Soul Trine Research Review
Research week: September 12 to 18, 2026
There is something deeply affirming about watching research begin to measure what many of us have already experienced through our bodies, our spiritual practices, and our work with others.
I do not mean that holistic services need science to make them real. People have long understood that stress can settle into the body, that touch can change how safe we feel, that breath can shift our state, and that spiritual practices can help us make meaning from what we are carrying. Research is not creating those connections. It is developing more ways to observe, describe, and discuss them.
What excites me is what may become possible as that language grows.
For too long, conventional medicine and holistic care have often been treated as if they belong in separate conversations. One addresses the diagnosis while the other supports the person living inside it. One measures symptoms while the other may help someone work with stress, pain, rest, emotion, meaning, and their relationship with their own body.
We are not at full integration yet, but I believe we are moving closer to a model where these forms of care can communicate without competing. Holistic services do not need to replace medicine to be valuable, and medical care does not have to account for every part of a person’s experience in order to remain necessary. The opportunity is to understand where each form of support belongs and how they may work together around the needs of the whole person.
That is where I want the Soul Trine Research Review to live.
Each week, I will look at research across mind, body, and spirit, not because every experience needs to be proven, but because better understanding can create better choices. Some findings will confirm what many people have already felt. Some will challenge the claims made within holistic spaces. Others will show us where the research is still too limited to answer the questions people are actually asking.
The purpose is not to hand you conclusions. It is to help you understand what the research may mean for your care, your development, and the way you make sense of your own experience. Thanks for reading Soul Trine Ascend! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
1. Learning to trust your intuition does not mean treating every feeling as a message.
If you are developing your intuition, one of the hardest parts may not be receiving information. It may be understanding what you received. A feeling can arrive quickly. An image may flash through your mind. You may know something before you can explain how you know it. Then the questions begin. Was that intuition? Fear? Memory? Projection? Something psychic? A mixture of more than one thing?
This is not an abstract question in my work. I am a psychic, and I teach psychic and intuitive development. I help people recognize how information reaches them, how it moves through their own internal language, and how easily the meaning we assign can become mixed with the impression itself.
Psychology gives us one helpful piece of the picture. It describes ordinary intuition as the mind recognizing patterns so quickly that the conclusion arrives before the conscious explanation. You may notice a subtle change in someone’s voice, breathing, posture, or behavior without realizing how many small details you took in. Your mind connects them, and the knowing appears first.
That is one way intuition can work. It is not an explanation for every intuitive or psychic experience, and the research linked here was not designed to study clairvoyance, mediumship, or other psychic abilities. It should not be used to collapse every form of knowing into pattern recognition. It also should not be used as proof of experiences it did not study.
For your own development, the useful lesson is not to distrust yourself. It is to become more curious about how the information arrived.
Did it feel quiet or urgent?
Did the impression come first, or did a story begin immediately?
Does it repeat when you are calm?
Are you sensing something in the present, or is an old experience shaping what you expect to find?
Discernment does not weaken intuition. It helps you build a clearer relationship with it. You can honor what you receive without forcing certainty before you understand it. And when the information involves another person, you can offer it without taking authority over their life: “This is what I am receiving. Does it resonate with you?”
Read: Psychology Today’s overview of intuition
2. You may not be bad at meditation. You may need a different kind.
Many people decide they cannot meditate because they cannot make their thoughts disappear. Others try a practice that asks them to turn inward and discover that it makes them more restless, emotional, or disconnected. That does not automatically mean they failed. Meditation is not one single activity, and different practices ask different things from the mind.
A 2026 study gives us a small glimpse of that difference. Researchers worked with 12 experienced Buddhist monks and compared two forms of meditation. Samatha is generally a concentration practice used to cultivate steadiness and calm. Vipassana emphasizes observing experience and developing insight into what is arising. The researchers used a brain-scanning method that records tiny magnetic signals produced by brain activity. They found different patterns during the two practices.
Twelve monks are far too few to tell us how every person’s brain responds to meditation. The study also does not tell us that one practice is better, deeper, or more spiritual than the other. What it supports is a much more practical idea: changing the type of attention can change the experience.
