Phenomena Finale: Not a Machine but a Flame [Takeover]

Tami Simon:   Hi, friends. You may or may not remember, a few months ago we aired on Insights at the Edge the premiere episode of Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing as a special podcast takeover. And now today, we’re proud to air the season finale of Phenomena right here. If you haven’t listened to the whole season, don’t worry. This finale stands on its own. Of course, you’re invited to listen to all six episodes and hear all of the eye-opening science and moving stories. 

Today’s episode features three renowned scientists—an expert on mitochondria, a retired neurobiologist, and a liver pathologist who helped discover the interstitium. It might actually be a key that helps us understand how energy healing works.

I’m going to turn it over now to the host of Phenomena, Ivy Ross. Please enjoy this special broadcast of the season one finale of Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing

-MUSIC-

Ivy Ross: Picture this: at a conference in upstate New York in 2025, mitochondria expert Dr. Martin Picard of Columbia University stands before an audience of fellow scientists, giving a presentation. Beside him is a looping video of a single lit candle, its flame flickering against the darkness.

Martin Picard: This is a fairly relevant analogy for what we are. What you see here is something organic—the structure of the candle is this waxy, carbon-based material, which is very similar to your body in many ways. You’re made of the same stuff as this candle, with a few more proteins and a few other things, but mostly it’s the same kind of material. A flame consumes oxygen and releases CO2, which is exactly what you do when you breathe: you breathe in oxygen, you breathe out CO2, and that happens in your mitochondria—we’ll talk about this a little bit.

What you also see with this flame is that it’s flexible. It’s sensitive—it responds very sensitively to the movement of air around it—but it’s also resilient, just like us. We’re very sensitive in some ways, but also very resilient. At the same time, it’s always in movement. It’s dynamic—second by second, it’s never the same. It’s adaptable. There’s a warmth to it, and a brightness to it. It releases light, just like we do—it releases photons. And it’s ephemeral: it has a finite lifespan. One day this candle will burn out and die, just like every living creature on the planet has this kind of movement.

So we are energetic processes.

Ivy Ross: Welcome to Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing. I’m your host, Ivy Ross. Today we’re going to tell a different kind of story. In previous episodes, we’ve heard from healers and the people they’ve healed. We’ve heard from scientists who have been conducting rigorous research to document and explain what happens during these healing experiences.

But at the core of all those stories, there’s one key question we haven’t yet asked: What is energy? What is this force that animates us, that gives rise to consciousness, that can be channeled to heal ourselves and others? What does it mean not just to heal, but at a more essential level, to be alive? And what has our modern medical perspective missed about all of this?

Here’s Dr. Martin Picard again.

Martin Picard: We’ve deluded ourselves over the last hundred years or so into believing that we are molecular machines, and this is what biomedical science is based on. This is so pervasive that it’s like the water for fish—the fish isn’t even aware that it lives in water, because it’s just part of its life from the moment it’s born.

If you grow up as a normal human being in this modern-day culture, you grow up in a world where materialism and physicalism is your water, and you’re not even aware of it. And if you grow up as a scientist in academia, it’s even worse—you become indoctrinated pretty strongly, so much so that you start to adopt a fairly dogmatic perspective. And then if someone believes something that doesn’t fit your model, there’s extreme resistance to it, to say the least.

Ivy Ross: Martin is a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University’s Department of Neurology, where he leads the Mitochondrial Psychobiology Lab, and he’s speaking from a place of deep professional and academic experience—also from his own life story. After his presentation, we spoke with Martin, and he shared that growing up, his mother was a nurse who did home care visits, and sometimes he came along straight from hockey practice.

Martin Picard: She would pick me up at hockey practice and sometimes she’d say, “Sorry, I’ve got a colleague—we need to go see this patient.” Sometimes she had patients who were in really bad shape, and it was clear in the next few hours they were going to go, and the family was there, in distress. So I got to see, pretty early on, what human suffering is. And some people did amazing—right, they weren’t supposed to recover, and then they recovered and healed. And this was really profound. And some other people—their wound was getting bad, and then they’d get a bedsore, and then they’d get an infection, and eventually they’d die. And I think I wanted to understand: why is that? What is it that allows some people to heal—that gives them the strength and the capacity to become whole again after an injury, after a surgery—and some other people not?

Ivy Ross: That’s a question that’s haunted Martin from childhood all the way through school, through his PhD program and his postdoctoral fellowship, and it’s fair to say it still haunts him today.

Why could some people seem to heal and some can’t? Why does the same affliction land differently on each of us? As Martin said, conventional medicine tends to see our bodies as molecular machines—a view of life that assumes everything has a mechanical explanation. But the closer we look, the less that seems to be the whole story. Even some of the biggest recent achievements in medical science have this flaw in their foundation.

Martin Picard: The Human Genome Project, which was a ten-year endeavor, had just been completed in 2001, and then in 2003 I started college. We still had hope—the scientific community still had hope that we were going to find the gene for heart disease, the gene for cancer, the gene for Alzheimer’s, the gene for every disease. That was the hope. That was the hypothesis. If the Human Genome Project had been a clinical trial, it would have failed its primary endpoint.

There’s no gene for cardiovascular disease. There’s no gene for cancer. There are a few genetic variants that explain a small percentage of predisposition, but very few genetic defects are fully penetrant—meaning if you have this genetic defect, you will get sick. That’s a very small sliver of the truth. The reality is there’s a lot of plasticity and malleability in biology, in health. And even when there’s a severe genetic defect that predisposes you to disease, it’s not written anywhere when you’re going to get sick. Life is dynamic. Health is dynamic. And I just felt like this wasn’t the truth.

Back in those days, if you cloned a gene, as a scientist, that would make your career—you’d win some prize, you’d get tenure. Discovering a gene was a big deal. And I think this taps into something deep, some deep bias. And maybe it was a bit of a rebellion against the fact that I wasn’t learning what I’d hoped to learn: how the human mind, the human spirit, actually connects with biology, and why people get sick, how people heal, why some people can heal and some can’t. There was none of this. Everything I was learning was cell biology. Even physiology treated the body like a machine.

Ivy Ross: Seeing the body as a machine means more than just reducing health into pieces and parts that can be tinkered with and fixed separately from the whole. It means treating every disease the same way, regardless of the person who has it.

