Is Emotional Energy Healing a New Age Trend or Ancient Wisdom?

When I began recommending energy healing to some people about a decade ago, I was dismissed because they said it was unheard of and sounded spiritual. I was assumed to be one of those who had ‘fallen’ for New Age ‘nonsense.’

What they didn’t know is that I’ve read and studied history. While I agree that there are some false or dark ‘energy healing’ practices, I don’t think it’s wise to assume without investigating.

So, is energy healing a modern New Age trend, or has it been around since time immemorial? I’d like to narrow this down to my own work that I’ve been doing: emotional energy clearing, and the answer is simple: it’s ancient wisdom. The connection between emotions and physical health has been recognized throughout history.

While we can only access what’s survived from the past, here’s what we know so far:

Throughout history, people have been trying to figure out why emotions and physical health seem to be so connected. You feel sad, you might catch a cold. You get stressed out, and suddenly your skin breaks out or your back starts aching. This isn’t just some weird coincidence — emotions and your body are linked, and I’m here to tell you why.

It all started way back in the day with the ancient Greeks. Hippocrates, you know, the “father of modern medicine,” believed that your health depended on keeping the right balance in your body. He thought that if your “humors” (aka bodily fluids) were out of whack, you’d get sick both physically and mentally. So, even though he didn’t exactly say, “Hey, emotions cause diseases,” he was on to something about balance in the body affecting your overall health.

Then, in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), they were more direct about this connection. For thousands of years, the Chinese believed that emotions were tied to the body’s organs. Like, if you’re angry all the time, it messes with your liver. If you’re super worried, it starts messing with your spleen. They understood that emotions and energy — what they call Qi — are deeply intertwined. And guess what? They weren’t wrong.

But we can’t forget about Galen, a second-century Greco-Roman physician who really took the mind-body connection to the next level. This guy was ahead of his time when it came to understanding that the mind and body aren’t separate — they’re intimately connected. And we can actually trace a lot of today’s thinking about how emotions impact physical health back to him.

Galen built on the work of Hippocrates, but he pushed things further. While Hippocrates focused on balancing bodily fluids (humors), Galen believed that emotions were directly tied to physical ailments. He said that different emotional states could lead to specific physical problems. If you were angry or anxious all the time, it wasn’t just “in your head” — it was actually affecting your body.

He wasn’t just talking theory. Galen observed how people’s emotions affected their health firsthand. He was a physician for Roman gladiators — people constantly dealing with extreme stress and fear — and he noticed that their physical wounds healed differently depending on their emotional states. If they were calm and emotionally balanced, they healed faster. But if they were angry or full of anxiety, their recovery took longer. Pretty wild, right?

Galen linked certain emotions with particular diseases or physical issues, much like Traditional Chinese Medicine. For example, he believed that melancholic emotions could lead to digestive issues. He didn’t have all the modern science to back it up, but he could see the patterns — emotions were energy that had a real, physical impact on the body.

Fast forward to the Renaissance, and you’ve got folks like Paracelsus saying that what’s going on inside your mind matters when it comes to your health. This is when people started to seriously consider the mind-body connection. But it wasn’t until much later that scientists began to dig deeper into the real, tangible link between emotions and disease.

In the 20th century, it was Franz Alexander who really brought this idea forward, coining the term “psychosomatic” to describe how mental and emotional stress can actually make you physically sick. And then there’s Hans Selye, who started talking about how stress affects the body, showing that chronic stress can lead to disease. So by now, people are really starting to see that emotions have a very real impact on your body.

Now, the field of psychoneuroimmunology gets even more interesting. Researchers like Robert Ader and Nicholas Cohen found out that stress and emotions actually change the way your immune system works. This means your emotions — those things you feel every day — are not just feelings. They’re energy. And energy, when blocked, starts messing with your health.

Here’s the real kicker: Emotions are energy. They’re like waves moving through you. If you let them flow, no problem. But if they get stuck — whether it’s old trauma, unexpressed anger, sadness, whatever — that energy builds up, and it can start manifesting as physical symptoms. What kind of symptoms? Well, think chronic pain, fatigue, digestive issues, and even more serious stuff if left unchecked.

This is where energy clearing comes in. By working with the body’s energy, we can clear out those blocked emotions before they turn into physical ailments. Imagine it like cleaning up emotional clutter in your energy field. Once that stuck energy is cleared, you’ll not only feel better emotionally but physically too. You’re freeing up the flow, balancing yourself, just like the ancient wisdom taught us — only now, we’ve got modern understanding to back it up.

Galen might not have called it “energy clearing,” but his observations on how emotions impact healing are exactly what we’re talking about today. The mind, body, and emotions are one big interconnected system. When you heal emotionally, you heal physically. When you clear stuck energy, you free yourself from so much more than just feelings — you free yourself from the things that hold you back physically too.

This is the work I have been doing since the past 8 years for myself, my family and my clients. Stay connected with me here to learn more, or subscribe to my newsletter where I will share updates on healing and transformation stories — both from my own experience and from my clients (with permission of course :-))