Learning Center: The Human Biofield

Role of Biofield in Health

Scientists have been studying human bioelectricity for the past 100 years. In 1994, a team of scientists at the National Institutes of Health came up with a term for the  electromagnetic field that surrounds and interpenetrates the human body: the “biofield.”  The biofield consists of bioplasma (living electromagnetic field roughly 5-6 feet around us in all directions, which serves as a type of energetic blueprint. 

For the past 25 years, I have been engaged in an experimental process of mapping the biofield. What I have found is that your biofield is essentially a map of your mind. From a biofield perspective, our minds are not in our bodies; our physical bodies are actually inside our minds! This living electromagnetic field holds information related to your emotional history, thought patterns, memories and physical and emotional traumas, and it sets the template for your physiology.  In your biofield is a record of everything you’ve ever experienced—and even what your ancestors experienced. It’s all encoded in standing wave format in the body’s electromagnetic field. 

Your biofield, like your brain, is compartmentalized, with different emotional experiences stored in different stratospheric locations. Just like the brain is compartmentalized and different areas are responsible for different things, so are our energy fields. (More on this in the next section!) 

At the edge of the human biofield is a double-layer plasma membrane which forms an outer boundary that offers protection. It creates the dynamic standing waves that hold information in a person’s field. Every cell and organ in the body has its own energy field in addition to being part of the greater field of the human body.

On the atomic level, the field appears to be composed of free electrons, ions, and protons operating in a balanced polarity of positive and negatively charged particles. These particles spin around each other in what’s known as a torsion force, which is a spiraling, twisting motion, bound by the plasma membrane at the outer edge of the field. The shape of the biofield as a totality is a torus, or donut-like shape, with a central channel of energy that circles around the outer boundary. 

The human biofield and its toroidal structure is a microcosm of what we find on the macro scale throughout nature. All electromagnetic energy comes in polarities of positive and negative. Polarity is a fundamental property of not only electromagnetism but all matter. The boundary of the earth’s magnetosphere is a double-layer plasma membrane that contains the earth’s atmosphere, displaying the same kind of structure as the human biofield.

The Electric Health view, founded on my own clinical experience and increasingly backed by reputable science, is that the biofield (and subtle energy of which it is composed) is not something separate from the electricity that our hearts and brains run on. It is simply a different expression of this electricity. You can think of the subtle energy of which the biofield is composed as simply a higher harmonic of the measurable electromagnetism that we call electricity.  

A big key to Electric Health is having a strong current of energy running through your central channel, which runs along the midline of the body. This enables a healthy flow of energy through the seven major chakra centers, feeding the energetic channels of the body known as nadis or meridiens, and throughout the various organs, tissues and systems of the body, , which enables healing, regeneration and vitality. When this central current becomes weak, the system becomes compromised and illness is the eventual result.

From a biofield perspective, our minds are not in our bodies; our physical bodies are actually inside our minds.

Biophotons

Biophotons are particles of light in the ultraviolet and low visible light range that are produced in biological systems, first discovered in 1923 by Russian scientist Alexander Gurwitsch. Their main function seems to be cell-to-cell communication, and they appear to create a coherent electromagnetic field throughout the body that uses electromagnetic frequencies for communication. 

Biophotons are present not only in the physical body but also its surrounding biofield. Biophysicist Dietrich Klinghardt describes the biofield as a coherent field whose purpose is to carry information from all the body’s cells and the memory of every event that the organism has been exposed to. 

This field carries the information of every cell in the body, and it engages in bidirectional information transfer with people, plants, animals, and energies in our environment.  

The biophoton hypothesis also provides a useful framework for understanding how our lives become a reflection of our energy fields.  If there are a lot of chaotic waveforms in your field, you’re going to be bringing that information into your interactions and likely attracting the same kind of waveforms.

Research using biophoton imaging devices shows that when an organism is under stress, it emits more biophotons–a leaking of life force that seems to result in a loss of order and integrity through the system. Stress or illness can cause an excessive leaking of noncoherent light out of the body and into the biofield — we literally leak out light as a result of stress and trauma. We lose our sparkle. 

This is a real scientific description of how the light in our eyes and the brightness in our being goes dim as a result of stress and trauma. Studies comparing biophoton activity in different research subjects have shown that while meditating monks give off very little light, people under stress are emitting large amounts of light out of their bodies and into the field around them.

We hypothesize that biophotons become trapped in areas of distortion and resistance in the standing waves of our biofield, stopping energy and lightfrom flowing freely through our system. We’ve leaked these photons during periods of our lives when we were under physical or emotional stress.