Martin Picard: You have three people with the same disease—say, migraine. One person’s migraine gets worse with heat and better in the morning. Another person’s migraine gets better with cold, and it always gets worse as the day progresses. And another person’s migraine just lasts for days and is immovable. These are three different disease entities, and they have the same label. So in medicine, we treat them the same way—we try this drug, this drug, this drug. We have no way of really individualizing or personalizing treatment the way we need to. There’s a famous quote from the physician Osler: “It is much more important to know which person has a disease than to know which disease a person has.” You should be treating the individual. In some ways, medicine starts there, but it very quickly becomes: this person is a molecular machine, and we need to identify the diagnosis and find what drug is going to fix that diagnosis, fix that symptom.

Ivy Ross: In this perspective, medicine is treating the label, not the person. And while that approach obviously benefits many people, seeing the body as a machine and healthcare as a system can also overlook the individual—it’s a framework that can’t see the differences between us. We spoke to two different researchers who have explored this same contradiction from different angles. First, meet Dr. Richard Hammerschlag.

Richard Hammerschlag: Maybe I can introduce myself by saying two things. First, I’m a recovering biochemist—I had about twenty-five years of a career in basic research in neurobiology; my PhD is in biochemistry. I then made a career switch to acupuncture research, which I greatly enjoyed for about ten years. And then I retired, and in my retirement I’ve become a “biofielder,” what can I say. I’ve gotten fascinated because I think the biofield is a link between conventional biomedicine—certainly the body that conventional biomedicine looks at—and the body that acupuncture and Chinese medicine look at, which is a very different body, based on flow and interconnections.

Ivy Ross: “Biofield” is a term we’ve heard many times in this podcast. It was coined in the early 1990s by a committee under the newly established Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Hammerschlag has been one of the key figures leading the study and exploration of the biofield. In fact, he literally wrote the paper on it, back in 2015.

Richard Hammerschlag: Think of biofield as an umbrella term that covers three different but related types of phenomena. First, what I call “little b” biofields—physiological activities we know exist in the body that, twenty-four seven, are involved in regulation: the electroencephalogram, the electrocardiogram. Those are electromagnetic fields. Biophotons are another area of great interest—light particles that appear to be released as signals between cells. So those are all “little b” biofields.

The second area is what I’ll call “Big B” biofield, and that’s a composite field—perhaps a composite of all these little biofields in the body. It’s a field that exists within the body but emanates from the body. It’s something that all living things contribute to, that we kind of exist within.

Ivy Ross: Dr. Hammerschlag’s description here sounds almost exactly like Anna Herring’s description of chi fields in episode three—this fractal, nesting-doll image of little fields of energy combining to make bigger and bigger fields. And similarly, he goes on to explain the interconnection between these fields, too.

Richard Hammerschlag: “Big B” biofield also asks us to consider that I don’t end at my skin. I think we’re beginning to have a strong sense of that, and that’s where a lot of biofield phenomena will one day be explained—on the basis of what that means. What is this field that we all interact within, that is not confined to the “me,” which somehow we’ve grown up being taught exists within my body? And the third way the term biofield is used, of course, is one we’re all familiar with: biofield therapies.

Ivy Ross: Those are the therapies we’ve been exploring through this whole series—Reiki, Qigong, distance healing, and more. This framework of “Big B” and “little b” biofields is a way of viewing our bodies not just as machines, but also as overlapping and interconnected fields of energy and information. It’s a more fluid and nuanced view, one that better answers Dr. Picard’s questions about the variability and individuality that the mechanistic perspective overlooks—which leads us to our third and final researcher of the episode.

Neil Theise: My name is Neil Theise. I’m an adjunct professor of pathology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. I worked with the liver transplant team for about thirty-five years. That got me into adult stem cell research, which got me into complexity theory, which got me into consciousness studies and integrative medicine, and science-religion dialogue. Independent of that, I wound up doing some novel human anatomy, discovering something called the interstitium—the spaces between cells and around tiny blood vessels—which turns out to be a body-wide network, through all the fascia of the body, connecting everything. It’s a communication network for the entire body.

Ivy Ross: There’s a lot to explore with the interstitium, which has amazing potential for explaining how biofield therapies and energy healing might actually work in the body’s biology. But I don’t want to skip over something else Dr. Theise said—complexity theory. He’s written an incredible book called Notes on Complexity, and we’ll link to it and other sources on our website at phenomenahealing.com.

Complexity theory is based on an idea similar to what Dr. Hammerschlag was describing with “little b” and “Big B” biofields—this cascade of interconnecting influences. Dr. Theise was introduced to the idea through a program in the UK that connected artists and scientists in dialogue. It came up during a conversation he was having with an artist named Jane Prophet.

Neil Theise: I told her about the stem cell work, and she said, “Oh, that sounds to me like these complexity people who talk about ants, ant colonies, and slime molds”—the way I was talking about cells moving in the body was how they would talk about ants moving in a colony. That’s where I really learned about complexity theory.

I was left with a really difficult puzzle, because as a scientist I thought: well, is my body a thing? Or is it a colony made up of cells, the way a colony of ants is made up of ants—in which case, that colony isn’t really a thing? So maybe my body’s not a thing. But if it’s not, then what is it? From a Western scientific and medical perspective, I thought there had to be a right answer to this question, or at least a more right answer.

Ivy Ross: Like Dr. Picard, Neil Theise had stumbled into a question he couldn’t answer—or ignore—what they’ve both called a scientific koan: an unanswerable question. One afternoon, walking in New York City, Dr. Theise had an incredible experience—a moment that led to what I can only describe as a scientific and spiritual epiphany.

Neil Theise: I was walking in New York City down 19th Street, coming to the intersection with Park Avenue, and there was a stop sign, but I was obsessing in my head: Am I a body or cells? Am I a body or cells? In Zen practice, we talk about koans—these little puzzles, or concepts, or questions that we can’t keep ourselves from pursuing and digging into. This had become a koan for me. I’m standing there thinking, body, your cells—am I a body or my cells? And then the light changed, and the people next to me on the curb stepped off, and I couldn’t step off myself, because my leg had turned into a flock of cells. It was strange. And then it cohered back into a leg, and I crossed the street.

Two weeks later, I was sitting in the zendo, where people come to meditate. I lit the incense on the altar and sat down to meditate. And instead of doing my official Zen practice, I was sitting there obsessing—am I a body or cells, a body or cells? And then, at one point, I looked up—I always get choked up when I talk about this, it’s hard to talk about—I looked up and saw the stick of incense on the altar becoming smoke, and I thought: oh, stick, or smoke; body, or cells. It isn’t one or the other. It’s both, and not either-or.

