Physics in Reiki Energy Work
Heart & Nervous System Coherence
Have you ever tried to get an infant or young child to sleep when you were stressed or in a hurry? What happened? You had to soothe yourself and become calm before they would calm down and be soothed to sleep, right? Why is this? The child feels your anxious or hurried energy and cannot become calm until you have become calm. Essentially, you embodied the feeling and energy you wanted them to feel. The same is true for any living being you are interacting with. Here is a study from The HeartMath® Institute depicting the heart rates of a boy and his dog (Josh and Mabel). They were both connected to heart rate monitors before being placed in a room together. The graph depicts the slightly elevated heart rates of both participants as they explore the unfamiliar environment of a laboratory. When Josh enters the room with Mabel, he consciously uses his breath to regulate and calm his heart rate. As a result, Mabel’s heart rate also calms down. The same is true in my example of putting a child to sleep. When you become calm, the child becomes calm.
*HeartMath is a registered trademark of Quantum Intech, Inc.
Used with permissions given to the author, a HeartMath® Certified Mentor
The heart is an electrical organ, producing energy. So it is with the nervous system. When we self-soothe we calm the rate of our heart beats which calms our nervous system. We call this coherence between our organs and systems. Bringing the heart and nervous system into coherence changes the nervous system’s output of hormones (from stress and excitement hormones like cortisol or adrenaline to system-regulating “feel good" hormones like DHEA and Oxytocin). Whether they realize it or not, others sense the energy we are sending out from our own internal organs and systems. When we steady our heart rate and become calm, we change the energy we are sending out and influence the way others feel around us and the way they interact with us.
Simply put, this is essentially what a Reiki Practitioner is doing in a session with you. They are channeling through and sending you the energy you wish to feel. They are, in a sense, “becoming” the energy you wish to feel. If you are carrying stress or anxiety, fear or worry, shame, guilt or grief…a good Reiki Practitioner can sense the stressors and bring themselves into a relaxed state which transfers to you. This is coherence between two people. The effects last for days or weeks beyond your session and give you a “leg up” towards learning to self-regulate your own stress levels. This type of coherence can also be observed when we see synchronization or spontaneous order. Spontaneous order occurs in many of life’s apparent phenomena but there’s nothing preternatural about it. It is the synchronization of energy.
Synchronization and Energy
As noted above, coherence between two beings can also be called synchronization. The regular beating of your heart and your ability to align it with your own nervous system and also with others is but one example. Examples seen across larger populations can be called spontaneous order. We see spontaneous order occur in many of life’s apparent phenomena.
A few other examples are:
The simultaneous flashes of fireflies becoming aligned with one-another
The tendency of applauding crowds to fall into a steady rhythm of hand-claps together
The synchronization of pendulum clocks or metronomes
One of the most spectacular visual displays of this was seen on June 10, 2000 with the grand opening of the Millennium Bridge in London.
As thousands of people walked across the bridge it became unstable, shifting back and forth, and the enormous crowd unknowingly began to synchronize their footsteps to compensate for the wobbling. They automatically fell into lock step with one another. This is coherence amongst a crowd of thousands of strangers.
Here is footage of the crowd coherence seen on that day.
The Coupling of Fireflies Flashing and Crowds Applauding
Just as each human’s heartbeat has its own rate at which it tends to beat and each human’s walk has its own pace, each Firefly has its own particular frequency at which it likes to flash. Just as each human can regulate their heart rate and bring others into coherence with them, or the crowd crossing the Millenium Bridge can regulate their footfalls to align into lock-step, masses of certain species of Fireflies tend to synchronize their flashes.
Even though each one has its own particular frequency at which it likes to flash, they couple to each other strongly enough so that swarms of them can flash together in the same split second. Every Firefly has an effect on every other one. If it sees a flash close by it nudges its internal clock forward a little bit, so it'll flash sooner than it would have otherwise.