Rather than being lost and gone forever, the light and energy we lost during those turbulent times appears to stay within our own atmosphere, and can actually be returned it to its rightful place in the body.  If aging is the loss of light over time, restoring this energy back into flow is akin to reversing the aging process. 

Biophoton research is an exciting and growing field of study poised to make major advances in our understanding of health in the coming years. This new physiology of light may prove invaluable to bridging science and spirituality. It’s actual proof that we are light beings! When the ancient Tibetan yogis talked about the “rainbow body” that is illuminated from within, they were accurately describing our biology. As Carl Sagan said, “We are the stuff of the stars.”

The Biofield in Traditional Medicine 

While it is widely accepted that there is electricity in the body—your heart, brain, nervous system, cells—our current medical model does not quite currently recognize the biofield as scientific fact. The Western medical paradigm remains focused on a chemical and mechanical perspective of health, treating concepts like life energy, energy medicine, and the biofield as myths, despite mounting evidence to the contrary – and despite the fact that it is a basic law of nature that anything that has an electric current running through it has a magnetic field around it. 

While Western medical science has yet to formally acknowledge the presence of the biofield, other cultures, especially ancient Vedic and Oriental cultures, describe it extensively and it is thought to be a vital component of the overall human system. 

Modern biofield science has yet to detail the structure and activity of the body’s energy field, but if we look back to ancient medicine systems, we find detailed mappings of a life force in the body known to keep us alive and healthy, which, when blocked, creates illness and low vitality. 

Whether it’s called prana or chi, nadis, meridians, or chakras, there is clearly precedent for understanding the electromagnetic nature of our bodies. In fact, the word chi translates to “electricity”. 

While these terms are useful to understanding what we encounter in the biofield, it’s also important to find language in the Western scientific paradigm to describe what we are finding. With philantropists lining up to support a concentrated effort by science to map and better understand the biofield like we have come to understand the human genome, as well as create agreed upon language for referencing it, our days of seeing the energy in energy medicine as “alternative” appear to be coming to an end.

Modern Research on the Biofield

In the early 2000s, the seminal work of UCLA biophysicist Beverly Rubik launched the modern field of biofield science. Rubik’s 2002 paper, “The Biofield Hypothesis: Its Biophysical Basis and Role in Medicine,” describes the biofield as a complex, weak electromagnetic field that utilizes electromagnetic “bioinformation” for self-regulation. The field, as she presents it, is a light grid of near-instantaneous communication that underlies the slower chemical processes that it gives rise to—challenging the mechanist view that chemical reactions are what give rise to human bioelectricity.  

The work of Rubik and other biofield scientists has showed that by interacting with the organism’s biofield, energy-based healing modalities like acupuncture and reiki seem to exert an effect on homeodynamics—the organizing intelligence of the body that is always seeking to promote healing and maintain order and balance. 

Research in the past two decades has continued to demonstrate the efficacy of healing approaches that target the body’s energy system. A systematic review of 66 clinical trials, conducted in 2010, showed that biofield therapies demonstrate strong and significant effects in reducing pain and anxiety and other palliative effects.

In April 2020, my friend and colleague Dr. Shamini Jain and her partners at the Consciousness and Healing Initiative (CHI) released a comprehensive report titled “Subtle Energy & Biofield Healing: Evidence, Practice, & Future Directions.”  This effort assembled a library of roughly 6,2000 publications in subtle energy and biofield healing, as well as a thoroughly reviewed and mapped subset of 396 clinical studies of subtle energy and biofield healing modalities for various health conditions. Their findings can be found at www.chi.is. 

You can find a list of peer-reviewed journal articles and other research sources on the human biofield here.

Biofield Tuning

There’s a universal challenge that those of us who work with Biofield Tuning face: The work is hard to explain, and often it’s hard to believe. I spent years conducting sessions, wondering if what I was finding was real or if I was just making it up. But the patterns have proved, over the years, to be fairly universal.  The same patterns have shown up in many thousands of Biofield Tuning sessions, conducted by myself and the more than 2,000 Biofield Tuning students and practitioners that have been trained so far.

One of the things that makes Biofield Tuning challenging to explain is that it encompasses two additional states of matter beyond solid, liquid, and gas. These two additional states of matter are plasma—the fourth state of matter that is widely proven and scientifically accepted—and a hypothetical fifth state of matter, aether, that has been the subject of scientific debate for centuries. While its existence is as yet unproven, aether has been consistently referenced in ancient healing systems including Ayurveda. 