And in that moment, instead of it being a concept, it was this really visceral experience of what the Buddhists call emptiness—emptiness of inherent existence—that things appear to be things, or phenomena arising from smaller things, depending on your perspective, and neither one is more correct than the other. In Buddhist terms, the absolute versus the relative—they are not separate, they aren’t different, it’s just how you experience them. In that moment, suddenly the science and the spiritual practice became one single thing, in a really indisputable way, for me.

Ivy Ross: Martin Picard’s beautiful link between the light of a candle and the movement of life. Richard Hammerschlag’s biofields, overlapping and interconnecting. And Neil Theise’s vision of body and cells, stick and smoke. We are not machines—we are dynamic processes. The incense becoming smoke, the burning flame. For me, that’s the answer to what energy is at a philosophical level. But next, we’re going to hear what that answer could be at a scientific level.

For now, let’s set aside these abstract ideas about energy. While Martin, Richard, and Neil might be skeptical of a purely mechanistic model of the human body, they’re also experts in their fields of scientific research—big believers in the data, and they’ve got plenty to share to help us understand energy from a physiological perspective.

Let’s start small—smaller than cells, in fact, inside cells, where energy lives in the body: mitochondria, the extraordinary structures Martin Picard has spent his career studying.

Martin Picard: There’s something really special about mitochondria. Mitochondria are the reason we exist as multicellular bodies with organs, and the fact that we’re thinking, feeling, conscious human beings and animals is because of mitochondria—because of the history of life. About two billion years ago, the only thing that existed on the planet was single cells—little bacteria-like organisms on the sea floor. At some point, a large anaerobic bacterium that couldn’t use oxygen to transform energy either engulfed a smaller aerobic organism that could use oxygen to make energy, or the small one colonized the big one—we don’t really know, but in the end that doesn’t matter. The end product is that this symbiosis, working together from the inside—it’s called endosymbiosis—of mitochondria, allowed cells to become social.

Instead of bacteria all fighting against each other, just wanting to make more of themselves—this really selfish kind of behavior—that behavior was transformed into a more social, more communal, collective behavior. There’s very good evidence that the advent of mitochondria is what made this possible. Cells developed the ability to talk to each other in more complex ways, and then you had a bunch of cells that stuck together and said, in effect, “You guys get some food, and we’re going to do the moving, the propulsion.” Then you had the beginning of muscle, and a stomach, and at some point some cells differentiated and became really good at integrating and sensing things—the forebearer of the brain. But that required cells to create a bigger self. And once you have a bunch of cells stuck together, energetically connected—and we know that happens in part through bioelectricity, sharing electrical current between them—they can feel each other. And not only can they feel each other, they become each other. So if the cell next door is suffering, you’re suffering too. That’s kind of a condition for this cohesive social collective.

Ivy Ross: The origin of multicellular life—of bodies and minds—is rooted in the capacity to know and feel what the cell next door is knowing and feeling. Life as we know it comes from interconnection, which is happening in part through bioelectricity, as Dr. Hammerschlag’s “little b” biofields demonstrate. But mitochondria are more than just tiny socialites—they’re actually known as the powerhouse of the cell, where our energy literally comes from, and that process is quite remarkable.

Martin Picard: I suspect mitochondria are the portal between the immaterial existence of the mind—your experience—and the way it manifests, the way it materializes or crystallizes into biochemistry. There’s a very real process that happens when you eat food, and food becomes who you are—you assimilate food, you metabolize it. The way this happens: you take food, which is really crystallized sunlight. There’s energy that comes from this nuclear reactor in outer space—it’s beamed down, absorbed and slowed down by a green leaf somewhere, and by slowing down that energy—that immaterial energy, photons, a wave or a particle—it gets crystallized into biochemistry, which is food. Then you eat that, and mitochondria, deep in your cells, dematerialize that energy back into an immaterial form: an energy gradient, a charge—mitochondria are basically like batteries, and that charge is basically the secret of complex life, because it can be used for making ATP, the cellular energy currency, but also for regulating ions, for making hormones. Once mitochondria are energized, they do all sorts of things—dozens of different things. That happens by dematerializing biochemistry into this electrochemical force. And somehow the mind arises from this. If you block the flow of energy through mitochondria, the mind just ends—that’s when you lose consciousness.

Ivy Ross: I love this description of the transformation of energy—from sunlight into food, light slowed down until it’s crystallized into matter, then transformed again by mitochondria. I picture it like Martin’s candle being lit again and again inside trillions of cells—an ever-shifting dance between matter and energy.

While mitochondria might be the secret of complex life, they can also be a source of complicated illness.

Martin Picard: We know that when mitochondria don’t flux energy properly or smoothly—when there’s higher resistance to energy flow through the mitochondria because of a mitochondrial defect, for example—everything in the body doesn’t work quite well. People don’t feel quite well, they’re tired all the time. It alters human experience. I discovered a few things that really led me to think we need to understand this: mitochondria as a portal, a way to ground this—to connect the mind and the body, maybe to connect the human experience, what you could call spiritual experience, or the human mind, and ground it into biology. Understanding how these two things are expressions of a deeper movement, perhaps, and bridging those, is going to be the path to transforming human health.

Ivy Ross: If we’re looking for a mechanical answer to Martin’s decades-old question of why some people can heal and some can’t, mitochondria would be a good place to start. Defects affecting mitochondria are a clear determinant of how well a body can function at a subcellular level. But as is always the case, that’s only part of the solution.

Martin Picard: I don’t necessarily think we need to pinpoint a molecular mechanism, or that there is one, for individual differences—but we’ve been pursuing the hypothesis that part of those inter-individual differences, what makes people unique, how we respond to life, is the way energy flows through our mitochondria. There are scientific ways to ask that question, to connect human experience with mitochondria. We’ve done three studies so far that show, yes, there’s a connection. People who report more positive experiences—feeling more optimistic, feeling like their life has purpose, feeling connected to other human beings—those things seem to be associated with more mitochondria, and mitochondria that are better at transforming energy.

