Love and Light : The science behind ‘energy healing’

Healing
Written By Daniel Boutros

AKA BIOPHOTONS, BODY READS & THE LIGHT IN YOUR CELLS

Not the Predator perving a random human, but biophoton photography - a form of photography showing every cell’s light emission in the human body.

By Daniel Boutros @ The Magick Mechanic - Updated yearly.
Last pass: July 7th 2026.

For years now I've held my hands near people's bodies and felt things - that sounds a bit raunchy, but what I mean is that I tend to feel subtle forces.

Patches that pull like a subtle vacuum, energy fields that gently shove back at me like a weak forcefield and so on.

I read the vacuums as places asking for love or ‘light’. Those are typically the areas storing unfinished emotional cycles hidden in shame, disgust or similar.

Other healers or facilitators I speak to and trust feel the exact same phenomena, which is either a shared delusion or a shared truth verified anecdotally at large volume.

At some point I got curious whether the scientific establishment had anything to say about the light that living beings give off. Thankfully it does, and quite a lot, but not quite to the degree of detail I’d like, so I’ve been filling in the gaps where I can.

Science has at least consistently verified this: Your body gives off light. Real, actual light that is far too faint for your eyes at 1/1000th of a lumen - most light bulbs are 40-100 lumens - but real enough that people have photographed it in a pitch-black room with a ridiculously cold camera. One that would be very welcome as a thing to hug in this summer’s London ‘heatwave’ (it’s not a heatwave - they just hate AC units in Europe for some stupid reason).

What I do for a living sits a long way past that camera, in a space the labs don’t have much language for as yet. Here is my collected explorations in looking for a bridge between the science, the anecdotes and the mystical, and sharing the best information I’ve found.

This mean’s what's solid, what's a clue, what I wish someone would f*cking study - or help me to - and what I believe from living it.

What's settled, what's a clue, what scientists should chase next, and what I just believe

These will be separate sections, so we’ll start with the science one first.

1. STUDIES CONSIDERED "SETTLED" - BUT I'VE STILL GOT QUESTIONS

These are the bits in actual science journals, which have been repeated and according to the standards of the scientific establishment, actually hold up. I'm still exploring each one though, as they read like pieces of a puzzle and not a finished image.

One note before we start : the ‘settled’ studies below mostly measure visible or near-visible light. Later on you'll see a study measuring ultraviolet and infrared instead - same broad territory, different kit and different wavelength, so I will continue flag that type of issue when it comes up rather than blur everything together.

1. Your body emits light. About a thousand times too faint to see. Kobayashi's team sat people in a pitch-black room with a camera cooled to minus 120 and photographed the glow coming off them - brightest from the face.

My question: They tracked the light rising with the day and dropping after sleep. So what is topping it up, if anything?

Does sun, food, rest and sex actually recharge something, or is the glow just a readout of how much energy you’re using / burning moment to moment? Based on what I visibly see in people, what brings them genuine joy, animates or ‘energizes’ them recharges it. When they cry from some stored up emotional density in those areas, that also restores or recharges it.

2. The light comes from oxidative metabolism. Your cells burn fuel with oxygen and throw off reactive sparks called free radicals. Those sparks smack into fats and proteins, knock their electrons high, and a photon pops out when the electrons drop back down.

Every cell does this, all day, healthy or sick. For years I thought a free radical was some kind of rebel cell gone rogue - it's actually a tiny molecule, and the glow it makes is part of the common language of all living tissues; sick or thriving.

A quick tangent on the name:

The ‘Radical’ in Free Radical comes from the Latin radix - root. It's where the square-root symbol comes from too. Old-school chemists used “radical" for the core root-group of a molecule. When they later found one of those bits floating about on its own, carrying a spare unpaired electron - unattached, twitchy, desperate to grab onto something - they called it a free radical. Free as in uncommitted to any particular thing.

Summary - Free radicals are the biological piece that has been observed by scientists to output the light in our bodies.

My question: In our material biological system, has the light been observed to do anything once it's out there - carry a message, activate a process - or is it just produced and waiting for instructions?

Science believes it’s “exhaust out the back of the engine”, from the oxygen fuel burning process.

That’s what science is focused on being true - the exhaust part - and based on my lived experience, that light is specifically what I’m transmitting from my body to another, so minimizing as it activity exhaust seems reductive and inaccurate. That light can also be charged with specific emotions and instructions. Perhaps, like the free radicals, it needs instruction and it’s another layer up the chain.

