Qualitative Study

Vinu V et al. (2026) · Cureus

This qualitative study with 12 Pranic Healing facilitators (PHFs) from across India explored what practitioners themselves experience while performing Pranic Healing (PH), a non-touch energy-healing practice built on the idea of prana, a life-force energy that several traditions describe as flowing through the body and supporting health. PH works with the aura (the body's energy field) and chakras (energy centers), which practitioners say they can sense with trained hands. Most prior PH research measured outcomes in people receiving healing; this study instead asked the healers what happens to them. Researchers conducted 60- to 90-minute telephone interviews with 12 certified facilitators (six women, six men, average age 49, with 6-26 years of practice) from six regions of India, using 13 open-ended questions covering their experiential, psychological, and self-development perspectives. Responses were analyzed through inductive thematic coding, then reinterpreted using a critical-realist framework that separates what people directly experience, what actually happens during a session, and what deeper mechanism might explain both, building toward a layered model of the Pranic Healing process. Facilitators consistently described sensing energy through their palms during three practice steps: scanning (assessing a person's energy field), cleansing (clearing "depleted" or "congested" energy), and energizing (projecting fresh prana, sometimes visualized in specific colors), reporting sensations like warmth, tingling, pressure, and color perception. Beyond these practice-related experiences, facilitators reported broader personal change: greater calm and emotional stability (hedonic well-being, meaning feeling good) and a stronger sense of purpose, confidence, and compassion (eudaimonic well-being, meaning functioning well and realizing one's potential), which the authors frame as psychological flourishing. Several also linked their own recovery from minor complaints, like allergies or migraines, to self-practice, and a few described brief, uncomfortable sensations such as skin irritation or localized pain during sessions, managed with rituals like salt-water rinses. The authors stress these are the facilitators' own retrospective impressions, not measurements taken by researchers. The resulting model proposes that Pranic Healing techniques act as a trigger that interacts with body sensation, energy-field beliefs, psychological traits, and awareness to produce these reported experiences (a theory for future testing, not a proven mechanism). With only 12 participants, all experienced volunteers from one training organization in one country, the findings cannot be generalized to new practitioners, other cultures, or to people receiving PH as patients. No health condition was tested or treated in this study; it describes practitioner experience only, and future research with objective measures is needed.