What Is Energy Work?

“I need my chakras aligned.”

“Do you do Reiki?”

“My qi is stuck.”

“Something just doesn’t feel right in my body, but I can’t pinpoint what it is.”

These are all things that have been asked or said to us over the years as an acupuncturist and a massage therapist. And since we both spend our lives sitting with, listening to, and thoughtfully touching people, we know it’s hard sometimes to put sensations and emotions into words. We believe this is why some people are drawn to using this kind of energy language; it offers a framework for the things we know are there, but don’t have any other way of making sense of.

When Kie was in massage school, he was required to take a class on “Energy Work”. They learned about chakras, meridians, Reiki, and other ways of energetically looking at the body. He was baffled, and very skeptical of “all that woo woo stuff”, to the point that he was becoming increasingly frustrated with this course.

When discussing his feelings with the teacher he found out that most of his classmates needed that framework, the language and the charts and the tradition, and they appreciated having concrete knowledge of energy centers and movement in the body. He also learned that he had been doing energy work all along, without even knowing it! For him, energy work isn’t chakras and meridians, it’s experiential.

The way these systems were developed thousands of years ago was by people noticing subtle sensations in their bodies, talking to other people about them, and experimenting on each other to see what worked and made sense, and what didn’t. That is to say, it was experiential. And while there are definitely patterns to be found, and things that we all sense, we’ve also found that each individual’s experience is wildly different.

For Kie, his mindfulness, presence, and intense connections with his clients (and with everyone he meets) are the ways he experiences energy work. His clients get off the table in an entirely different headspace than they were in when they got to the office. Something has shifted, their energy has aligned, their qi has moved, and everything feels right in their bodies.