What is the human “biofield”?
Have you ever noticed an ultra-faint glow (like a translucent light) or energy field that surrounds a person’s head or body? If so, you may have unwittingly seen that person’s biofield. If you haven’t ever seen this type of misty-like mirage, don’t worry -- you’re in good company: most people are unable to see the body’s superluminous bioenergy field.
Far from the reaches of the supernatural, that this bioenergy field actually exists is now an established scientific fact.1 Currently, many medical discoveries are being revealed about this magnificent outer energy matrix that we all possess. Our biofield acts like a sophisticated super-computer that governs and commands our body’s complex physiological systems.
You might define the body’s biofield as a large field of light bioenergy that extends out from the exterior wall of the body on all sides by about 8 feet (on average). In a very healthy person, their biofield may extend out much further (up to 20 feet). For a sick or weakened person, their biofield may be quite flat against the body (and may extend out only a few inches or not at all).
Can you feel the biofield?
Although most people cannot see the human biofield, many individuals are able to feel the biofield with their hands. They describe it as holding their hands against the elusive outer edge of a large bubble that has enough subtle substance to push back (very faintly) against their hands.
The transition to the new biomedicine
Conventional medicine as used today is gradually transcending to a more expanded, integrative medical model that emphasizes not just illness care, but true healthcare that treats the whole person, not just their disease symptoms. This allows a patient to be offered a greater choice of multiple therapeutic choices, including both the old style and the new in medical therapy.
This new biomedical model questions the old system – the former medical paradigm that has been founded on reductionism where the doctor focuses mainly on genes, disease symptoms and drugs based on the in-grained belief that the body’s complex systems must be broken down into their individual components to be treated.
Energy medicine
In contrast, an integrative model of health-care and biomedicine values the complexity of the human biology and its biofield with intricate inner workings, so that isolated body parts can never really be separated from the whole body to try to understand them.
An integrated model views healthcare from several perspectives simultaneously -- beyond the reductionist approach. It has been called energy medicine.2 The foundation of this new biomedicine, an expanded integrative medical model, has been formed from breakthroughs in biology, biophysics, psychology, and mind-body research such as psychoneuroimmunology and epigenomics.
Energy medicine realizes that living systems generate biofields and also respond to external energy fields. These properties are seen as functional aspects of the body’s ability to internally self-regulate. It is interesting to note that many spiritual traditions have described the pathways of energy that surround the physical body and that also exist within it.
Laying on of hands
Energy medicine views the body’s energy pathways as a key to improve health. To improve and synchronize the energy pathways, practitioners of many complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies have used different versions of “laying-on-of-hands” on the patient to enhance these natural bioenergy pathways.
To determine pathology, western medicine routinely examines the patient’s electrical fields of the heart via ECG (electrocardiogram) and the brain via EEG (electroencephalogram). In addition to these established medical tests, advanced cell biology, biophysics and biofield research provide further evidence that body-generated electromagnetic and other types of internal quantum fields play active roles in the body’s repair and internal homeodynamic processes.3,4,5
The biofield: a common language
The term, “biofield” (i.e. the quantum energy field/matrix of the body, now scientifically proven), fills the gap for a term to explain both traditional and advanced models of energy medicine.
A term such as “biofield” provides a common language for use in both clinical practice and scientific research that focuses on investigating the form and properties of the energy fields of the body. The term “biofield” can include the levels of scale being investigated, from minute biophotons being emitted from cells to active cellular membrane transport to the entire organism functioning as a whole.
To enhance our understanding of the inherent beauty and majesty of the body’s quantum biomatrix, those who work with the “biofield,” whether the person is a neurologist, a quantum physicist, a Tibetan Buddhist, a chiropractor, or a cell biologist – all are able to give us profound insights into the deeper, unseen dimensions of the body.
References
- Beverly Rubik et al., Biofield Science and Healing: History, Terminology, and Concepts, Glob Adv Health Med. 2015 Nov; 4(Suppl): 8–14.
- Cassidy CM. What does it mean to practice an energy medicine? J Altern Complement Med. 2004;10(1):79–81.
- Funk RH, Monsees T, Ozkucur N. Electromagnetic effects—from cell biology to medicine. Prog Histochem Cytochem. 2009;43(4):177–264.
- Movaffaghi Z, Farsi M. Biofield therapies: biophysical basis and biological regulations? Complement Ther Clin Pr. 2009;15(1):35–7.
- Bischof M, Del Giudice E. Communication and the emergence of collective behavior in living organisms: a quantum approach. Mol Biol Int. 2013;2013:987549.