In the practice of Biofield Tuning, tuning forks are used to scan through the electromagnetic field of the body in order to detect and correct areas of dissonance and resistance. Through the introduction of the coherent sound input of the tuning fork, chaotic waveforms come to a more harmonious expression. By shifting the body’s magnetic field and thus shifting the electrical flow in the body, pain, tension, stuck emotions, and trauma are released. 

In Biofield Tuning, we take an electromagnetic approach to restoring wholeness by bringing discordant wave forms back into circulation and availability.  The more bioavailable energy we have at our disposal, the more energetically efficient we become. By using the coherent input of the forks, the biofield also becomes more coherent, orderly and harmonized.   

How Sessions are Conducted 

A standard Biofield Tuning session is about 60 minutes in length and can be conducted in-person or at a distance. The role of the client in a session is to focus their attention on their breath and to be aware of what they are noticing as the practitioner moves through their field with the tuning forks. 

Biofield Tuning utilizes a combination of weighted and unweighted tuning forks.  Unweighted tuning forks are those that people imagine when they think of tuning forks. These forks produce an audible sound that practitioners use as sonic feedback for any vibrational disruptions in the field. Every emotion encountered in the field (i.e. fear, alarm, sadness, depression) has a particular sonic signature that is picked up by the forks. The weighted forks, in contrast, produce less sound but provide deep vibrations that allow us to shift deeply-entrenched blockages in the field. These are what we think of as our “heavy lifters.” We use both the unweighted and weighted forks to comb through the field, but the weighted forks are also used to work directly on the body.

Each session begins by activating the client’s central energy channel, or sushumna, that runs along the spine. This is a way to strengthen their overall energy system and call their awareness back to the present moment. You can envision this by thinking of yourself as an energetic torus and bringing your awareness to your energetic midline of the body. Feel into the central channel that runs along your spine, from the center of your being all the way down into the center of the earth. As we anchor into our core, we come into electromagnetic alignment.

The practitioner then reads the energetic blueprint of the client’s field by combing the forks through the energy field like a needle on a record, listening closely to any places of distortion. The record is read like rings on a tree, so that a person’s human timeline is close to birth at the edge of the field, and their current age closer to the physical body. 

When our central axis is tilting to the right or left sides of the field due to these frozen biophotons, we struggle to be in the present moment and become out-of-balance because our energies are tied up in the past, in our memories, old stories, traumas and pain. As practitioners comb through the energy field, we are collecting all of the different pieces of ourselves from where they’ve been scattered and stuck and frozen, and bring them back into the neutral midline with the help of the coherent input of the forks. As we return these biophotons into the central channel, we are bringing people back into the present moment and bring more electricity back into circulation. We are literally returning their light to them! When clients finish a session, the response is often, “I feel lighter.”  People look and feel lighter.  

That’s a simplified explanation of the basic process of Biofield Tuning. For post-session self-care, we recommend drinking plenty of water, taking epsom salt baths, and anything else that makes you feel grounded – perhaps earthing, a walk in nature, or journal reflection.

Tuning In On Your Own 

You can practice doing some of this work on yourself, whether with your own tuning forks or by listening to an audio session. Be sure to use your breath as a way of bringing you into your body and noticing any places where there is tightening, or any places that feel locked, stuck or dark in your body. As you breathe into these places, ask yourself:

• What is it in my body that I’m avoiding?
• Why am I dissociating from my feeling sense?
• What’s uncomfortable in my system right now? Can I breathe into that?

You can also learn how to use your mind to shift your inner photonic arrangement through awareness and intention. There are a few key ways to use your mind to shift patterns of energy flow. The first is to increase your awareness by simply identifying what’s present. As things are coming up to be processed, name what you’re finding in clear, neutral terms. For example, “I am noticing a story of unworthiness,” “I am feeling a fear of being seen.” As you name and witness these emotions, you are bringing more light into these energetic structures. As you do so, you begin to shift and clear them.

Affirmations can also help you to shift your energy. An affirmation is simply a declaration of an intention. For example, “I am open to the possibility of seeing things differently,” or “I am in control of my finances.”  If you state an affirmation and then feel resistance in your body, this is confirmation that there is a blockage here. As you acknowledge it and work with it, you also begin the process of shifting it.

Visualizations can also shift the flow of energy. When you encounter a blockage in your own energy, guiding yourself through a visualization process of removing a block, wall, or other constraining object like a ball and chain will help to initiate this shift. Studies have shown that mental practices like imagining oneself lifting weights can result in actual increases in muscle mass. In some cases, visualization can be almost as effective as physical exercise. If you can shift patterns in your physiology using your imagination, don’t you think you should be able to shift your energy and emotions in the same way?