If meditation has felt difficult, it may help to ask what you actually need.
Do you need a single point of focus to settle your mind?
Space to observe without reacting?
A guided voice?
Prayer?
Visualization?
Movement before stillness?
Permission to keep your eyes open?
A practice that calms one person may make another feel trapped inside their thoughts or too far away from their surroundings. This can be especially important if you have experienced trauma or periods of feeling disconnected from your body or environment. You are allowed to adjust the practice, shorten it, remain oriented to the room, or choose a different form entirely.
A brain scan can show that two practices affect attention differently. It cannot tell us what the experience meant to the person, what they understood spiritually, or how it changed the way they met their life afterward.
Read: Overview of the meditation study
3. Breathwork can change your state quickly, which is why your choice matters
Breathwork is sometimes presented as if it is automatically gentle because breathing is natural. But not every breathing practice is calming, and not every body needs more intensity.
The practice in this study was conscious connected breathwork. Instead of breathing normally or taking an occasional deep breath, participants used a continuous breathing pattern with little or no pause between the inhale and exhale. This kind of breathing can create strong physical and emotional sensations. It is different from the slower breathing often used to settle the nervous system.
Researchers assigned 107 adults either to six weekly 90-minute online breathwork sessions or to a waitlist. A waitlist means those participants did not receive the sessions during the study and served as the comparison group. Anxiety scores improved much more in the breathwork group.
That is encouraging, but it does not tell us whether this form of breathwork works better than gentle breathing, meditation, supportive group attention, therapy, or another active practice. Most participants were white women, so we also cannot assume every community will respond in the same way. The researcher disclosed that he had previously worked as a breathwork facilitator, which is another reason the finding should be followed by more independent research.
What matters for you is that a powerful response is not automatically a better response. Before joining an intense breathwork experience, you should know what kind of breathing you will be doing, what sensations may occur, whether the facilitator screens for health or trauma concerns, and what support is available if you become overwhelmed.
You should also be able to slow down, return to normal breathing, or stop without being told that resistance is part of the process. Consent does not end when the session begins. Breathwork may be supportive, but it should not require you to override your body in order to prove that you are open to the experience.
Read the study: Blake, Journal of Affective Disorders
4. What Reiki research means for the person receiving it
Most people don't come to Reiki to debate how it works. They come because they feel overwhelmed, disconnected, emotionally heavy, or simply curious about what may shift when they are given space to become still.
The experience is not the same for everyone. Some people feel warmth, tingling, or movement. Some notice emotion rising. Some become deeply relaxed. Others do not feel much during the session but recognize later that something in them feels quieter, clearer, or less compressed. There is no single response a person is required to have for the session to be meaningful.
Researchers have tried to measure some of these outcomes, particularly pain, anxiety, relaxation, and quality of life. Some studies have reported improvement, but the research as a whole is still inconsistent. In plain language, there are encouraging findings, but not enough strong evidence to predict what Reiki will do for a particular person or to present it as medical treatment.
That uncertainty does not erase what someone experiences. Research is designed to answer specific questions under controlled conditions. A Reiki session can also involve rest, spiritual connection, personal meaning, and a sense of being supported. Those parts of the experience are real to the receiver even when they are difficult to measure or explain in a lab.
As a multidisciplinary Reiki Master and energy worker for over a decade, I believe the most honest invitation is also the simplest: you don't have to arrive convinced, and you don't have to perform a response. You can notice what you feel, what you do not feel, and what becomes clearer afterward. Reiki can be part of your spiritual and personal care without being asked to replace the medical or mental-health care you may also need.
The question does not always have to be, “Can research prove every part of this?” Sometimes the more useful question is, “What did this experience make possible for me?”
Read: NCCIH’s Reiki evidence summary and a review of Reiki for pain and anxiety
5. If you live with migraines, relief can mean more than fewer attacks
When you live with migraines, the experience may not stay neatly contained in your head. Your neck may feel guarded. Your shoulders may tighten. Light, sound and movement may become difficult to tolerate. Even between attacks, you may notice yourself bracing for the next one.
That is why this study matters. Researchers followed 99 adults with episodic migraine and placed them in three groups: neck exercise alone, neck exercise with Mulligan manual therapy, or neck exercise with sham manual therapy.
Those names need translation. Manual therapy is a broad term for care in which a trained professional uses their hands to work with muscles, joints or movement. Massage is one kind of manual therapy, but the technique tested here was not massage. Mulligan manual therapy is a physical therapy approach. The clinician generally uses their hands to apply a gentle, sustained glide to part of the neck while the person actively moves their head. The intention is to make that movement easier or more comfortable.
Sham manual therapy is a simulated comparison used in research. The person receives hands-on contact that resembles the treatment, but without the specific joint glide the actual technique is designed to provide. This helps researchers separate the possible effect of the technique from the effects of touch, attention, expectation, and participating in something that feels like treatment.
Adding the actual Mulligan technique did not lead to fewer migraine attacks. It did, however, help with some measures of daily functioning in the short term and neck movement later on.
For someone receiving bodywork, the finding offers a clearer way to think about relief. A session may not prevent the neurological process that causes migraine, but it may still help with the tension, restricted movement, stress, or sense of physical guarding that can surround the experience.
The question becomes personal: what would make support worthwhile for you? Fewer attacks may be the outcome you want most, but it is not the only outcome that can improve your quality of life. Easier neck movement, more comfortable rest, less jaw or shoulder tension, and feeling less braced between episodes may also matter.
Bodywork should not be presented as a cure for migraine or a replacement for medical evaluation. It can be one part of how you care for the body that is carrying the migraine experience. A practitioner should be willing to listen to what you need that day, adjust pressure and sensory input, and understand that sometimes the most helpful session is the one that asks the least from you.
Read the trial: Satpute, Bedekar and Hall
6. You do not have to move harder for movement to count
Not everyone feels supported by fast, forceful, or highly demanding movement. Sometimes the body is tired. Sometimes pain has made movement feel risky. Sometimes you are rebuilding trust after a long period of stress, illness, or inactivity. In those moments, being told to push harder can make movement feel even farther away.
Two new studies offer another way to look at it. In one, 46 sedentary postmenopausal women practiced Baguazhang for 12 weeks. The researchers found improvements in blood pressure and in measurements connected to how the body regulates heart rate. The study was small, and it did not compare Baguazhang with another type of exercise, so we cannot say that this specific practice was the only reason for the change.
The second study looked closely at how 16 experienced Tai Chi practitioners coordinated their muscles during a heel-kick movement. It was not designed to prove pain relief or determine whether Tai Chi is better than another practice. What it did show is that a movement can look slow on the outside while requiring complex timing, balance, and control on the inside.
The larger message is permission. Gentle movement is not lesser movement. Slow movement can still ask your body to coordinate, balance, breathe, focus and adapt. It can give you a way to notice what feels available without forcing your body to prove anything.
If you have been disconnected from movement, the first meaningful change may not be greater flexibility or endurance. It may be feeling safe enough to stay present while you move. Progress can begin with less fear, more choice and a growing sense that your body is working with you again.
Read: Baguazhang randomized trial and Tai Chi coordination study
The thread running through all six findings
Research is most useful when it makes our work more precise, not smaller.
This week’s evidence does not ask us to choose science over spirit, or intuition over discernment, or hands-on care over medical care. It asks us to become clearer about what each form of support can and cannot claim.
The mind interprets. The body communicates. The spirit makes meaning. None of those should be reduced to the others, and none should be allowed to operate without consent, care, and humility.
At Soul Trine, that means meeting the person who arrived through the doorway that made sense to them. Sometimes that doorway is massage. Sometimes it is Reiki, psychic development, spiritual guidance, meditation or breath. The work is not to force everyone through the same doorway. It is to help them notice the fuller house.
Explore Soul Trine’s writing and resources or view current sessions and experiences.
This article is educational and is not medical or mental-health advice. Complementary practices should not delay appropriate care.