Re-Air: What is Energy? And Can Energy Therapy Heal?| Phenomena Podcast
September 12, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readThe Body Is Not a Machine: What Energy Healing Reveals About Life
At a 2025 conference in upstate New York, mitochondria researcher Dr. Martin Picard of Columbia University stood before an audience of fellow scientists with a looping video on the monitor beside him. It showed a single lit candle, its flame flickering against darkness. "What you see here is something that is organic," he told them. "The structure of the candle is like this waxy carbon-based stuff, which is very similar to your body in many ways. You're made of the same stuff." The flame consumes oxygen and releases CO₂—exactly what you do when you breathe. It's flexible, sensitive, resilient, always in motion, never the same from one second to the next. "It releases light, just like we do. And it's ephemeral—it has a finite lifespan. One day this candle would be burnt out and then will die. And just like every living creature on the planet has this energy of movement. So we are energetic processes."
This image of the candle became a recurring thread through a conversation that wove together three researchers whose work, taken together, offers a radically different picture of what it means to be alive—and what it means to heal.
The Limits of the Machine Model
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What you'll learn
- 1 Timestamped Outline
- 2 (03:27) **The Candle Analogy** - Mitochondria expert Dr. Martin Picard opens a 2025 conference presentation with a looping video of a candle flame
- 3 (05:45) **Core Question: What Is Energy?** - Host Ivy Ross frames the episode's central mystery that has been unasked through previous episodes
- 4 (06:09) **The Machine Metaphor Problem** - Picard argues that biomedical science has been built on a flawed assumption that humans are molecular machines
- 5 (07:21) **Picard's Origin Story** - The scientist reveals his personal motivation from childhood experiences with his mother, a home-care nurse
- 6 (08:58) **The Human Genome Project's Failure** - Picard explains how the promise of genetic determinism collapsed
- 7 (15:30) **Treating Labels, Not People** - The machine model leads to treating everyone with the same diagnosis identically
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
We're sharing an episode Jonathan Cohen appeared on that we think you'll love. Jonathan joined the Phenomena Podcast to help close out its season on energy healing and we wanted to bring that conversation to you!
What is “energy” in energy healing? Every healer in this series uses the word. Every patient reaches for it. Ancient healing traditions built entire systems around it and modern researchers are striving to study it.
But what is energy biologically, physically, measurably and how does it move through the body to influence health and healing? In this episode, three renowned scientists offer remarkable visions that, taken together, start to answer this question.
Martin Picard, PhD, of Columbia University has spent his career studying mitochondria, the body's cellular power sources, and has found them far more connected to our inner experiences, our consciousness, than biomedicine ever assumed, and likely far more central to how we heal.
Richard Hammerschlag, PhD, co-authored the paper that helped define the modern science of the biofield: the organizing fields of energy and information that operate within the body and extend outward from it. Like the nested Qi fields of older traditions, these are dynamic interrelating layers — energy running all the way in and likely all the way out.
Neil Theise, MD, of NYU helped identify the interstitium, a remarkable recent major discovery of a fluid-filled network running throughout the body. Consistent with the intuitions of ancient healing systems, it may help explain how signals fundamental to health and healing actually travel, a new communication network in the body previously overlooked by modern medicine.
Together, these three voices present a compelling, eye-opening, and deeply human vision of the body and mind not as a machine, but as a dynamic energetic ecosystem.
Learn more about this episode and Phenomena Healing: https://www.phenomenahealing.com/phenomena-podcast-episode-6-jonathan-cohen
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