Spirituality versus Science?

When it comes to our wellbeing (or more often the absence of it) we get curious and ask many questions to solve the riddle of how to gain (back) our health. What is the best way to feel better? What is the fastest way? What interventions are the most efficient?

But asking these questions more often seems like going down a rabbit hole. With a market that is flooded with health coaches, specialised physicians, so-called health experts, healers and many more, it appears that everybody seems to have a different answer. The problem: the different “solutions” contradict each other.

Consider the topic of a healthy diet where one expert tells you to eat a certain type food on a daily basis (say animal protein) and another one tells you to avoid it under any circumstances and maybe consider to completely vegan diet. But not only do the experts contradict themselves on the details of a matter. They also choose to oppose each other completely by representing fundamentally different overarching approaches. In the example above one might recommend to look at food from a scientific approach and analyse its nutritional value. A spiritual guide might tell you that any kind of food could serve you as long as you energise it spiritually.

As a Reiki Healer and Psychologist and am both, a believer of spirituality and science. I, in fact, energise my food (especially animal products) before consuming it. I do not only notice a change in how I digest the food, I can even taste a difference and the leftovers rotten much slower and less mouldy.

When society talks about health, the majority seems to have no trouble at all to accept scientific findings, but gets doubtful or sceptic when spiritual explanations are presented. Often enough people who share spiritual experiences are looked at with raised brows and disbelief. When people use a word like “faith”, they are being doubted, but if the scientific community uses the word “placebo”, they trust it. But did you know that the placebo effect is not explained by science to this day? Did you know that this is just a word for a black box that we do not know the inside of? The placebo effect describes an unexplained efficiency of an intervention. It seems like the world is split between two disciplines – spirituality and science. But are these two really separate from each other?

In the example above, does it really matter if we call it “placebo effect” or “having faith”? Neither of the disciplines know for sure what happens when be believe something will help us (a certain vitamin for example). The placebo effect as well as the faith in the vitamin will both do their job: improve our health.

So, are spirituality and science really opposing each other? My clear and loud answer is: no. They actually complement each other wonderfully and prove each other’s point.

What could be an intimate and one of the most profound relationships the world has ever seen, is cursed by society to be fighting each other and going through the worst divorce in history. I think we should do a step into the right direction and stop being that being the vindictive mother-in-law everyone fears to get. Bring those two lovers back together and let them embrace their knowledge and enlighten the world on the topic of wellbeing and health.

Spirituality has long spoken about energy, how we (as humans) can channel it and how it benefits our health. It can even benefit our pet’s health, nature’s and the world’s. Science slowly slowly catches up and shows the effect of Reiki Energy on water molecules and how they arrange differently when frozen.

I was born with a close relationship to the spiritual world, I got repelled by any spirituality while growing up when learning that I “should fear God”, I became a major sceptic and science-driven Psychologist and I re-discovered spirituality more authentically and with a genuine relationship to the spiritual world only to discover that these different disciplines actually try to explain the same thing and serve the same thing. When becoming an Empathetic Communications Trainer, I learned one profound principle: two seemingly opposing things can be true at the same time and we do not have to choose between them. We may allow both to co-exist at the same time.

This one principle freed my mind and I could follow my curiosity and logical, analytical thinking as a Psychologist as well as lean into the universal energy of Reiki which shows me messages from a different world and sends be energy whenever I or someone else needs it.