Let there be light

3. Stress increases light being activated for use. Heat, injury, illness, hard work - all raise the intensity of the glow. This has been seen in plants, mice and human skin, over and over in numerous studies.

We know stress raises it and meditation lowers it. But singing? Toning? Breathwork? Sex? Orgasms? Eating? I’m seeing this as another missing part of the study work that needs to happen.

For me, I see the light increase and decrease and it is observed - by me - in connection with emotional shifts typically. More happiness and self-empowerment tends to feel like an increase in light emission.

4. Movement raises it - and the heat generated from movement is not what’s creating the light. A Korean team measured both wrists during grip exercises. The light climbed while people worked, then dropped the second they stopped.

Their skin kept getting warmer the whole time, while the light fell anyway. So while the science folks have verified that the glow tracks the oxygen you're burning, they also see that temperature has nothing to do with it.

Working a muscle and feeling a strong emotion do a similar thing to the body: increase of light glow intensity.

My question: It drops “immediately" when you stop the work. How immediately? And does it dip below where it started, or just settle back? That gap will help inform whether this is depletion of a generated, fixed resource of light or something else.

5. It stops when you die. The glow switches off. Part of how we know it's a living process and not background radiation.

So we know it can’t exist if you’re dead. And that makes a lot of sense. And I’ve only seen the light in an animal who was freshly dead, though it felt like it was weaker and it’s on its way out.

6. Plants store and re-release light. On a seconds-to-minutes scale, through photosynthesis. This is established information in nature. Shine light on the plant’s skin - especially the leaves - and a bit gets held, and then trickles back out as an afterglow.

My question: Plants do it simple and brief. Do we do anything like this with light, to somehow utilize it for energy?

This story about a yogi called Angus Barbieri says ‘maybe’ - it’s a story and case with numerous issues. Breatharianism is entirely built off the premise we can make ‘prana’ aka living energy by sun gazing.

I’ve personally experienced phases where I only needed 4 hours sleep and one meal and felt great - for many months - while also spending a lot of time in the sun, and meditating for 2 hours a day, but that was during a very low-stress time living in rich nature outside of the city. Personal observation - stress is a factor on what our bodies can and can’t do, especially in the metaphysical realm.

We have sun gazing reported as a mystical energizing tool as one lead. This would support the ‘we can charge up and replenish our light’ my model rests on - and that's where establishment science explorations have fallen flat (for now). However, this is currently in the ‘mystics only’ bucket and scientists still haven’t connected with that.

A delightful sun gaze

2. STUDIES MISSING THE CONTROLS THAT EARN RESPECT in the science establishment

And they still smell like clues, but they are not yet rigorous enough for the lab coat folks to bank on.

I'm including them because clues matter when you're forming a hypothesis - but I'm telling you exactly what each one is missing, so you can hold it at the right distance. None of this is “proof." This is a puzzle in play, and I’m sharing my current game.

A. The healer's hands (Rubik & Jabs, 2017). This measured the light coming off energy healers' hands before and after a session. The hand-light dropped about 11% after - like they'd ‘spent’ something. Each session had its own pattern.

Missing controls : The people receiving showed no clear signal, it was a tiny sample, ran in a fringe journal, and there was no blinding. A hint for the ‘this becomes a resource we spend’ side.

B. Intention spiking the glow (Joines, Baumann & Kruth, 2012). They wired people up and measured the light coming off them while they focused intent. The three-person meditation groups pushed emission to roughly 400-600% over baseline.

Two standout individuals hit 40,000-80,000%! - hundreds of thousands of photons a second against a baseline of about sixteen. And one participant measurably got better at it over nine months of sessions with feedback.

Missing controls : They measured on the ultraviolet detector, and they hadn't controlled what people ate - certain foods (shellfish especially) glow in UV and could lift the readings.

Record-keeping was loose-leaf paper, not formalised. The infrared image analysis had no independent, blinded review. One of the researchers died mid-study, which is partly why they called it preliminary themselves. All their own admissions, which I appreciate and respect. A real clue on the “we can amplify the ‘light’ when we use intent" side, with some caution.

C. Qigong performed on cells in a dish (Chien and colleagues, early 90s). A qigong master aimed “healing" intent at human cells - the cell growth and DNA activity went up! “Harming" intent nudged them down.