If you want to be a little reductionist about this, you could say maybe people who have more mitochondria that flux energy better have a more positive outlook on life, and that snowballs into a better, more positive life with more positive experiences. That’s very reductionist. Or you could say: no, there’s something else in the person—maybe it’s in the environment, their family, their friends—that is bringing about those positive experiences, and then those positive experiences shape the mitochondria. So your mitochondria become shaped by your experiences. Those are two possibilities. If you look at animal studies, you can test both directions—in mice, you can cause them stress, and you see this changes the mitochondria. If you do more positive things, it changes the mitochondria the other way. So you could say the experience is changing the mitochondria. And then you could say, well, let’s change the mitochondria and see if it changes the behavior—and yes, it does. So the animal studies, the mechanistic work, show it’s a bidirectional relationship.

Ivy Ross: In other words, the experience changes the biology, and the biology changes the experience. It’s a chicken-and-egg question—or, as Dr. Picard suggests, it could be what scientists call a third, unobserved variable. Maybe it’s an underlying movement of consciousness causing both observed effects.

Martin Picard: The body and the mind, then, would be two expressions of a deeper, truer reality. And asking causal questions here maybe becomes a little futile. But unearthing this connection—discovering this connection between the mind and the mitochondria that my lab has made—I think it has pointed us, in a very concrete, scientifically grounded way, to a deeper, potentially energetic dimension of what life is, of where health comes from, and what drives a healing process.

Ivy Ross: The science clearly shows the link between the mind and mitochondria, between energy and wellbeing. Richard Hammerschlag’s work takes this connection and asks a different question.

Richard Hammerschlag: What I’m really interested in is the possibility that there’s an overlooked surveillance system in the body, engaged twenty-four seven in detecting where imbalances occur. I’ve always been interested in the idea that East Asian medicine can detect imbalances and correct them before they become clinical signs and symptoms. Western medicine is far less developed in terms of detecting subtle diagnostic indices of early imbalance in the body. But we know the body does have these kinds of surveillance systems. The immune system is constantly doing surveillance—natural killer cells are naturally looking for invading pathogens, viruses, or bacteria, identifying them and triggering ways to neutralize them. We know there’s a system in the nucleus where specific sets of proteins have evolved with the function of constantly walking along the DNA, identifying where spontaneous mutations have occurred—or maybe not so spontaneous, maybe caused by environmental toxins—and when they’re not too severe, they can correct them.

Ivy Ross: An autonomic system that keeps the body healthy—a kind of upkeep and maintenance constantly happening below our awareness. Dr. Hammerschlag’s proposition is that the approach of East Asian medicine and biofield healing is much more attuned to these pre-diagnostic processes than Western medicine, which is more focused on fixing what’s broken. The machine model, once again.

Richard Hammerschlag: We focus so much in Western medicine on pathogenesis, but what has come to be called salutogenesis is the study of ways the body keeps us healthy, not just ways it breaks down. As a thought experiment, what I’ve been spending time on lately is: what if there’s a monitoring system in the body that can identify very early imbalances—imbalances that acupuncture and other types of Asian medicine have realized, with much more subtle diagnostic systems than we have in the West, how to identify?

Ivy Ross: This system would operate in part at the cellular level, going back to the idea we heard from Dr. Picard of mitochondria allowing cells to become social, interconnected, and aware. And Dr. Hammerschlag has an idea of how they’re communicating.

Richard Hammerschlag: My sense is that this system, if it exists, could well exist within the fascia—what exists between the tissues. It provides a kind of cushioning and support for all our tissues; it’s wrapped around all the tissues. We know this collagen-based fascial system seems to be part of a whole-body network. The collagen touches all the cells in the body, and collagen can tap into a signal that cells release, indicative of their state of health. If that signal is within a healthy range for any condition or activity in the body, it’s recognized as such. If the signal becomes weaker, within a certain range, the body can detect it and correct it, bringing it back into the healthy range. If the signal becomes weaker yet—indicative of a more serious, but still subclinical, problem—we need something like acupuncture, or perhaps a biofield therapy, that can detect it and boost this endogenous healing system back so it’s strong enough to correct the system. If the signal gets so weak that it can’t be corrected, that’s when clinical signs and symptoms begin, and that’s when we need much more robust biomedical interventions.

Ivy Ross: This interconnection and flow is a beautiful expression of Dr. Hammerschlag’s work with biofields—a fluid, overlapping system of information and interaction. The promise of energy medicine is that it might function as a kind of bridge between that self-sustaining world and the more reactive interventions of conventional medicine.

You’ve heard us talk about fascia before—the system Dr. Hammerschlag is describing is the same one we heard about from Dr. Andrew Ahn in our episode on qi and meridians. It’s a system that has surprisingly only recently been discovered in the West, and one of the key figures in its discovery was Dr. Neil Theise.

Neil Theise: The idea that there’s an interstitial space between things is nothing new—that’s been known for centuries. Wherever you have a capillary—the smallest blood vessel, bringing nutrients into a tissue and taking away waste products from the cells in that tissue—there’s a space between the capillary and the cells of the tissue or organ. That’s an interstitial space. Nutrients come in across it, waste products go out across it to be carried away. No one ever thought those were likely to be interconnected in some fashion. I’m not sure it was a question anyone even asked.

Ivy Ross: Dr. Theise’s involvement in the discovery was a combination of new technology, decades of expertise, and office space.

Neil Theise: I was at the hospital I was working at then, Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, in the gastrointestinal medicine division. Since I was located there, when two people in the department—the director, David Carlock, and one of his senior fellows, Petros Benias—got a newfangled endoscope, and when they looked into the bile duct, the tube that connects the liver to the small intestine, they saw these light-filled spaces separated by dark bands, and they didn’t know what that was. Since pathologists know what things look like microscopically, and I was just down the hall, they knocked on my door and showed me these pictures and said, “What do you think this is?” And I said, “I don’t know—I’ve never seen anything like that.” I knew what the wall should look like, and I showed them under the microscope that there are no spaces there—it’s just this densely layered collagen, which is hard and stiff, with occasional cracks in it, because when you make a slide of a thick piece of collagen, it’s so stiff it’ll crack with the blade when you’re making thin sections for a microscope slide. So I showed them the cracks and said, “That’s artifact,” as I was taught, and as I’ve taught decades of residents and fellows. But they kept seeing these spaces when they looked. So something was changing between the living tissue and what I was seeing in essentially dead tissue on the slide. Eventually we figured out that in living tissue, the dark bands they saw are thick collagen bundles, and the bright spaces must be fluid-filled between them—they disappear when we process the slide, because when you take out a tiny bit of tissue for a biopsy, the water drains out of it. Then, when you process it with formaldehyde and so on to make a slide, you further tighten things up. So the process of making microscope slides, which we thought reflected the normal living anatomy in all cases, in this case did not. Those cracks we saw were the remnants of the fluid-filled spaces.

