Is Holistic Healing Biblical? Christianity, Energy Medicine & the Body

I live and practice in Utah, which makes this question especially interesting.

Because when somebody asks me, “Is holistic healing biblical?” I almost want to ask them another question first:

What exactly do you mean by biblical?

Do you mean, “Did somebody use the words Medical Qigong in the New Testament?”

No.

Do you mean, “Does the Bible contain stories of physical healing, laying on of hands, anointing with oil, prayer, faith, touch, fasting, rest, forgiveness and the belief that something divine can influence the physical body?”

Well…yeah. A lot.

And I think that distinction matters.

I grew up Mormon. I live in an area where LDS culture is still extraordinarily strong. I work with people who are deeply, faithfully LDS, people who have left the Church, people healing from their experiences within religion, Christians from other traditions, and people who want absolutely nothing to do with organized religion.

My own relationship with Christ is still very important to me.

And the deeper I have gone into holistic medicine, the less I have felt that I needed to choose between faith and healing.

If anything, studying more ways of understanding the human body made my relationship with God bigger.

Not smaller.

Is Holistic Medicine Against Christianity?

I think this is usually the real question.

People aren't necessarily asking whether holistic medicine is mentioned in scripture.

They're asking:

Am I violating my Christianity by doing this?

Am I accidentally worshipping something else?

Am I opening myself up spiritually to something I shouldn't?

If somebody talks about energy, are they talking about God?

If I practice Reiki or Qigong, have I somehow abandoned Christ?

Those are legitimate questions.

But I think we make an enormous mistake when we assume that encountering another culture's map of the human body automatically requires us to adopt another religion.

It doesn't.

Western medicine is a map.

Traditional Chinese medicine is a map.

Somatic therapy is a map.

Psychology is a map.

Christian theology gives us another way of understanding humanity.

None of these is the entire territory.

One of the most useful things holistic medicine has taught me is that I am allowed to look through more than one lens.

Sometimes We Are Fighting With Vocabulary

This is especially true when we start throwing around words like qi, energy, Reiki, chakra, somatic, or prana.

We translate ancient concepts into tiny English words and then start fighting about the English word.

Take somatic.

It sounds very wellness-y now.

It isn't.

The word comes from the Greek sōma: body. Somatic simply means pertaining to the body.

So when someone asks me:

“Is somatic healing biblical?”

Part of me wants to say:

You mean…is working with your body biblical?

Because Christianity certainly doesn't teach that the body is irrelevant.

First Corinthians describes the body as a temple of the Holy Spirit.

If you genuinely believe your body was a gift from God, learning how to inhabit it, regulate it, listen to it, care for it and stop letting every fear, hormone, impulse or thought completely run the show does not strike me as inherently anti-Christian.

Quite the opposite.

Being able to come back into your body instead of constantly being hijacked by it can be an extraordinarily spiritual practice.

What Does the Bible Actually Say About Holistic Healing?

The Bible obviously does not contain a chapter called A Beginner's Guide to Holistic Wellness.

But look at the actual healing stories.

Jesus touches people.

People are healed through faith.

People pray.

People fast.

People are anointed with oil.

People care for one another.

There is forgiveness.

There is relationship.

There is rest.

There is food.

There is solitude.

There is spiritual healing happening alongside physical healing.

In Mark 5, after a woman who had suffered physically for years approaches Jesus believing she can be healed, Jesus connects what has happened directly to her faith: “your faith has made you well.”

James 5 tells the sick to call on the elders, pray and be anointed with oil.

Jesus repeatedly withdrew from crowds to be alone and pray.

And when the disciples were overwhelmed by people coming and going and didn't even have time to eat, Jesus told them to go somewhere quiet and rest.

That sounds remarkably whole-person to me.

Not because I'm trying to force twenty-first-century wellness terminology into first-century scripture.

I'm not.

I just don't think biblical healing was ever as sterile as we sometimes make it sound.

I don't think God's healing was: poof, magical disease removal.

Faith mattered.

Relationship mattered.

The person mattered.

The body mattered.

Then What Is “Energy Medicine”?

This one is fun, because I could give you ten thousand answers depending on who is sitting across from me.

The word energy is woefully insufficient for the number of things people try to make it describe.

When I talk about energy medicine in my own practice, I am talking about working with experiences such as light, magnetism, temperature, color and vibration, alongside the enormous role that attention, intention, breath, sensory experience and the mind have in how we experience our bodies.

I am also talking about concepts that other medical and spiritual traditions developed long before modern Western medicine had our current vocabulary.

That does not mean I believe “energy” is a god.

I don't worship energy.

To me, there is a physical nature to being human, a spiritual nature to being human, and something fascinating happening in the relationship between the two.

My simplest language for it has always been:

Energy is the glue between heaven and earth.

You don't have to use my language.

You don't have to believe exactly what I believe.

That's kind of the point.

Holistic medicine asks us to become curious enough to recognize that our existing vocabulary may not explain everything we experience.

The Mormon Question About Energy Healing

Because I practice in Utah, I also can't write this without talking about the LDS Church specifically.

In December 2020, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints updated its General Handbook with language specifically addressing what it called “energy healing.”

The Church teaches that seeking competent medical care, exercising faith and receiving priesthood blessings can work together in healing. It also discourages members from seeking miraculous or supernatural healing from people claiming special access to healing power outside prayer and properly performed priesthood blessings, noting that these practices are often described as “energy healing.”

If you're LDS, I think you should know that.

I am not interested in pretending an official position doesn't exist because it makes this conversation easier.

I also understand why the distinction around healing authority matters deeply within Mormon theology. Priesthood blessings are sacred, they are not supposed to be sold, and priesthood authority has a very specific meaning within the faith.