Missing Controls : One operator, no blinding, never cleanly repeated, and a hundred ways for heat or vibration or hopeful measuring to sneak in. Provocative. Matches with the heavily flawed ‘Emoto’ study, but not proof.

D. Gurwitsch's onions (1920s-30s) - the granddaddy. He found a dividing onion root could stimulate growth in a second onion through quartz but not regular glass, pointing at UV light as the messenger. He called it “mitogenetic radiation."

Missing Controls : It's a century old, and replication's been patchy ever since. Treat it as the origin study for metaphysically-leaning biophoton studies.

E. Distant intention on water crystals (Radin and colleagues, 2006 / 2008). This used double and then triple-blind tests of focused intention aimed at water before freezing, and the results were then judged on crystal beauty. The triple-blind run scraped a small positive result.

Missing Controls : It's crystal-beauty ratings were subjective. It ran in a parapsychology journal, and the effect was deemed fragile. Still had better controls than Emoto's originals - but that's a low bar, and it's still not somewhere a lab coat could build their career or be taken seriously.

F. Honest note on Emoto and the plant-loving / bullying study. Emoto's water work falls apart the second you look at the method - he photographed tons of water crystals and picked the pretty ones, with no blinding or rigour - basically it was loaded with bias.

The viral “shout at a plant till it dies" thing was a furniture-shop marketing campaign with one plant per condition and zero controls. I'm calling this forward because it’s popular in the spiritual community I don't want you repeating this as credible, despite it aligning with a lot of ancedotal wisdom. Veda Austin does some great work here, but she’s not using scientific method - purely playful and exploratory, with a wealth of imagery.

G. Is the glow just a cosmetic particle effect - exhaust with no function? Is it actual data being broadcast that other cells read, like networked players syncing their states in a game? Scientists are still arguing about this. Mainstream science says it’s cosmetic byproduct. The late Fritz-Albert Popp argued it's networked data. Nobody is won that fight yet in the lab. My work quietly assumes there's “data" in it and you can steer it - I’ve seen it time and time again with what I teach in candle magick, and in somatic work. I’m solid on this through direct experience, but the lab coats are not yet convinced, and getting the controls set up so they can be could be the issue. I ‘prove’ it constantly in psychic and energy work / magick exercises with students. When I teach them to charge a candle with an energy, but blinded, others tune in and more often than not, pick out the exact energy through their own subjective lens. It’s something I invite you to experience with me in my next magick, psychic or healing workshops.

My summary on this whole section : These studies lack the basics - blinding, big sample sizes, outside labs repeating them, tight control of sneaky stuff like heat and expectation, etc...

I share them because I'm openly building a hypothesis I'm biased toward, off the back of direct lived experience. This is not something a lab coat could back, and I will share it with honesty, as I refer to these ideas in my work.

It's a trail of breadcrumbs the rigorous experiments simply haven't followed yet, but I am still carving my own path and ideology and want to be transparent around it.

Crystals - they live in both spirituality and science as a tool in very different ways

3. WHAT SCIENCE ACTUALLY NEEDS TO STUDY (IN MY OPINION)

Most of my hypothesis isn't disproven - it's just not been tested through the establishment lens.

These experiments are doable, but nobody's done them. If they did, I'd either get a clean model or a clean ‘redirection’, and I welcome either.

And my honest bet on why nobody's explored these ideas?

There's no money in proving you can shift your own body for free. You can't bottle a breath. You can't charge rent on someone learning to talk to their own nerve(ous) system. So it sits there, unstudied, while the expensive version gets sold to us instead.

  1. Measure spending AND storage on the same tissue at the same time.
    Right now the “glow you give off" and the “light you can hold and re-release" get measured in separate experiments. My whole ‘spend-versus-charge’ idea can't be tested until someone tracks both at once on the same sample. This is the big one.

  2. Break down the daily curve.
    Track the glow AND the storage capacity across a full day, with and without sun and activity, and see whether a depletion is being hidden underneath a recharge. Nobody's looked.

  3. Test whether rest actually refills the tank.
    We know meditation lowers the glow. We don't know if it recharges the STORE, because nobody's measured the storage capacity before and after rest.

