What Does Energy Healing Have to Do With Body Oil?

I'd never heard of energy healing before in my life.  Is it a kind of therapy?  Is it like Reiki?  Honestly - do I even know what Reiki is?

And furthermore, I really wasn't sure what energy healing had to do with body oil.

Here's the thing I did know: our mantra, the filter we run every decision through, is to restore your nature.  And somehow, by perhaps feeling alone, the idea of energy healing was related.  So before we understood how all the dots connected, we jumped.

Joanna's Session

Joanna, one of our cofounders, took the lead on this one.  She booked a session with Bruce Platt, an energy healer, and came out the other side describing it as a weight lifted off her shoulders - like she was fifty pounds lighter than when she walked in.

I was there to document it, and my experience was a little different.

I couldn't tell you whether or not any weight was actually lifted.  What I saw was Bruce's hands moving through the air, and Joanna, afterwards, in tears.  At one point, we stepped out so the two of them could be alone.  By looking through the footage, I saw Joanna cry - the kind of crying that isn't really a choice.  She told me later she'd realized things about her own life, drawn lines between the moments she hadn't connected before.

I was personally left with more questions than answers.  What actually healed?  Was it a release of emotion - of something bottled up that finally had somewhere to go?

On the drive there, Joanna had described energy healing as a way to loosen the stuck parts of yourself - to unblock whatever's clogging your flow so that you can move through life a little less tethered.  Whatever that meant for her specifically, she'd decided in that session that she was done being stuck.  And whatever it was that was let go, it made her feel fifty pounds lighter.

The Question I Was Actually Left With

My job, on the sidelines, wasn't just to film.  It was, afterwards, to figure out how any of this, and any of our field notes really, connects back to body oil - to us, to the brand.

And I think that my simple act of reflecting on it is a big part of the answer.

We don't really have a way to measure what is "restorative."  What restores one person might do nothing for another.  The same place that gives one person peace might make someone else feel unmoored.  None of us gets to judge what brings another person back to center.  There's no single correct path to it.

The only real truth is that we go looking - we try things, we stay curious about what actually matters to us - and that the answers we find change and shift over time because well, we change and shift over time.

As an obviously related example, I hated pickles as a kid.  I couldn't have imagined wanting one anywhere near a burger.  But now, I genuinely love them and in many more forms than I expected to.  Small example, yes, but it holds.

We are evolving creatures with evolving tastes, chasing an understanding of ourselves that keeps moving as we change.  Even the things we treat as fixed facts about the world get revised eventually.

Our Field Notes series - this ongoing exploration into what restores us - is built on that same idea.  We're not chasing a fixed answer.  We're documenting the search.

Energy healing might just be one expression of the same instinct: The pull to come back to yourself, however that happens to show up for you at whatever stage of life you might find yourself in.

And Finally, What is Energy Healing?

Well, I honestly still can't tell you exactly what energy healing is - I haven't experienced it.  And even if I did experience it, I'm not so sure that I'd be able to explain it.  But, I'm also not sure it matters because everyone has their own unique path back to center.

Whether it's an energy session or a few minutes with some body oil after you get out the shower, does it really matter what other people think of what you do?  Does it matter if people understand what it is you do?  If it works, if it gets you back to center, I think that's the most important part.

Energy healing, body oil - they're different roads with the same destination.  That's... I think... what one has to do with the other.