Cuddling, also known as snuggling, has benefits.
Namely, cuddling releases oxytocin and serotonin. That makes you feel good.
That means that when you’re sore and irritable, cuddling can make you feel better.
“Energy healing” and “energy work” aren’t fundamental concepts in Western medicine yet that doesn’t stop you from hearing about them.
You’ll also hear about energy healing connected with concepts like “life force” and “chi.” The concepts themself are hard to study objectively, though you certainly can measure the effects.
Concerning energy healing, you’ll hear about things like meditation, aromatherapy, crystal healing, acupuncture, and so forth.
Even distance healing!
Rarely something like cuddling.
Cuddling isn’t typically for sale, though one could pay for it. There’s little commercial incentive to promote it as energy healing. That doesn’t stop some entrepreneurs from trying.
It’s usually the byproduct of being in a relationship with another person.
How cuddling is energy healing
Cuddling can help your overall health by helping you lose weight, decrease blood pressure, and boost your immune system. There’s even a best-selling book targeted toward women that posits cuddling is an anecdote to burnout and stress. While it may be more generally socially acceptable for women to enjoy non-sexual cuddling, it also has a feel-good effect on men. Both sexes release hormones like oxytocin and serotonin when cuddling.
The concept of energy healing can go far beyond those things and into other areas besides cuddling. Many of them are free, too. By having a handle on energy healing, you can design a regenerative program for yourself where you’re more likely to be in great health.
To do that, you need to acknowledge the potential power of energy healing and realize there’s no good way to measure it beyond general effects and how it makes you feel.
Basic cuddling positions
Cuddling is the act of snuggling between two or more partners. The partners can be people, young or old, or pets.
Snuggle and cuddle mean the same thing.
When it comes to cuddling positions, it can involve a lot of skin-on-skin contact such as an arm and a leg draped over a partner when laying on a bed or sofa. Conversely, it can involve somewhat less contact, such as a head placed in the bend of an arm.
Cuddling can also be one person laying on top of another.
Or two (usually) people laying side-by-side spooning.
Those basic cuddling positions are often the most comfortable and therefore the most popular.
Whatever the position, any definition of cuddling would involve feeling good. If it didn’t feel good, it wouldn’t be relaxing. If it wasn’t relaxing, then it wouldn’t be cuddling.
What’s energy healing?
When people talk about healing, when they mean depends on their experiences. They can be referring to the removal or absence of symptoms, maximizing the way their body, mind, and spirit functions, and/or the remission or absence of an illness. Of necessity, it’s a broad concept.
Energy healing refers to changing the vibration of something to put it in balance.
There doesn’t seem to be a reputable way to measure this vibrational frequency, though several people on the internet will do it if you send them 15 dollars. Whether they can actually do this is questionable. There aren’t professional standards for doing this.
Instruments that measure something typically need to be calibrated. That’s how you ensure objectivity. Professional grade scales that measure loads on trucks are calibrated. So are gas pumps. A device that measures glucose (blood sugar) is calibrated by applying test solutions that produce a high reading and a low reading. If it doesn’t produce a result in the expected range when the solution is applied to a test strip, then you know that the monitor isn’t working.
How would you calibrate a device that measured someone’s vibrational frequency? This leads us to ask how you’d test for someone’s vibrational frequency? How could you test the monitor against a known quantity of vibration?
That doesn’t mean that this idea of vibration doesn’t exist. It does mean it’s non-scientific. It’s intangible. We’ve all been around people that have given us the creeps. Sometimes there’s a reason for it. Sometimes we’re picking up some information about them that is helping to keep us safe. It’s a form of Spidey Sense.
However, your Spidey Sense could actually be an unconscious bias against an unfamiliar circumstance. Be careful. Bias can be an efficient shorthand for making decisions but because it can obscure you from seeing the truth bias can easily lead you to the wrong one.
Many people also report getting a certain feeling from a pet or a person when they walk into a room. You can tell when they’re happy, sad, angry, or projecting a completely different emotion.
It bears repeating: just because it’s not material doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
Keep the idea of energy healing simple and useful
You can take this idea of energy healing and make it extremely complicated. You can study auras, meridians, chakras, and all of the other ideas of the various things affecting this “energy body” that seems to, directly and indirectly, affect your physical body.
This can lead you down some dubious pathways.
The thing is if you can’t measure your vibrational frequency and you realize that when you feel better, you’re going to be at a higher vibrational frequency, you should concentrate on doing the things that are going to make you feel better. That should ensure you’re at a higher vibrational frequency.
Expressed mathematically: feeling better = higher vibrational frequency.
Money is a limited resource. You definitely wouldn’t want to spend a lot of money on energy healing if there are so many free avenues to explore. You’d want to optimize the free ones.
Cuddle with your pets and loved ones. Cuddling is shown to help our relationships and our general health.
Go for walks on beautiful days.
Stretch. Yoga. All of these things should help the flow of your life force.
React positively to stress. Keep troubles in perspective.
Make sure to get enough sleep.
Practice earthing.
Eat a diet that doesn’t stress your muscles and joints.
Other ideas like surrounding yourself with gemstones and meditating can help your energy field flow better and heal. If that appeals to you, do it. It’s a fine excuse to buy or go looking for some cool-looking rocks. What else are you going to do with them?
Like a prism of light that flows through a crystal, the gemstone is supposed to focus your energy field in a new way. You can’t test for this because you can’t test your energy field. A cure from a placebo is as good as healing from something that’s not. Healing is what should matter.
Further reading:
Why you need to play every day.
Updated Oct. 28, 2022
James Cobb, RN, MSN, is an emergency department nurse and the founder of the Dream Recovery System. His goal is to provide his readers with simple, actionable ways to improve their health and maximize their quality of life.
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