Ivy Ross: Now considered the third circulatory system of the body, the interstitium was a major scientific discovery, and as I said, it’s kind of shocking that it’s only recently been identified. Many now believe this body-wide network allows energy and information to flow through a conductive fluid.

Neil Theise: The other really powerful thing has been that when the interstitial anatomy first got published, every time I met someone coming from a different culture of health and healing—whether an acupuncturist, someone doing energy healing work, someone from an Ayurvedic tradition, or Tibetan doctors who do pulse diagnosis—whatever they were talking about, when I showed them the anatomy, they’d say, “Yes, that’s what we’ve been talking about.” They just didn’t have a precise, microscope-based Western scientific way of describing it. All the things they talk about, they describe with poetic metaphors, because how else could they describe what they’re feeling or intuiting in their own bodies, or in the bodies of people they’re working with, without Western science? They’re going to use poetic language. But when I show this to them, they say, “That’s what we’re talking about.”

Ivy Ross: And Dr. Hammerschlag sees it as further evidence of this monitoring and maintenance system at the cellular level.

Richard Hammerschlag: I would love to talk to Neil Theise at some point, because he talks about the interstitium as a fluid-flow system, which makes a lot of sense in terms of the support or cushioning system of the fascia. I wonder if these are really two different ways of describing the same system. Neil Theise describes, in his papers, the interstitium—these fluid-flow channels—as bounded by collagen fibers. So what we’re talking about with the fascia is just looking at the walls, if you like, the boundary of these systems. It makes a lot of sense, and it’s not just a kind of passive support system for the tissues. Evolution doesn’t evolve a whole-body system without it also being a means of carrying information. That’s what I really believe.

Ivy Ross: Admittedly, we’ve gone deep into the science here—billions of years of evolution, the transformation of energy into matter and back again, interconnecting biofields communicating about the body’s health or dysfunction and constantly repairing it, and finally, the remarkable story of an interstitial network that might make all of this transfer of energy and information possible. It’s been quite a trip. But as we conclude this part of the episode, I want to return to the idea that we are not molecular machines. All of these explanations are scientific attempts to find direct cause-and-effect biological mechanisms for energy and energy healing. As compelling as these arguments are, they’re not the whole story.

Neil Theise: The dominant metaphor in our culture for living things is that they’re machines. But they’re not machines, because machines always do exactly the same thing over and over again, and if the environment changes, the machine can’t adapt and change itself. But if a complex system has too much randomness, there’s no self-organization—ants don’t make colonies, it’s just a bunch of ants running around. If there’s too little change, then when a food source runs out—and there was a food line between the colony and the food source, with the ants carrying food back and forth, and everyone knows what an ant food line looks like, it’s really contained and well organized—but there’s always two to four percent of the ants that aren’t following the line, and it’s those ants that are likely to bump into a food source somewhere else. That low-level randomness, the ants not following the line, is what allows the colony to adapt and change when the environment changes. That’s how life progresses. We shouldn’t expect bodies to act as machines. Part of the problem with Western medicine is we treat them like machines, because that’s our big metaphor, and we don’t understand it when they don’t behave that way—even when we see something like an energy healing experience, which is not a machine-like phenomenon.

Ivy Ross: Let’s return to Martin Picard and his presentation in 2025 in upstate New York, and to our original, persistent question.

Martin Picard: What is energy? We’ve heard this term a lot—it’s part of a lot of our lives. What is actually energy? The simplest, and I think most accurate, definition I’ve ever heard is this: energy is the potential for change. And that’s true at the biological level, the psychological level, the societal level.

Ivy Ross: Dr. Picard plays another video to demonstrate his point—you can watch the full video at phenomenahealing.com. On the screen is a petri dish with a random scattering of small black dots.

Martin Picard: I wanted to show this experiment. These are little metal beads in oil—completely inert metal beads in oil, in a petri dish. Nothing’s happening right now. You infuse energy into it—electricity, in this case—and this is what happens.

Ivy Ross: The dots begin to move and connect. Lines and patterns begin to form and grow.

Martin Picard: It self-organizes. It moves. It has this behavior. There’s even some kind of healing effect happening, where you get reorganization. This is all purely spontaneous, from injecting energy into a simple system—this system is so simple, it’s two components, metal beads and oil. Imagine if you have a system with a hundred thousand proteins, twenty thousand genes with all sorts of variants, lipids, and so on—the complexity is amazing. You just flow a bit of energy, and then it feels like something. Consciousness.

Ivy Ross: The capacity for change is the capacity to heal, but even more, it’s the capacity for life and for consciousness. Energy and change is a flame, a stick turning to smoke, a trillion cells and biofields in constant communication and cooperation. It is the dynamic flow of life. And when we see ourselves not as individual machines but as part of this ever-flowing, cosmic-scale process, we’re able to tap into the potential for healing.

Next, I’ll talk with my friend and colleague Meredith Sprengel, and for our final episode of the season, a special guest, Jonathan Cohen.

Hi, Meredith, and welcome, Jonathan, our special guest. Jonathan, it’d be great if you could share with our audience a little about yourself.

Jonathan Cohen: Absolutely. My name is Jonathan Cohen. I’m the co-creator and executive producer of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown. I’m also a writer, and I’ve been an energy worker for almost twenty-five years.

Ivy Ross: Well, then, you’re the perfect special guest to have here on our last episode of the season. This idea that we’re not molecular machines is a big statement—one that I knew ever since I was a little girl—but I’d love to get each of your reactions when you hear that statement. What comes to mind? And if we’re not molecular machines, what are we, Meredith?

Meredith Sprengel: Oh, I have to start?

Ivy Ross: Mm-hmm—ladies first.

