A surge in ‘energy healing’ searches points to something deeper

If you’ve found yourself Googling “how to be spiritual” or “energy healing” lately, you’re in good company. Searches for the former just hit a 15-year high, while interest in energy healing has reached an all-time high in 2026, according to the search engine.

Something is shifting in the composition of spirituality, and millions of Americans are turning to their search bars to make sense of it. For Rolene Jaffe, the search spike makes perfect sense.

“We are all traumatized right now,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Jaffe has spent more than 30 years practicing what many would call spiritual healing — including the idea that emotional pain lives in the body, not just the mind, and that real recovery means addressing both.

Rolene Jaffe has spent more than 30 years practicing what many would call spiritual healing — including the idea that emotional pain lives in the body, not just the mind. (Hyosub Shin/AJC)

Science has been building the case right alongside her. Neuroscience research has consistently shown that trauma induces persistent changes in the nervous system, leaving the body physiologically anchored in survival mode long after the threat is gone. It’s also the backbone of Dutch American psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s 2014 book “The Body Keeps the Score,” which has spent years on The New York Times bestseller list.

Jaffe works at this intersection through modalities including Reiki, emotional freedom technique tapping and journey work. She’s deliberate about how she describes herself.

“Don’t use the word therapist for me at all,” she says. “That’s why I call myself a multidimensional healer.”

She describes her work as getting out of the mind entirely and dropping into the body instead. Where traditional talk therapy asks you to narrate your history, her approach asks your body to tell it.

“You literally don’t have to tell me anything about you,” she says. “Even if you talk to me for six months, how do I know where to go? How do I know which is the most challenging issue that you have in your life?”

Instead, she guides clients inward. A meditation, a body scan, a visualization. She asks them to find the part of the body that feels different, step inside it and start to look around. What does it look like? What emotion is radiating from the walls? When was the first time you felt that way? The answers, she says, come not from memory but from the body itself.

“You know when you get that kick in the gut? That’s the body saying no.”

The results, she says, can be visceral and immediate. After three decades of practice, she has seen clients leave sessions having shifted something they’d carried for years. The work isn’t always comfortable.

“The spiritual journey is not an easy one. Hell no, baby. You think I’m on the spiritual journey and it’s just going up and up and I always feel good. No, not at all. It’s really tough. Because ignorance isn’t bliss.”

Rolene Jaffe, holding her Rise & Radiate oracle cards, describes her work as getting out of the mind and dropping into the body. “The spiritual journey is not an easy one,” she says. (Hyosub Shin/AJC)

The hunger Jaffe describes in her practice is showing up everywhere. Beyond the search data, the global somatic therapy market is projected to nearly triple by 2032, reaching $12.4 billion, according to market research firm Coherent Market Insights. Spiritual stores are breaking out in local search, according to Google Trends data. Oracle decks, aura readings and new moon rituals are no longer considered “woo woo.” They’re a normal night.

For Jaffe, the cosmic and the cellular have always been linked. It’s a belief she has spent about half her life building — and one she recently distilled into her own Rise & Radiate oracle cards, released last December.