Over time you can see waves traveling through all the fireflies until they're all flashing at once.
The coherence created within communities of Fireflies mirrors that seen in auditoriums full of people applauding. Each person has their own particular frequency at which they clap their hands but with sustained applause they couple to each other and eventually synchronize their clapping until they’re all clapping in time with one another. Here is an example of an applauding crowd falling into a steady rhythm of hand-claps together. This is an audience in Budapest applauding after a performance. But what happens next is completely spontaneous. They're not being instructed by anyone. See if you can spot the phase transition. This phenomenon of synchronization is universal and occurs at every scale of nature from subatomic to cosmic. It uses every communication channel that nature has ever devised from gravitational interactions to electrical interactions to chemical or mechanical. In all these occurrences we can observe anywhere from two to hundreds of thousands of beings or things influencing each other and nature using that to get things in sync.
The Synchronization of Pendulum Clocks or Metronomes
The individually paced timing of a pendulum clock’s ticking and tocking has been observed to synchronize with the individually paced timing of a separate pendulum clock since as far back as 1656. When physicist Christian Huygens invented these clocks to help sailors figure out where they were on the globe he noted that latitude can be judged by measuring the position of the sun or stars. But for longitude you also need to know the time at some fixed location, say your home port. Since clocks of that era were routinely off by as much as 15 minutes a day they were effectively useless for accurate navigation, however Huygens’ pendulum clocks were accurate to around 10 seconds per day. Huygens' plan was to hang his clocks from a heavy wooden mast on the ship, so they wouldn't wobble too broadly with the waves of the sea. His plan called for two clocks in case one stopped or was damaged.
While testing his theory with two pendulum clocks hung from a wooden mast on dry land he discovered that after half an hour or so they would spontaneously synchronize. As one clock’s pendulum swung one way, the second would swing the other way. As one would tick, the other would tock. So he tried disturbing the clocks. He set them ticking out of sync. But again, within
A short time they were back to the same lockstep. Huygens thought this sympathy of clocks must have been caused by air currents between the pendulums, so he placed a large board in between them, but their clocks continued to sync up.
When he separated the clocks, the synchrony would disappear, their times drifting apart.
But when he brought them back together, the synchrony returned. Huygens realized the two clocks were synchronizing because they were hung from the same wood beam. Mechanical vibrations, or energy, transferred from one clock to the other, making the two pendulums couple to each other. The timed pendulum swings of clocks couple to each other strongly enough so that multiple clocks can tick and tock together. Even though each pendulum has its own particular frequency at which it can be set to keep time, it begins to synchronize with other pendulums around it. What Huygens had stumbled upon became the first recorded observation of this kind of spontaneous synchronization in inanimate objects.
Another qualitative example of synchronization can be seen in more recent experiments placing multiple metronomes on an unstable platform.
Here’s a fun demonstration from The UCLA Department of Physics.
These metronomes don't have the same frequency, and yet they still beat in time. To understand how this works, it's easiest to first consider a couple metronomes oscillating in sync with each other. When the large masses accelerate to the left, they push the platform to the right. And when they accelerate to the right, they push the platform to the left. So the center of mass of the system always stays roughly in the same spot. Now, if you start another metronome completely out of sync with the first two, the motion of the platform gives it a kick every half swing, speeding it up until it's in time with the first two.
This works, regardless of the number of metronomes you have. The platform just goes whichever way the majority of metronomes are pushing it. The platform is transferring energy from one object to another, bringing the objects into coherence with one another. Just like you transfer energy from your heart to your nervous system, bringing them into coherence with one another. Just as you can transfer energy from yourself to your child, bringing them into coherence with you. Just like crowds walking across a bridge can transfer energy from one to another, to another, to another…creating mass coherence and spontaneous synchronization.
The Fireflies, the Pendulum Clocks, even the Tides and the Phases of the Moon are but mere examples of the unseen order which aligns us all through the transfer of energy. Can you see how all the examples we’ve reviewed illustrate the same apparent phenomena? Although truly jaw dropping to observe, there is nothing phenomenal about it. There are basic laws of physics at work here.