Meredith Sprengel: I have a few reactions when I hear this. I always ground it in my own experience—I was just at a consciousness conference, and I presented a little of the energy healing research, and someone raised their hand and said, “What’s the mechanism? How can we deduce this down into a cause-and-effect model?” And I think we keep going back to this idea of being machines, even in these frontier areas of exploration like consciousness. So when I hear that, I think back to all the research we’ve done and all the conversations we’ve had, where we see it as—we call it—a symphony of influences: a number of different effects across the phenomenological, the neurological, and the cellular level, things happening that wouldn’t happen if we were machines. And I think Neil said it well—we are really resilient beings. That’s kind of what he talked about in his section of the podcast. Machines don’t necessarily adapt and conform to the environment or situation the way humans do.

What about you, Jonathan?

Jonathan Cohen: I love “the symphony of influences.” The engineering side of my brain does believe there’s an understandable pattern, a level of systems we’re influenced by. But it’s far more complex than we’re able to deduce simply from our understanding of how a machine operates. It’s not simply command-in and result. There are so many factors, and we’re not really able to understand them all, because many of them go beyond our five senses.

Ivy Ross: Yeah, and it seems like we need to accept complexity. I think as a society we love to find the fast-food-lane answer—one that’s measurable and provable and simple—when it’s a much more beautiful, complex world than that. I think we have to start to zoom out and embrace it. If we accept that the body is an energetic system, a symphony of influences that keep it healthy, what are the ramifications of accepting that idea, and changing our lens?

Meredith Sprengel: This comes back to what Richard talked about—the salutogenic versus pathogenic model of how we think about health. What makes up our health is a number of different factors—even just the container, the room, in which we’re healed, or in which we receive our care, or live our lives. This also comes back to what one of our earlier guests said about how eighty percent of health doesn’t happen in a hospital room or a doctor’s office. As we move forward in understanding the complexities that make us healthy beings, I think there’ll be less focus on that doctor’s office visit and more on the container in which we live our lives, and the inputs we allow in—and don’t allow in.

Ivy Ross: I love that. It’s a whole different perspective, one that isn’t just around the doctor’s visit—it’s around how we live our lives. I even think there’ll be new kinds of “doctors,” healers who blur the lines between physical and mental. From the book I co-authored, Your Brain on Art, there’s a lot of research around aesthetics and how we create spaces that go against everything we know about how human beings heal.

Jonathan Cohen: It doesn’t take thinking of ourselves as energetic beings to know that the lights in hospitals don’t help anyone’s circadian rhythm, or help them get the rest they need to recuperate. And once you get into “we also might be energetic beings”—not might be, we are energetic beings—then we have to think about: does the person believe they can heal? What are they carrying forward, what are they saddled with, that may not show up on a CT scan, that may be impacting their ability to go through the next process in life? And what are they living for—what is the purpose and meaning, and how does that influence us in terms of our biological energy, and what we’re producing physically? There are many doctors who say they can give you all the treatment in the world, and yet you won’t actually get better without something shifting in your life. So I think we’re at the beginning stages of looking at this—from the physical spaces, which absolutely need to change to support people, to the psychological, and then the energetic beyond that.

Ivy Ross: Absolutely. And one of the through-lines I think runs through all of these episodes is the relational aspect of healing—whether it’s the relationship you have with yourself, taking accountability and responsibility, or the relationship with the people on your healing team. I’ve always thought relationship is all there is in life—the relationship we have with each other, within ourselves, and with the natural world. What do you think about the relational aspect of healing, and how important is that, Meredith?

Meredith Sprengel: We have a lot of examples of how important this is. We’ve talked a lot about therapeutic alliance, and how important that is to facilitate healing, even within doctors’ offices, with acupuncturists, with a healer. We have millennia of healing rituals based on interpersonal engagement, an interpersonal ritual that facilitates a healing response. There’s something about the ability to align with someone, to be witnessed, that allows us to surrender—and by surrender, I mean give ourselves over to something larger than ourselves that can help the healing process. You can find that in churches, with healers, but also with a good friend, a good doctor. I think a lot of the time, whether we’re sick or just need guidance or help, the ability for someone to witness us, and allow us to surrender to the process we need to heal, is really key in life. Therapeutic alliance is one of those key elements—not just for energy healing, but even in everyday life, to feel seen and heard. And that can apparently affect our mitochondria, like Martin Picard talked about in the episode—he says even our social relationships show up in the way our mitochondria look. He has a paper, I believe, where they looked at people who were lonely when they died, and showed that their mitochondria were shaped differently. So there’s something very interesting about how our social relationships show up in our bodies.

Jonathan Cohen: Beautifully articulated by Meredith. I think the idea of belief—what do we believe as we go into any healing process or practice, and how does that therapeutic alliance help us change that? So many people struggling with something think that’s all there is, that’s all they’re capable of, and sometimes it takes something shifting very profoundly in them to imagine a life where they’re not struggling with whatever they’re dealing with. I do think healing, and that change, comes from someone who has faith in the process, who believes in them, and who they can feel that from. Knowing that we don’t live only within the confines of our body—that we can feel other people we know, and sense their intention, and are impacted by how they think about us—having a practitioner, whether a doctor or someone in what’s considered an alternative field, really hold that space and intention for us has a physiological impact.

Ivy Ross: I just spoke to a woman with fourth-stage cancer who said that as the doctors were about to tell her her prognosis, she stopped them and said, “Stop. Do not tell me that. I want to live, and I am going to make sure I live—I’m going to take this on as a project. I’m going to change.” She went into a whole dissertation to the doctors, preventing them from giving her information that she knew would have affected the cells in her body.

Jonathan Cohen: We spoke to Dr. Ellen Langer from Harvard on the podcast, and she describes that a prognosis is simply a mathematical probability based on everyone else—it’s not able to consider all the multiple variables of the individual. While you should never outright ignore that you may have a specific condition that needs treatment, limiting yourself to the statistical average doesn’t take into account how unique our situation is, and what’s possible for us.

Ivy Ross: We really have to understand how uniquely individual each one of us is. I think society has reduced us to a kind of common-denominator norm, and I think we’re about to understand that this has done some damage on multiple levels, including in how we think about neurodiversity, what’s considered “normal.” We just need to understand and personalize what unique beings we are, embody that, and start by getting to know ourselves really well. And everyone we come into relationship with needs to respect and honor that, too.

Meredith Sprengel: In arthritis, and a lot of different diseases, certain medications work for certain people, and they don’t really know why. They’ve done a few research studies using Chinese personalized diagnosis, and some metabolomics—a biological way to look at your biological system—to see if there are certain personality types the medication worked better for. And they’ve demonstrated that, with arthritis and with things like the prognosis of diabetes, that the Chinese-medicine personality types could be more predictive. So it’s interesting to think there might be systems that have been around forever, that have taken into account more of our individual characteristics when thinking about health.