My own practice comes through a different lens.

And this is where I return to something important:

I don't believe I heal people.

I Am Not Your Healer

I tell my clients this all the time.

There are only two people who can heal you:

God and yourself.

I am not healing you.

I am not the person who possesses some secret supernatural authority that you need in order to become whole.

I don't want that job.

What I can be is a conduit for light and a person who has spent an extraordinary amount of time studying, practicing and collecting tools.

I can introduce you to different ways of breathing.

Different ways of paying attention.

Different ways of understanding your body.

Different cultures' maps.

Different practices.

Different ways of sitting with pain instead of immediately running away from it.

And then we find out what actually serves you.

That distinction is enormous to me.

Where Holistic Healing Can Go Wrong

Do I think everything called “holistic” is automatically good?

Absolutely not.

People are people.

You can find manipulation inside a wellness practice.

You can find it inside a church.

You can find it inside medicine.

You can find it inside a business.

The name over the door doesn't guarantee integrity.

I become very cautious when a practitioner tells someone that they are the source of healing.

I become cautious around fear-based practices, promises of guaranteed cures, people creating dependency on themselves, or anyone encouraging clients to stop seeing qualified medical or mental-health professionals.

I will not tell a client to stop taking a prescription.

I will not tell someone not to see a doctor.

I am extraordinarily pro-therapy.

I have turned people away when they wanted holistic care instead of medical care for something that needed a medical professional.

Because this was never supposed to be a competition.

I am also personally cautious around practices deliberately seeking altered states through drugs, attempting to form relationships or “contracts” with spiritual entities, or intentionally inviting in spiritual forces that someone does not understand.

That's a boundary for me.

Holistic does not mean anything goes.

Discernment still matters.

Christianity and Holistic Healing Do Not Have to Be Opponents

One of the strangest things we have done with modern health is turn everything into teams.

Science or religion.

Medicine or natural health.

Therapy or spirituality.

Prayer or treatment.

Why?

They are tools.

And tools have different jobs.

I sometimes describe Western medicine as the firefighters of healthcare.

If I'm having a heart attack, please do not sound-bathe me.

Call 911.

If I break my leg, I want imaging, a physician and somebody who knows exactly how to put that thing back together.

Modern medicine is unbelievably good at acute care, diagnostics, surgery, infectious disease treatment, emergency intervention and countless other things.

Holistic care asks another set of questions too:

How are you sleeping?

What are you eating?

What has your stress looked like for the last five years?

What does your body do when you feel unsafe?

Are you moving?

Are you lonely?

What medications are you taking?

What support do you have?

What are you believing about yourself every day?

What is happening spiritually?

What is happening relationally?

What does your medical team say?

What are we missing?

That is what holistic means to me.

The whole picture.

Not “Western medicine is bad.”

Not “throw away your prescriptions.”

Not “crystals instead of chemotherapy.”

The whole damn picture.

What Is Holistic Ministry?

I'll be honest: this is not terminology I use for myself.

I don't consider Healing Thyme a ministry.

But people search the question, so here's the way I understand it.

If ministry means the act of tending to people, teaching them, caring for them and helping anchor them spiritually, then I can understand holistic ministry as an approach that recognizes the whole person while doing that work.

Body.

Mind.

Spirit.

Relationships.

Environment.

Health.

Faith.

And maybe the most valuable thing a holistic ministry could offer isn't another set of rules.

Maybe it is another lens.

A way to practice Christianity with less fear, not less Christ.

What If You're Christian and This Still Makes You Uncomfortable?

Then don't do it.

Really.

It is not my job to convince you.

I'm not going to tell somebody who feels deeply uncomfortable with Reiki that they just need to pray harder until God tells them Reiki is okay.

That's ridiculous.

There are a thousand tools.

Pick one that doesn't scare the shit out of you.

Maybe it's massage.

Maybe it's reflexology.

Maybe it's breathwork.

Maybe it's learning how stress affects your body.

Maybe it's walking.

Maybe it's therapy.

Maybe it's prayer.

Maybe it's improving your sleep.

Maybe it's changing how you eat.

Maybe it's simply noticing what happens inside your body when you say certain things about yourself.

We can start there.

Good healing does not require me to win an argument with you first.

You Are Allowed More Than One Lens

This, more than anything, is what I wish people understood.

Learning another way to think about your body does not automatically require you to abandon God.

Using another tool does not require you to throw away every tool you already have.

And discovering something useful in another culture does not automatically mean you have converted to that culture's religion.

You are allowed more than one lens.

Your physician can have one.

Your therapist can have one.

Your pastor can have one.

Traditional Chinese medicine can have one.

Your own body can have one.

And God can still be God.

So, Is Holistic Healing Biblical?

Can it be?

Absolutely.

Can somebody practice something called holistic healing in a way that I would find unethical, spiritually irresponsible or completely inconsistent with my understanding of Christianity?

Also absolutely.

That's why I don't think the label answers the question.

Look at what is actually happening.

Look at the intent.

Look at the ethics.

Look at whether your practitioner wants you to become increasingly capable of listening to yourself—or increasingly dependent upon them.

Look at whether good medical care is respected.

Look at whether fear is being used to control you.

Look at whether you are being treated like a whole human being.

And then decide.

I don't believe that God—at least, not the God I know—created this entire existence so we could spend it miserable.

So if the tools you have right now are not enough to help you find joy, health, peace, connection and a deeper relationship with your own life, maybe the answer isn't to try harder with the same tool.

Maybe we start looking for a few more.

Not because we have abandoned God.

Maybe because this enormous world was full of more tools than we ever realized.