  4. Make “felt state" measurable.
    Pair the glow with the body signals of real feeling - heart-rate variability, breath, vagal tone - so “felt words versus dead words" becomes a proper variable instead of my hunch.

  5. Do the intention studies properly.
    Pre-registered, blinded, decent numbers, fake-treatment controls that match for heat and sound and expectation, and an independent lab repeating it. The existing ones fail on rigour, not necessarily on direction.

  6. Test the thing I do with my hands.
    Have me or others like me, feel for a “low" spot, mark it, then measure whether that exact spot shows lower glow or lower storage on a camera - while the camera people have no idea where I pointed. That's the one experiment that speaks directly to my work. It's easily doable. Somebody message me and we can do it.

Healing hands certainly have a notable feel to them as a recipient

4. MY FULL HYPOTHESIS (LIVED, NOT Establishment-PROVEN)

This is mine. Built from years with my hands on people, and from comparing notes with skilled friends who feel the same things I do. I'm labelling the whole section as lived experience and informed bias on purpose. Please read it as that.

Back when I was an energy healer in Thailand and looked like I ran a cut.

1. Energy has patterned textures : What I feel when doing hands-on work.
When I tune into a body, I feel patches - some like vacuums, some pushing my hand away, and other textures too. The vacuums are where I read a need for loving attention. And I'm not the only one; other practitioners feel the same pattern. It's consistent and it's also not been measured. Anecdotal. I'm telling you anyway, because it's the honest birthplace of the whole idea.

2. Felt words land and hollow ones don't.
This is why most affirmation-based models do not work or sustain. Say something with real, sincere feeling and the body responds. Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali understood this well. Say the exact same words dead and empty and you get weak energy.

A session with a friend where I used sincere, felt words to shape energy he could direct into his hands. He was unable to close his hands for months until our session, where he literally did everything and I guided the practices.

I've watched this too many times to wave it off and I’ve demonstrated it probably thousands of times by now, while giving folks the exact mechanisms and switches to experience it themselves.

The little science that exists tends to point at the state of a person more than the dictionary meaning of the words - which matches what I see and experience.

3. My working model of how biophoton light works in our bodies, in a healing context:

  • A place that needs healing floods with activity, and that flood shows up as more light. This fits the scientific data - stress and repair both raise the glow.

  • It settles as the work completes. Also fits the lab coat work - that's the decline curve they caught.

  • You can ‘color’ or ‘flavor’ the light emitted with emotional qualities. This lays as a key tool in energy work / magick, psychic and emotional healing work I teach. The lab is struggling with this.

  • It appears DARK and feels like a vacuum when the area's been depleted or wrecked. I add that it also appears like this when there’s a shamed, judged, hated, etc… or feared emotional energy being held in the body there. This one doesn’t have a science study confirming it, to my knowledge. Closest fit is true at death, and demonstrated as true in degenerated tissue. The findings tied to the best study I could find on cancer cells is that this level of stress activates MORE light, but my position - not confirmed by the lab - is that it depletes the body faster of its light stores when activated in urgent need.

  • And the love and light as connected parts - I typically read less light as less love in that area of the body, and that rings true in my direct experience. The studies believe in the reverse, but my hypothesis holds per the ‘flooding the area with light when in need’ concept.

  • One older thread (Zakarayan & Tarusov, 1966, cited in the Joines paper) reported healthy cells radiating while cancerous cells stayed dark - which leans my way. However, it pulls against the tumor studies above that found cancer glowing brighter, so it's a contested crumb in my favor and not a clean win.

4. The present conceptual conflict with the establishment, but one I’m confident they will confirm : My model leans on the idea that the body stores light like a charge, and we possess a similar system to photosynthesis, but it’s context is wrapped up in other factors, like lifestyle and overt use of backup energy systems society regards as primary.

That storage is potentially hinted at in small and brief ways in the ‘proven’ science studies. The bigger version I'm betting on is the contested branch and I’m confident it will be seen that way at some point.

5. SOURCES USED FOR THE SCIENCE BITS

Almost every reference above and below has a DOI or PMID so you can pull the original study yourself and make up your own mind. A small number are referenced from books enough that they carry cultural weight, and are easy to challenge, but no PMID was found.

One recent paper (the 2024 sunlight one) has a note where the final volume number is worth a glance before you cite it - everything else is locked.