Jonathan Cohen: I think we’re just at the very beginning of trying to understand how we can individualize care, and really understand this symphony of influences to our advantage. It can be overwhelming to think there are so many influences we’re never going to be able to isolate them all. But as we start to understand how to work with some of these—the biofield, energy medicine, and personality types, and customize—I think the opportunity for us to get substantially better care improves.

Ivy Ross: Speaking of the experience, I love the mystery Martin Picard describes, in not knowing whether it’s the mitochondria affecting experience, or the other way around. What does that bring up for you, Jonathan?

Jonathan Cohen: Does it have to be one or the other? Can’t it just be this bidirectional influence? We have a certain amount of raw energy that’s influenced by our biology, our general makeup, influenced by our sleep, our environment, our nutrition—and then it’s bidirectional with how we feel, what we think. It’s this information transiting back and forth, that’s either going to optimize, or increase, or decrease. I think what we try to do, in a mechanistic approach, is say, “Which one is it?” versus understanding that it’s relational.

Ivy Ross: Back to that word, relation. Absolutely agree—it’s a constant dance, back and forth, in exchange.

Jonathan Cohen: I have a silly example. What comes to mind is a basketball player who’s hurt themselves on defense and is limping a little, and as soon as they get the ball on offense, all of a sudden they’re sprinting down the court. Is it adrenaline? Sure. But it’s also the excitement of the moment, the anticipation they’re having. When we look at our energy level, our ability to heal—how much of our mindset, and beyond mindset, how much of the patterns in our life that we’ve taken on, that we’re not even remembering we’ve taken on—and these, when we think about an energetic field living around us, we embody them. We’re connected to them in a way that we don’t even realize is impacting us, both physically and mentally, in our ability to thrive, to be excited by things, or to interpret them in a way that helps us feel energized.

Ivy Ross: I love a quote that came up during this series—this idea of “I don’t end at my skin,” which plays into what we’re talking about here, in terms of how these interactions are relational. What’s your gut reaction, Meredith, when I say “I don’t end at my skin”?

Meredith Sprengel: This is what I keep coming back to—when Neil, in the episode, was talking about body, your cells; body, your cells; individual, collective; individual, collective. I think we are those ants in a colony, and there’s something collectively happening. If we understand more about how we’re all connected, we can understand more about how we create healthier societies, and a different approach to how we live in this collective space.

Jonathan Cohen: I couldn’t agree more that we don’t end at our skin. The question is, how far out do we go, and how far should we consider that when looking at any one condition? For me, I never really spoke about my experiences as an energy worker, because it can become so esoteric that you forget what’s actually happening in the moment. I think we’re in this collection of mirrored systems—what Neil found about the interstitium, and how that works, is likely similar to how we operate outside our skin, meaning we’re likely part of this network of moving information, and how it all works is still being determined, if that makes sense.

Ivy Ross: Absolutely. One thing I want to say about not ending at our skin—I was once at an art exhibit where someone had shown that our heart field, the electromagnetic field, extends about six feet. They had circles drawn, and when you think about the people you surround yourself with within six feet, our heart fields are connecting. That was an “aha” moment for me—I started thinking about how I feel when certain people are in my field, versus others. If you start paying attention to this idea that we don’t end at our skin, it gets really fun.

Jonathan Cohen: One step beyond that—if you go into a quiet space, are slightly meditative, and pull one of those people into your space from a distance—you think of that person, conjure them in your mind, bring them as close to you as you can—you’ll have that same experience of being near them. Is that simply recreated in your mind, or are you bringing them close in some other way? How do we explain that?

Ivy Ross: Beautiful. I just want to play you one last thing from Neil Theise and get your reactions.

Neil Theise: When an energy healer enters a room, and there’s someone awaiting them, hoping for treatment, their electromagnetic field extends far beyond the limits of their skin. Their field enters the room way before they get there, and encounters the patient way before the patient sees them, or they see the patient. As they come in, closer and closer, it is not two separate fields—it’s a single, merged field. We’re not talking about one impacting the other; we’re talking about how they assemble into a single field, how that functions, and how both fields are changed as they move apart, at the end of a treatment. That’s a very different way of looking at things than Western medicine, where we’re separate, and I come in and impact you in a certain way.

Jonathan Cohen: It’s beautiful.

Meredith Sprengel: That was, to me, one of the most profound moments in all of our interviews, because it really honed in for me why people continue to go to healers, and are so fascinated by this ephemeral moment where this true, deep healing occurs. It’s not just a one-directional thing—it’s an interlinked process, where both people are reconnecting to that blueprint, and back to a place of health and wellness.

Jonathan Cohen: It also makes me think that shifts start to happen as soon as you set the intention, or make the commitment, to do something—it’s not simply in the room itself, it’s the process leading up to it. Often, in very substantial transformation, there’s a lead-up process—you can have a ritual of setting an intention before bed, that you want to reintegrate all the parts of yourself that may have been lost along the way, or setting an intention for what it might even be like to overcome whatever challenge you’re going through. That process starts to happen far before you ever step into the room.

Meredith Sprengel: This makes me think of Ron’s story—I don’t know if you remember, from an earlier episode this season, Ron, at one point, has this deep PTSD, and he asks God, “Take me.” And Jesus comes and says, “It’s not your time.” The next day, someone says, “I’m going to connect you with this healer.” He’d already started in that story—I’m getting goosebumps, I’m such a nerd—because I think that’s the representation of what you’re talking about, Jonathan. He said, “I want God to take me,” and he had this image, be it from himself or outside himself—it doesn’t really matter—that set the intention to heal. Then he gets Maggie’s number, and by the time he gets to Maggie, he’s ready for that change.

Ivy Ross: And that’s how synchronicity works. It’s magic, I mean, but it was only because he said “I’m ready” that she appeared.

Across the six episodes—and Meredith, you’ve been with me through all of them—we’ve talked about the study at MD Anderson on chi and cancer, Reiki and chronic pain, Qigong and PTSD with veterans, the healer-patient bond, and now a bit about the biology of energy. What pattern have you seen emerge across all of this that you’d love to share?

