Energy healing can be accomplished at a distance just as easily as in person. Prayer is the simplest form of distance healing, and it has been demonstrated that prayer is effective in facilitating healing (see Dr Larry Dossey's book, Healing Words.) An energy healer can sense the energy field of the person receiving the healing and provide healing equally effectively if the person is in the same room or across the world.

Scientific Foundation

There are many ways one might understand how distance healing works. Much of our everyday experience involves the transfer of energy over long distances -- satellite dishes are just one example. There are energies all about us traveling great distances in short amounts of time such as radio waves. Some have described the "life energy" used by healers as a subtle energy that is "faster than light energy" (Richard Gerber, MD, Vibrational Medicine).

From another viewpoint, it is not necessary for the energy to "travel" anywhere as some models describe the universe as being like a holograph, where the whole is contained in every part. Time and distance are only concepts which help define our reality. The Holographic Universe by Talbot is especially fascinating in this regard.

The laws of nature which describe subtle energies are different than those which describe the physical body. As physics explores deeper and deeper "layers" of the structure of creation, phenomena are less and less "localized". Some physicists describe a "unified field" which is "non-local".

This will seem like a very abstract discussion unless one has experienced "altered states of awareness" in which the limitations of time and distance have been transcended. Awareness itself, the field of intelligence and "being in one" in which this whole phenomenal world is contained, is completely non-local. In a more expanded state of awareness, it can be understood intuitively that physical distance is no barrier to a healing interaction. Many have had the experience of a kind of telepathic connection with someone else in which one senses what is happening with the other person. An energy healer doing distance healings can sense the presence of the client and affect the client's energy field through this same kind of "sensing".

References to research on distance healing can be found on the Institute of Noetic Sciences website.

Recommended Reading

The Field: the Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, Lynne McTaggart, HarperCollins, 2002. Highly recommended, and very far-reaching in its implications. Provides a scientific basis for understanding distant healing, and much, much more!

Healing Words, Larry Dossey, MD, Harper San Francisco, 1993. On prayer and healing.