As I was recording magnetic field (MF) activity during Healing Touch sessions, healers would tell me that they had felt or noticed an energetic release or releases by the client during the healing session. Furthermore, the healers ‘knew’ what side of the client (left or right) and approximately when during the session the release had occurred. In the MF recordings, I observed a MF wave corresponding to where and when the healer had described an energetic release. In other words, the ‘felt’ energetic releases corresponded to MF waves in my recordings. Here is a sample MF wave:
What I have not mentioned is that the healers were also aware of a change in breathing by the client: a double inhale followed by a long exhale – this breath pattern was also identified by healers as an energetic release.
Recently, I came across a YouTube video by Dr. Jin W. Sung encouraging his viewers to do a physiological sigh, a double inhale followed by a long exhale, to relieve stress. There it was! The breath pattern described by the healers.
Sung cites the work of Dr. Andrew Huberman whose lab has studied the physiological sigh as a means of stress release. Huberman has made many YouTube Videos on this subject – trying to help people cope with stress in the moment by changing their breathing for a short period of time (e.g., 5 minutes). In the breathwork scientific literature, it is sometimes described as the cyclic sigh, where it is consciously repeated (cyclic) multiple times for relaxation. According to Huberman and other scientists, the physiological sigh works by increasing oxygen and offloading excess carbon dioxide (double inhale) and slowing the heart and stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system (long exhale), leading to less stress and more calm.
The physiological sigh was first observed in the 1930s, and studied in depth by Dr. Jack Feldman and colleagues who recently localized this reflex to a small 200-neuron complex in the brainstem (Li et al., 2016).
The physiological sigh occurs during energy healing often! It seems to involve the biofield too, not just the physiology. The sigh is helpful when there is a build-up of charge and tension (i.e., stress), leading to a discharge and relaxation. In future experiments we need to test if the physiological sigh is associated with an energetic release in energy healing. We can easily record respiration and magnetic field activity at the same time – a simple experiment – connecting what we know about respiration with the possible mechanisms underlying energy healing.
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