Meredith Sprengel: There are a number of things. Not to be depressing, but we know so much, and know so little. We’ve learned a lot about how biofield therapy was impacting cells. We’ve learned that Reiki had a trajectory of change that really impacted people’s knee osteoarthritis. We’ve learned all this interesting information about how chi could be carried through the interstitium, and how healing-touch practitioners could fundamentally change PTSD outcomes. That’s a lot of information, but I think what it shows me is we’re at a tipping point, where we’re reimagining not only what science can look like, but the really true interpersonal connection, and how much it matters for fostering health and wellness.

Ivy Ross: I actually think this is a super exciting time. The fact that we have all this input, and don’t have all the answers, means it’s a time to use both the science and our imagination, to develop some new hypotheses to move forward with.

Jonathan Cohen: I think a lot of people will be surprised by just how much is being influenced by perception, and what it takes to shift perception—which, for many people, is quite different from what we’ve been taught. We’ve been taught to silence the mind, but actually, having small moments of “aha” and observation can likely be the most powerful influence. So when I think about energy, I think about what is the animating force within each of us. Some people think of it as connected to our soul, but what really brings us enjoyment, what brings us excitement, what captures our interest—and where this leads, in a very unexpected way, is to the nature of the unique individual, whether that be their soul, their path, or their purpose.

We spoke to Rizwan Burke, who said that every time he moved off his life’s path, he ended up in the hospital. He kept getting this message that he was supposed to write. He’s a serial entrepreneur and video game designer, and every time he invested his full-time focus into companies instead, he had these health problems, and he believed he was being guided to do the next phase of his life. Does that apply to everyone, in every circumstance? We each have limits in the physical world, and we have jobs, and things we have to take care of. But is it possible that each one of us has a unique bioprint, a unique signature—things we’re meant to do in this world, and that doing them will help us feel more animated and alive, and therefore our biology will follow?

Ivy Ross: I absolutely believe we’re here to live only the life we’re supposed to live, and part of life’s journey is figuring out what that is. The universe is our friend, kind of, when we get off the path—first it pokes us, and if we don’t move in a different direction, it shouts at us, and eventually, I think, it can cause a health crisis, for us to reexamine whether we’re on our life’s path. When I think of the word “energy,” I think of possibility, or change—I think that’s the force I see it as: a force for possibility, or a force for us to change.

Meredith, since this is our final episode, and we’re talking about energy—what does energy come to mean for you?

Meredith Sprengel: A bit like you, I think the energy that heals is reconnecting you to some sort of potential. What Jonathan was saying about purpose was really resonating with me—I’ll go a roundabout way, but we’ll get back to an answer. When energy healers say they’re not healing you, but connecting you to the channel that heals, they’re reconnecting you to your blueprint, and to your purpose. When I was hearing Jonathan tell that story, I thought: maybe that is the key to why we’re so intrigued by, why there’s this enhanced interest in, energy healing—because it’s that reconnection to purpose. So what is the energy? Maybe that energy is the potential, the connection, the possibility—and where you go with that energy is really how it lands with you, and how it moves you toward your purpose. What that specific field or intention looks like, I can’t categorize. But we know what it feels like when we feel energy, and we know what it feels like when we’ve been moved by it. I think usually what that results in is a reconnection with self, with the world, and with purpose.

Ivy Ross: And that’s the most important part—how we feel it. We may never know what it is, but Jonathan, what is the word “energy” to you, in this context?

Jonathan Cohen: I’d agree with what’s been said, and, in the simplest form for me, it’s the animating force of life, of the universe—what makes us come alive, feel alive, feel energized—sorry to use the word to define the word, I know that’s a no-no. But I don’t think it’s one thing.

Ivy Ross: And there we come back to the complexity—it is never actually one thing. It’s a symphony of things.

Meredith Sprengel: It’s interesting hearing you talk, Jonathan, because an animating force that historically was a god, or a spirit—it’s interesting to see how things have changed over millennia, and how, as we reintegrate agency back into the way we see the world, our perspective, it becomes an animating force, as opposed to some sort of god that is fueling you.

Jonathan Cohen: If we bring this back to medicine for a minute—imagine a medical system that could help you identify if you’ve veered off your life’s path in some way, or if you’ve ever known what your life’s path is. There’s a screening questionnaire, I forget if it’s the one for depression or the one for anxiety, that’s like the nine-question one. Imagine a form that helps you understand where you are in achieving your life’s goals, whatever those may be.

Ivy Ross: I love that as the intake form in a doctor’s office—or whatever we’ll call that office in the future—instead of asking your medical history, who had cancer in your family, and so on, but asking where you are on your life’s journey.

Meredith Sprengel: I think this gets back to something we just intuitively know—that there’s some larger field we’re connected to, or connecting to. That’s why so many people are drawn to this area of research, and to new ways of knowing, because the science isn’t meeting people where they’re at, or how they understand this interconnectedness.

Ivy Ross: Which is why I think it’s important that we need more scientists who look at things from different perspectives—researchers who can step outside and see things differently. I think that’s how we’ll get to some of these breakthroughs: by having more diverse types of researchers and scientists willing to ask different questions.

Meredith Sprengel: And willing to question a system. I think science has become too much of a culture, when science was only supposed to be a method. We can’t separate our whole selves from our science, and that’s something I live by. So although I have a method to use, I also bring my whole self, my whole experience, to how I think about doing research, and what research needs to be done.

Ivy Ross: Absolutely. And I think if everyone brought their whole self to everything we do, we’d start to see a lot of overlaps, and a lot of problems get solved. So thanks for being you.

Meredith Sprengel: And thanks for being you, Ivy.

Ivy Ross: And thank you, Jonathan, for being with us—it was terrific.

Jonathan Cohen: Really a pleasure.

Ivy Ross: Throughout this season of Phenomena, we’ve heard stories of suffering and salvation. We’ve followed the science as it explores the mysteries of energy and life, from our body’s cells to the fabric of the universe. I came into this project with a belief that there are forces at work in our bodies and beyond that we don’t yet fully understand, and sometimes can’t even detect. But what I’ve learned is that these forces might not be so unknown after all—they might simply have been set aside, maybe in our passion to explain the world and find answers. We forgot what generations before us had discovered, and what our bodies already know: that there is energy inside us, and between us, energy with the power to heal.

To continue this journey, join us at phenomenahealing.com, where you’ll find even more stories, resources, and details on the docuseries. There’s so much more to explore here, and please stay curious. I’m Ivy Ross, and this has been Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing.