The before and after of pranic energy work.

It started, almost by accident, in 1939. A Soviet electrical technician named Semyon Kirlian, working with high-frequency medical equipment in a hospital in Krasnodar, noticed that placing a finger or a leaf onto a photographic plate connected to a high-voltage source produced a faintly luminous halo on the developed image. The corona was a real physical phenomenon, the visible discharge of ionised air around the object. He and his wife Valentina spent the following decades refining the technique, which they named electrography. The field that grew up around it has since been called bioelectrography, gas discharge visualisation, and Kirlian photography. The modern computer-based version, GDV (Gas Discharge Visualization), was developed in the 1990s by the Russian physicist Konstantin Korotkov.

Within pranic energy work, Kirlian and GDV imaging has been used for decades as a visual record of what changes after a course of sessions. The before-and-after image plates that appear throughout the pranic literature, including the published work of practitioners trained in Grand Master Choa Kok Sui's lineage, are the most familiar example.

The image below shows the bioplasmic energy field around the body of a 62-year-old man living with diabetes and neurological problems, captured with a GDV camera before and after ten sessions of pranic energy work. In the first frame, the field is patchy, broken in places, dimmer in others. In the second, after the course of treatment, the field is fuller, more even, brighter at the edges. The difference is visible without explanation. The images were taken by the All India Yoga Vidya Pranic Healing Foundation Trust, with research conducted by Ms. Rama Devi, and published in Grand Master Choa Kok Sui's The Ancient Science and Art of Pranic Healing.2

“The photographs are not a clinical instrument. They are a record, taken in light, of something the body had already begun to know.”

What the body does in the same window the photographs span is consistent. People often describe a softening in the chest, a settled head, a sense that the day's accumulated noise has been gently brushed off. A heaviness lifts in the legs. A piece of fatigue, of the kind that follows a difficult few weeks, gives way. Some clients sleep that night more deeply than they have in months. The photographs are one record of the change. The body's own report is the other.

The trial literature points in the same direction. A 2017 randomised double-blind study found that adults receiving pranic energy work alongside their medication for mild and moderate depression improved more than those receiving medication and a mock treatment.1 Other trials in paediatric pain, in lower urinary tract symptoms, and in diabetic foot ulcer recovery have shown similar improvements over control conditions. The signal is consistent in direction. The photographs are older than the trials, but they have been pointing the same way the whole time.

How a session at Balans unfolds is unhurried. A short consultation first, in which the practitioner reads what is happening in the body and in everyday life, and shapes a plan. The session itself, the protocol of scan, sweep, and energise, performed at a consistent distance from the body. A quiet rest afterwards. Most clients leave noticeably lighter than they arrived.