Substack Live Re-Air: Did An Energy Healing Practice Stop Cancer Cells From Growing? | Meredith Sprengel

**Mayim Bialik** (0:04)
Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

**Jonathan Cohen** (0:05)
And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

**Mayim Bialik** (0:06)
And welcome to our breakdown. Today, we've got a very special something for you. It was previously only available over on Substack. It's a conversation with Meredith Sprengel, Research and Program Director for the Subtle Energy Funders Collective, as well as the Fellowship Director for the Biofield Fellowship Research Program. Her work centers on evaluating how complementary modalities can be incorporated into conventional medicine for the treatment of chronic disease. The goal is strengthening resilience, supporting well-being, and fostering more of a whole person healing. This conversation discusses energy healing, which has been practiced for centuries, but is now kind of finally we're seeing the science catching up, and Jonathan is the perfect person to talk about that.

**Jonathan Cohen** (0:52)
In this conversation, Meredith and I explore biofields, energy fields. We talk about the field that is emitted around our bodies and how science is starting to measure it. The research she's doing really is fascinating because it explores all the hippie ideas that spiritualists and healers have, and how science is trying to translate them, understand them, and really help us get a better sense of how they can be used and how they impact our healing. One particular study that really stands out is the recent release of a cancer study from MD Anderson, where energy healing was used to change cancer cells in petri dishes, showing the reduction of cancer.

**Mayim Bialik** (1:40)
Jonathan's also going to talk about his Reiki practice, and a lot of what Meredith says really resonates with what Jonathan has experienced to be true, as well as the people that Jonathan has worked with.
Really, really incredible. Are we channeling God? Can we channel source? Can we channel consciousness? How do we release stuck energy? It's a great conversation. Please make sure also to check out Meredith's new six-part podcast series with co-host Ivy Ross, which is called Phenomena, The Science and Stories of Energy Healing, where they sit down with healers, people who've received healing and scientists studying what is actually happening when we talk about energy work in particular. We really hope you enjoy this episode, and we hope to see you over on Substack. Here is Jonathan talking with Meredith Sprengel.

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**Jonathan Cohen** (3:13)
As someone myself who has practiced Reiki for a long time, who has thought a lot about hands-on healing, the mind-body connection when we hear words like subtle energy and biofield, a lot of people are like, they think they know what it is and then we quickly discover that we have no idea if we're all talking about the same thing.

**Meredith Sprengel** (3:36)
Yeah. I think we have ideas of what they are, but I don't think we know what they are. Let's start with subtle energies. Subtle energy is the mechanism by which that healers describe that they're healing you. But they use a number of different terms. You could say subtle energy, God, consciousness, the universe.
It's the idea that that is that energy that connects all of us and can help facilitate a healing response.
When I talk to a lot of healers, I do that a lot for my research. Healers say they heal by they connect themselves to a source and then their channel for source energy or that subtle energy that then they use to then interact with participants' biofields to help reset the blueprint, right? The blueprint being of health and wellness and the core of who they are. And the idea is that over time they use these blockages of energy or this information that gets stored in this concept of a biofield that perturbs your health or then creates health and disease. A lot of times it originates with trauma, be it physical or mental health. This idea of a biofield, so we literally have a biofield. We are bioelectric beings, so we admit a bunch of different sources of bioelectricity from the heart, from the brain. Those are biological fields, right? It means that it extends outside of our skin and we can measure it. And we've done some of that, some preliminary work here in the Netherlands to measure biological fields like ultra-weak photon emissions and electromagnetic fields from the heart. The biofield that is kind of defined within this realm, which is this frontier form of science, like the subtle energy in biofields healing, they're fields of energy and information, not necessarily electromagnetic. So the idea is there might be some additional fields that we don't understand via physics or our current paradigm of science that we might also be sharing between us that might be creating that transpersonal healing effect you get from energy healing that may be core to the to the mechanism of how it works. So or the idea that this somehow there's a collective biofield that's being manifested from all of these bioelectric fields. So these are all concepts and ideas that are grounded in science, but kind of extends outwards to try to explain what's happening. But there's very preliminary research, although the Subtle Energy Funders Collective for which I work, that is kind of what we're trying to do is to foster new science to understand these concepts.