sham Reiki. In a rigorous clinical trial involving researchers from Harvard Medical School, the University of Utah, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Florida State University, the University of Michigan, and UC San Diego, 164 patients with clinically diagnosed knee osteoarthritis were divided into four groups: real Reiki, sham Reiki (performed by a trained actor mimicking the exact hand positions and movements of a Reiki practitioner), mindfulness meditation, and a waitlist control.

I find this study remarkable not because it proves Reiki beyond all doubt — nothing in science works that way — but because it demonstrates clearly that something is happening that the actor, performing all the same movements without energetic intent, could not replicate. That gap matters.

Energy Healing and Pancreatic Cancer: The MD Anderson Study

This one stopped me in my tracks when I first heard it discussed. Researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center — one of the world's most respected cancer research institutions — have been studying what happens to pancreatic cancer cells when energy healers go to work on them. Not on patients. On cells in dishes, and on mice. Specifically designed to rule out the placebo effect entirely.

"We started with cells and animals so we could be sure there was no placebo effect," said Dr. Lorenzo Cohen, co-lead author and Director of the Integrative Medicine Program at MD Anderson. "And what we saw was a consistent, meaningful reduction in tumor invasiveness and metastasis."

Let me sit with that for a moment. A healing practitioner, working with intention alone — no touch, no drug, no intervention recognizable to conventional medicine — appears to alter the behaviour of cancer cells. In a lab. Repeatedly. With controls. I'm not claiming this is a cure. The researchers aren't either. But the door this opens is significant.

Synchronized Hearts and the Body's Response to Intention

The Telepathy Tapes podcast, Season 2, dedicated two episodes to energy healing research — and surfaced some compelling additional threads. Among them: studies measuring synchronized heart rhythms between healers and recipients during sessions, suggesting that the body may respond to intention and connection through systems we're only beginning to map. Research showing that veterans with chronic conditions experienced the return of phantom sensations during healing sessions that couldn't be traced to touch or suggestion.

None of this is settled science. All of it is pointing in the same direction.

What Rupert Sheldrake Has Been Saying All Along

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has spent decades arguing that our current scientific paradigm is missing something fundamental — that consciousness, memory, and intention operate through fields that extend beyond the individual body, beyond the brain, beyond what materialism can currently account for. His hypothesis of morphic resonance proposes that nature has a kind of memory, that habits and patterns accumulate and propagate through fields that connect organisms across space and time.

A 2025 meta-analysis Sheldrake co-authored examined 26 telecommunication telepathy experiments published between 2003 and 2024, finding consistent results that far exceed what chance would predict. His work is controversial — it challenges the very foundations of how science currently understands mind and matter — but he is a Cambridge-trained biologist with over 100 published papers, not a fringe figure. He asks good questions. And the questions keep pointing toward the same territory that energy healers, intuitives, and indigenous wisdom traditions have always inhabited.

The Surrender

Here's what I've come to: I don't need science to validate my experience. But I am genuinely moved when it starts to. Not because I needed permission, but because it means more people — people who might otherwise dismiss this work before giving it a chance — might begin to open a door they'd kept firmly shut.

The sceptic who walks in not quite believing and walks out saying "I don't know what happened, but something did" — that person is who I think about when I read these studies. Not because I need to convince anyone. But because the work is real, and real things deserve to find the people who need them.

Something is going on that materialist science cannot currently fully explain. That doesn't mean it isn't real. It means we're at an edge — and edges are where the most interesting things happen.

I've learned to be comfortable at the edge. To let go of the need to understand every mechanism before I trust the felt knowing. To surrender, when it's appropriate and safe, to what the body and the energy already know.

That surrender isn't weakness. It's its own kind of intelligence.