What Do New Age Healing Practices Do?

Ever since René Descartes declared the mind and body separate in the 17^th century, Cartesian dualism has dominated Western understandings of the human corpus for centuries.¹ Biomedicine today is largely navigated through empirical research and the scientific method, modes of inquiry that have given us pharmaceutical drugs, public hygiene laws, and surgical breakthroughs. These discoveries often came from viewing the body as a machine made up of parts that make up a whole.² These scientific advances have certainly improved quality of life, but many, if not most, remain dissatisfied with their health outcomes.

With institutional medicine failing to deliver on its promises to the sick, many take matters into their own hands through magical healing practices. These practices might take the form of what has historically and traditionally been thought of as “magical”—potions of herbal remedies, ritualistic chanting and dancing, shamanism, or communicating with spirits through séances in the hope that they may assist with the sick person’s recovery—or might take a more contemporary form like crystal healing, sound baths, and New Thought manifestation. The treatment styles all have one thing in common: they view the body as an extension of the mind, subtle energy, and/or spirit. Magical healing practices are becoming more in vogue; or perhaps we’re just realizing that they have always been a part of our healing journeys.

An important caveat to magical healing practices is that though many can experience healing, they cannot promise a cure; there is a fundamental difference between healing and curing. Curing refers to the complete elimination of evidence of disease, while healing suggests a more holistic, psychological experience of an improved state of being. Religious anthropologist Brett Hendrickson views the magical, numinous healing practices as bringing a person back to a state of “wholeness.”³ From a metaphysical healer’s point of view, maladies are caused by ruptures in the soul caused by traumatic events. Retrieving the fractures of these soul parts and restoring them unto the patient can allow the healing process to begin.

Mind over matter certainly rings true today with new scientific discoveries. Though once deemed “pseudoscience,” holistic alternative medicine practices like prayer, reiki, meditation, and other “energetic” practices are being incorporated into medical standards. Reiki, a Japanese form of energy healing, uses light touch and hovering hands to guide the “universal life force” through the patient’s body. A 2017 study has shown that its effects work better than placebo⁴, and reputable medical institutions like the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins offer it as a complementary treatment.

Energetic healing is more than just a physically beneficial procedure. When it feels like one’s body is at the mercy of fate and external factors, practicing reiki can be a way to reclaim agency and ownership over one’s body. But it can achieve the opposite, too; for many, it is a ritual of relinquishing control and surrendering to an external authority (like reiki energy), creating freedom from one’s former self.⁵

These and similar metaphysical practices are often labeled “alternative” and “New Age.” But most who engage in these healing techniques are not self-described pagans or witches. In some way or another, much of the world participates in magical healing rituals in times of need. Think of the mother who prays for her child to get over a fever, or the power of placebo and positive thinking in helping overcome illness. Even our blind faith in the healing powers of chicken noodle soup could be called magical. Health care and magical thinking need not be at odds. While some tension between the two is to be expected, we can open our hearts to the possibility of magic to heal before a cure is found.

[1] Kristin Keller, “The Body as Machine and the Lived Body in Nursing,” Collegian 27, no. 3 (2020): 364.

[2] Sarah M. Pike, New Age and Neopagan Religions in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pg. 100.

[3] Brett Hendrickson, “Metaphysical Healing and Health in the United States,” Religion Compass 8, no. 11 (2014): 350.

[4] McManus, Donna Elizabeth. “Reiki Is Better Than Placebo and Has Broad Potential as a Complementary Health Therapy.” Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary & Alternative Medicine 22, no. 4 (October 2017): 1051–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/2156587217728644.

[5] Beeler, Dori. 2017. “Reiki as Surrender: Evidence of an External Authority.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 32 (3): 465–78.

Tara Yazdan Panah is an essayist from Carlsbad, CA, and an Inglenook Features Writer. She is currently based in Cambridge, MA, where she works as a teaching fellow at Harvard Divinity School.