In kindergarten, my father would take me to constructions sites and explain combustion engines and hydraulics. In grade school, he taught me physics and chemistry, and helped me build a radio from a kit. Our quality time revolved around science.

When I was 11, a friend who loved fantasy novels told me that he felt energy from trees. I tried, and felt a warm tingling. Was that energy or just imagination? I have no idea, but I knew I had to understand it. I began exploring energy every day, developing insights that would serve as the foundation of my later work.

My father was the kind of atheist who made fun of psychics and religious people, so I didn’t dare tell him about it. When that friend lost interest, I didn’t know anyone else who felt energy, so I never talked about it. In college, I joined a pagan club in the hopes of finding community, but when I shared my energy work, no one seemed interested. I learned that my approach to energy was unique, and as an awkward teen, that only added to my isolation. I couldn’t connect with anyone, and after a couple years, I gave up on finding community.

In my 20s, I started dating a woman, Lisa, who would become one of the great loves of my life. She’d had psychic intuitions as a kid, but had turned them off to fit in, and like me, she’d never talked about them with anyone. I helped her re-awaken that part of herself, and we explored energy together for 8 years.

The first healing techniques I developed were for her. She had chronic knee pain, and had given up running years earlier. Whenever her knees would hurt, like after dancing or gardening, I’d adjust their energy, and after three months, her pain had mostly stopped, and she began running again. Later, working night shifts as a nurse, Lisa developed chronic hives. Despite the best medical care, her itching kept getting worse. Neither of us thought I could help, but one evening she told me, “If I knew I was going to be like this the rest of my life, I’d kill myself.” We began working together to develop new healing techniques, combining my knowledge of energy with her knowledge of Western medicine. I started by adjusting the energy of her skin, but after an hour, nothing had happened. Next, I tried adjusting the energy of her nerves, focusing on the ones carrying the itch signal, and within half an hour, her itching dropped from 8/10 to 4/10. A few weeks later, we added one more energy adjustment, and the next morning she woke up without hives for the first time in nearly a year.  Results like that drove me to leave my 6-figure tech job and devote myself to energy.

Over the next several years, I developed techniques for observing the structures that guide energy through the body, techniques for working with the deeper layers of a person’s energy field, and other techniques that gave me visibility into this invisible world.  Longing for community, I also started blogging — Lisa edited all my posts — and I met biofield researchers and initiates from various traditions. But I didn’t meet anyone with similar techniques for observing and understanding energy, and I still haven’t to this day, except for what I taught Lisa.

In 2014, I found out Lisa had cancer. We had broken up and lost touch, but we reconnected, and for months I flew out to help take care of her. I also developed new healing techniques to make adjustments deeper in her biofield, and I saw her pain decrease and her sleep improve after our sessions.

I also developed a technique designed to get her immune system to respond to her cancer. And it did, but she’d had two rounds of chemotherapy by then, and her body wasn’t strong enough to handle the immune response. She went into sepsis and we had to turn off the energy. She died two months later.

But she inspired me. Lisa had always believed in my energy even more than I did, and always wanted me to share it with the world. And working with her, I had seen what we could do with energy if only we understood how the biofield interacts with organs, cells, and atoms. A few months later, I started Healing Lab.

I knew nothing about marketing, sales, or any business aspects of a healing practice. At every networking opportunity, I tensed up, expecting the rejection I’d experienced in college. And every setback fueled my self-doubt: Maybe I wasn’t good enough to do this professionally. Or maybe my father was right, and energy was all placebo and imagination. For two years, I waded through this resistance and fear.

I found inspiration in my clients: A woman with arthritis and hip pain, who’d had one hip replaced and was thinking of replacing the other. She came to me with hip pain at 7/10, and after our work her hip pain dropped to a 3. Another client had psoriasis for decades, and after working with me her itching stopped. And a friend with insomnia had slept 3-4 hours a night for years, and after working with me was sleeping 6-7 hours a night.

I found peace in peer-reviewed research, which provides strong evidence that, not only does energy exist, but it affects humans, animals, plants, cells in a Petri dish, and even inanimate matter.

And I found confidence in the classes I taught, where we’d play energy games, such as: Blindfold your partner and send energy to one of their hands. Don’t tell them which one, and don’t touch them. Using only your energy, get them to feel it. And I saw how, with training, students were getting up to 90% accuracy. (Class schedule.)

As my doubts evaporated, I reconnected with the curiosity that drove me to explore energy in the first place. And, with the knowledge and experience I’d gained, I was finally able to express my vision:

Every few generations, humanity discovers a phenomenon that’s missing from the science of the day. In the 17th century, we observed single-cell organisms for the first time, which led to vaccines, antibiotics, and modern medicine. In the 18th century, we discovered oxygen’s role in combustion, leading to chemistry and modern transportation. In the 20th century, we unraveled quantum physics, which has already led to transistors and computers. The modern world was built by exploring these anomalies.

Today, the anomaly is biofield energy. It’s not yet understood by physics, but there’s mounting evidence that it affects humans, cells in a Petri dish, plants, even inanimate matter. Placebo-controlled trials show its impact on people with pain and other conditions. In my own work, I’ve seen how understanding this energy leads to better healing techniques for people with conditions like hives, psoriasis, and cancer.

But beyond healing: Understanding how biofield energy interacts with cells and atoms will lead to breakthroughs in biology, chemistry, and physics, and the next generation of technology.

Biofield energy will drive the next scientific revolution.