Settled / mainstream:

  • Kobayashi M, Kikuchi D, Okamura H (2009). “Imaging of Ultraweak Spontaneous Photon Emission from the Human Body Displaying Diurnal Rhythm." PLoS ONE 4(7): e6256. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0006256.

  • Laager F, Park S-H, Yang J-M, Song W, Soh K-S (2008). “Effects of exercises on biophoton emission of the wrist." European Journal of Applied Physiology 102(4): 463-469. DOI: 10.1007/s00421-007-0607-4.

  • Pospíšil P, Prasad A, Rác M (2014). "Role of reactive oxygen species in ultra-weak photon emission in biological systems." Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology 139: 11-23. DOI: 10.1016/j.jphotobiol.2014.02.008.

  • Amano T, Kobayashi M, Devaraj B, Usa M, Inaba H (1995). “Ultraweak biophoton emission imaging of transplanted bladder cancer." Urological Research 23(5): 315-318. DOI: 10.1007/BF00300020.

  • Zhao X, Yang M, Wang Y, Pang J, Van Wijk E, Liu Y, Fan H, Zhang L, Han J (2017). “Spectrum of spontaneous photon emission as a promising biophysical indicator for breast cancer research." Scientific Reports 7: 13083. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-13516-8.

  • Murugan NJ, Rouleau N, Karbowski LM, Persinger MA (2017). “Biophotonic markers of malignancy: Discriminating cancers using wavelength-specific biophotons." Biochemistry and Biophysics Reports 13: 7-11. DOI: 10.1016/j.bbrep.2017.11.001.

  • Van Wijk EP, Lüdtke R, Van Wijk R (2008). “Differential effects of relaxation techniques on ultraweak photon emission." Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 14(3): 241-250. DOI: 10.1089/acm.2007.7185.

  • Zapata F, Pastor-Ruiz V, Ortega-Ojeda F, Montalvo G, García-Ruiz C (2021). “Increment of spontaneous human biophoton emission caused by anger emotional states. Proof of concept." Microchemical Journal 169: 106558. DOI: 10.1016/j.microc.2021.106558.

  • Zapata F, Pastor-Ruiz V, Ortega-Ojeda F, Montalvo G, García-Ruiz C (2024). “Effects of light exposure on human ultra-weak photon emission: Preliminary findings for a pioneering control tool in cosmetics." Microchemical Journal (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.microc.2024.111322. (ScienceDirect ref S0026265X24014632 - worth a glance to confirm the final volume number when you cite it.)

  • Niggli HJ (1993). “Artificial sunlight irradiation induces ultraweak photon emission in human skin fibroblasts." Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology 18(2-3): 281-285. PMID: 8350193. (This is the photon-storage / “trapping system" paper - healthy cells store light, DNA-repair-deficient cells leak it.)

  • Pónya Z, Somfalvi-Tóth K (2022). “Modelling biophoton emission kinetics based on the initial intensity value in Helianthus annuus plants exposed to different types of stress." Scientific Reports 12: 2317. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-06323-3.

  • Cifra M, Brouder C, Nerudová M, Kučera O (2015). “Biophotons, coherence and photocount statistics: A critical review." Journal of Luminescence 164: 38-51. DOI: 10.1016/j.jlumin.2015.03.020.

  • Popp FA, Nagl W, Li KH, Scholz W, Weingärtner O, Wolf R (1984). “Biophoton emission. New evidence for coherence and DNA as source." Cell Biophysics 6(1): 33-52. DOI: 10.1007/BF02788579.

  • Gurwitsch A (1932). Die mitogenetische Strahlung book (no DOI ref). Springer, Berlin.

Clue-level (weaker venues / weaker controls - read with the caveats above):

Note on the sleep/oxidation bit I mentioned in conversation: that the body clears oxidative junk during sleep is well supported in sleep biology, but it sits a step away from the biophoton papers above - treat it as supporting context, not a biophoton source.

THIS IS A LIVING DOCUMENT

I update this roughly once a year, because the science moves and so does my thinking. If something here gets proven, disproven, or turns a corner, it'll change - and I'll say what changed and why.

Want to stay on top of it? Come back to this page, or sign up for my newsletter and I'll let you know when the next version lands.

That's the honest map as of today. Ask me again in a year.

- Daniel

Daniel Boutros
Previous

How do I sound heal myself?
Next

Q+A from the curses and entities chapter of Magick As F*ck.