Electric Emotions

If we want to change our minds and bodies, we need to start with our emotions. An emotion is not just chemical and mechanical.  It is a waveform. It is a fundamentally electromagnetic phenomenon that gives rise to chemical and physiological changes such as heart rate increase or decrease, muscle tension, and breathing rhythm. But the vibrational aspect of an emotion is primary.  If we look at the etymology of the word emotion, it reveals that an emotion is a moving thing, it’s “in motion.”  

As a waveform, an emotion naturally rises up, crests in our awareness, and then falls away so that we can recognize it, express it, acknowledge the message it carries, and use that information to guide our decision about how to respond to a particular situation.  

One way to think about it is that our emotions are magnetic and our thoughts are electric.  Magnetic fields guide electric currents: Our feelings are primary, and our thoughts follow.  When we work with our emotions, we’re shifting the magnetic field, which is then shifting the way the electric current is running through the body–and ultimately showing up in certain mental and physical patterns.  Physical pain is often the final manifestation of an emotional pattern in the magnetic field.  If I have a pain in my right shoulder, I have too much electric current running through those wires. In Biofield Tuning, we find where the magnetic field is stuck there and shift the magnetic field so that the electric current will flow differently through the body. Wherever there is stuck energy in the field, there is corresponding tension in the body. Disease is often the body’s last resort to making the emotion heard. When we release the resistance in the magnetic field, the electric resistance and corresponding tension in the body is also released.

The goal is not to get rid of all these difficult emotions so that we are no longer emotional.  Emotions are natural and healthy. Part of being a whole human is being able to access a full range of emotion! This is about getting rid of our baggage and traveling light.  Whatever emotions arise will be much more manageable once you’ve dredged up the emotional backlog and released it from the body.

When we learn to dance with our emotions and accept them as a healthy and natural part of life, we enter into a fluid relationship with them, simply by allowing whatever emotion is arising at the moment to arise and dance its dance. Most people find that when they are finally able to release a backlog of emotion, they suddenly have reserves of energy to do things that they didn’t have the energy to do before. All the energy that was trapped in that emotional holding pattern suddenly becomes available for living and creating.

Energenetics 

The influence of what I call “energenetics” is one of the most powerful discoveries I have made in this work. Energenetics is the tone of the song of our DNA. We don’t simply inherit physical traits such as hair color or eye color.  We also inherit all the emotional experience and tonal qualities of our ancestors. DNA is as much vibrational as it is chemical. 

Ancestral influence and intergenerational trauma are a huge part of health that has largely been ignored in Western understandings of health and well-being. What we often fail to account for in our highly individualized American culture is how difficult it is to self-actualize when you are carrying around a set of traumas, emotions, and limiting beliefs that are not your own. As a result, we often go through life blaming ourselves for having dysfunctional patterns and then feeling guilty and inadequate for not being able to change them.  It’s not necessarily easy to shift the DNA files that got corrupted before we came along and then were passed down the line!  It’s often a relief to people to realize it’s not their fault that they inherited these patterns. 

I discovered a structure in the biofield, The Ancestral River, that is located ten inches off the right and left sides of the body. This area holds our inherited genetic and energenetic information. When appropriate and applicable, a Biofield Tuning session may include a clearing of the Ancestral River. 

Exercises

If you have a tuning fork, you can use it to feel into and harmonize with your own emotions. If you’re feeling angry, try putting a tuning fork on your liver. If you’re feeling scared, try resting the handle of the fork on your kidneys. You can purchase a 128 Hz weighted tuning fork for under $10 and start playing around. If you’re interested in investing in higher-quality forks, I recommend starting with the Sonic Slider, my most popular fork, which is intended for self-use.  

There’s a visualization I like to use to help people to embrace the full range of their emotions. For a moment, close your eyes and contemplate all the waveforms in the universe. First, bring your awareness to the lowest imaginable waves that are thousands of light-years across from crest to trough.  Contemplate the vastness of these low frequencies that travel in plasma through space. Then use your imagination to travel up the scale of frequency, allowing those waveforms to get a little bit shorter and closer together. Imagine them gradually becoming higher frequencies, but still vast and still below the audible range. Keep making them smaller and smaller, until they become the low tones of the audible range, and then move through the audible range up to the inaudible range. Then move up from there into the highest, finest frequencies that you can possibly imagine. 

Recognize that within your consciousness, you contain all of these wave forms: the infinite spectrum of sound, light, cosmic rays, gamma rays. You exist on every single one of those wavelengths. If you start getting too dialed in to any one particular waveform within yourself, just acknowledge that this is what’s happening within you at this moment.  You don’t have to deny it or push it away, but you can also open your mind and recognize that you’re much more than that.  You have the power to choose to change your own frequency.