Professor Steven Strogatz explained it better than I can in his 2004 TED Talk. In an attempt to capture Strogatz’s explanation here, we can represent the position of a metronome pendulum or any other oscillator as a point on a circle. This shows its phase (that is, what part of the cycle it's in). So you could call the rightmost point of the pendulum zero degrees. And then the leftmost point is 180 degrees. And as the pendulum oscillates back and forth, the point goes around the circle, the higher the frequency of the oscillator, the faster that point goes around. So the rightmost point represents two metronomes with different frequencies while the leftmost point represents two metronomes with the same frequency, but completely out of phase. When the metronomes are synchronized in phase, their dots go around the circle together, and we can use this depiction to illustrate a mathematical model for the synchronizing behavior we've been looking at. It's called the Kuramoto model. It says the rate each dot goes around the circle equals its natural frequency, plus some amount related to how far it is from all the other dots. And the size of this term is determined by the coupling strength.
How Can Energy Help Us?
Knowing all this about the synchronization of energies, what in the world do we do with the information? Well, that’s up to each of us! Perhaps we get curious and begin to observe spontaneous order in the environment around us. Or open our minds a bit to the importance of energy, vibration and frequency when it comes to our understanding of the universe. Perhaps we seek out a skilled Reiki Practitioner and try it for ourselves. Or learn about the techniques from The HeartMath Institute and see how we can use coherence to retrain our nervous systems, our brainwaves, our thoughts and our ability to communicate coherently with others.
Personally, my brain is tired after writing all of this. So I’ll take a moment and bring my mind into coherence with my heart and soothe my nervous system from the stimulation of several cups of blog-writing-inspired coffee.
To do this, first, I will create a clear intention in my mind to calm the energy coursing through me.
I will place my hands lightly over the areas in my body where I feel most tired or anxious.
Next, I’ll focus on the area of my heart.
I’ll imagine my breath is flowing in and out of my heart.
I’ll breathe a little slower and deeper than usual, finding an easy rhythm that is comfortable.
I’ll keep this up for about two minutes until I feel a sense of calm and ease come over me.
Be right back!
Thanks for holding - wow that feels good! How interesting that while I was doing my Self-Reiki and Heart Focused Breathing® my pets came into the room from elsewhere in the house. They snuggled next to me on the couch. Perhaps they felt my peaceful energy?
Coherence Between Humans and Pets
References:
Bennett, M., Schatz, M. F., Rockwood, H., & Wiesenfeld, K. (2002). Huygens's clocks. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 458(2019), 563-579. — https://ve42.co/Bennett2002
Broughton Suspension Bridge and the Resonance Disaster — https://ve42.co/Broughton
Goldsztein, G. H., Nadeau, A. N., & Strogatz, S. H. (2021). Synchronization of clocks and metronomes: A perturbation analysis based on multiple timescales. Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, 31(2), 023109. — https://ve42.co/Goldsztein
Strogatz, S. H. (2012). Sync: How order emerges from chaos in the universe, nature, and daily life. Hachette UK. — https://ve42.co/Sync and his 2004 TED talk.
Strogatz, S. H. (2000). From Kuramoto to Crawford: exploring the onset of synchronization in populations of coupled oscillators. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 143(1-4), 1-20. — https://ve42.co/Strogatz2000
Strogatz, S. H., Abrams, D. M., McRobie, A., Eckhardt, B., & Ott, E. (2005). Crowd synchrony on the Millennium Bridge. Nature, 438(7064), 43-44. — https://ve42.co/Strogatz2005
Winfree, A. T. (2001). The geometry of biological time (Vol. 12). Springer Science & Business Media. — https://ve42.co/Winfree2001
YouTube links embedded within the text are referenced on the correlating YouTube videos
