In September 2025, the California Institute for Human Science co-hosted the Biofield Science & Healing Collaboratory with UC San Diego and the Consciousness and Healing Initiative, bringing together researchers, clinicians, healers, faculty, students, and institutional leaders for a three-day exploration of consciousness, healing, subtle energy, and the future of integrative science.

Held September 24–26, 2025, the collaboratory unfolded across multiple sites. Wednesday’s program took place at UC San Diego, Thursday’s gathering was hosted exclusively at CIHS, and Friday’s program included events at both UC San Diego and CIHS. The week then culminated on Saturday with CIHS’s 2025 graduation ceremony, creating a meaningful arc from research and dialogue to student achievement and institutional celebration.

For CIHS, the collaboratory was more than a conference. It reflected the Institute’s long-standing commitment to the scientific, philosophical, and experiential study of consciousness, healing, subtle energy, and human transformation.

Key Voices

Scientists shaping the field

Shamini Jain, Ph.D.

Founder of the Consciousness and Healing Initiative and a leading voice in biofield science and healing research.

Arnaud Delorme, Ph.D.

Co-creator of EEGLAB and an internationally recognized researcher in EEG, consciousness, and brain dynamics.

Beverly Rubik, Ph.D.

Biofield researcher, biophysicist, and CIHS Lead Faculty member whose work helped shape the field.

Shamini Jain and the Science of Healing

The first full day of programming opened at UC San Diego with Shamini Jain, Ph.D., founder of the Consciousness and Healing Initiative and a longtime friend of CIHS. Jain played a central role in helping bring the collaboratory together and in inviting CIHS into the event as a co-hosting institution.

Her presentation, “Biofield Healing Science: Progress and Potential,” framed biofield healing as an emerging field of scientific inquiry with implications for medicine, health, and human development. Jain’s work has long focused on building bridges between rigorous research, healing practice, and expanded models of health. Her presence at the collaboratory helped establish the event’s core orientation: a serious scientific engagement with forms of healing that have often been marginalized, misunderstood, or left outside conventional biomedical frameworks.

Jain’s talk invited participants to consider how healing may involve not only biochemical or mechanical processes, but also dimensions of relationship, consciousness, intention, and subtle energetic exchange. This orientation resonated deeply with CIHS’s founding vision: that mind, body, spirit, and science must be brought into conversation rather than separated into competing domains.

Arnaud Delorme and the Measurement of Healing Connection

Arnaud Delorme, Ph.D., followed with a presentation titled “Linking EEG Dynamics to Biological Processes in the Context of Biofield Studies.” Delorme is an internationally significant figure in EEG research. He is widely known as a co-creator of EEGLAB, one of the foundational open-source software environments used for EEG analysis, and his work has helped shape contemporary methods for studying brain dynamics.

At the collaboratory, Delorme discussed research assessing the impact of energy healing on brainwave coherence between human energy healers and mice. In the study design he presented, the human healers wore EEG equipment while the mice had intracranial EEG recordings, allowing researchers to explore whether measurable patterns of synchrony could be detected between the human healers and the animal subjects.

The research pointed toward evidence of brainwave synchrony between human healers and mice, raising provocative questions about interspecies connection, biofield interaction, and the physiological correlates of healing intention. Rather than treating healing solely as subjective experience, Delorme’s presentation focused on how biofield-related effects might be measured through sophisticated electrophysiological tools.

For CIHS, this work is especially relevant. It sits precisely at the intersection of consciousness studies, subtle energy research, neuroscience, and the methodological challenges of studying phenomena that do not fit neatly within inherited scientific assumptions.

Clinical Practice, Integrative Medicine, and the Biofield

One of the major Wednesday sessions was the panel “Energize Your Practice: Integrating Biofield Therapies into Clinical Care,” featuring Mimi Guarneri, M.D., Rauni Prittinen King, M.I.H., R.N., Dan Vicario, M.D., and Cassandra Vieten, Ph.D.

The panel brought together leaders with deep experience in integrative medicine, nursing, oncology, mindfulness, consciousness research, and clinical care to explore how biofield therapies can be responsibly integrated into practice.

Mimi Guarneri is a leading physician in integrative medicine and cardiology whose work has helped advance whole-person approaches to healthcare. Rauni Prittinen King has been a major figure in Healing Touch education, holistic nursing, and biofield practice. Dan Vicario has spent decades at the intersection of oncology, integrative medicine, and healing-centered care. Cassandra Vieten brings a research and clinical background in mindfulness, consciousness, psychology, and integrative health.

Together, the panel helped translate the collaboratory’s larger scientific questions into clinical and professional practice. How can biofield therapies be brought responsibly into care settings? What standards, training, and research are needed? How can clinicians remain open to healing practices that extend beyond conventional models while still maintaining rigor, discernment, and ethical responsibility?

The panel made clear that biofield science is not only a theoretical or laboratory question. It is also a practical question for healthcare, healing, and the future of integrative clinical work.

Biology, Coherence, and Biofield Devices

The Wednesday program continued with presentations exploring biology, coherence, and the state of biofield measurement.

Hemal Patel, Ph.D., presented “Impact of Coherence Healing on Biology,” continuing the collaboratory’s effort to connect healing practices with measurable biological processes. Patel’s work helped extend the conversation from subjective experience into physiology, asking how healing practices may influence cellular or biological systems.

Beverly Rubik, Ph.D., a pioneering biofield researcher and Lead Faculty member at CIHS, presented “Biofield Devices: History and State of the Art.” Rubik’s talk was especially significant for CIHS because of the Institute’s own history in subtle energy research, biofield measurement, and laboratory inquiry. Her presentation situated contemporary biofield devices within a longer arc of frontier science, energy medicine, and attempts to measure the fields and subtle dynamics of living systems.

Rubik’s presence also reflected the continuity between CIHS’s historical mission and the future of biofield science. CIHS has long been a place where the measurement of subtle energy, consciousness, and spiritual experience is treated not as a fringe curiosity but as a serious field of inquiry.

The day closed with a group sound healing practice led by Eileen McKusick, a current CIHS Ph.D. student in Integral Health and founder of Biofield Tuning. Her closing practice brought the day’s scientific and clinical dialogue back into embodied experience, reminding participants that biofield science is not only something to analyze from a distance. It is also something many practitioners and participants encounter through lived, relational, and somatic practice.

CIHS Hosts the Integral Noetic Sciences Retreat

On Thursday, September 25, the collaboratory programming transitioned to CIHS, as CIHS hosted the First Annual Integral Noetic Science Student Retreat. The day brought CIHS students, trustees, UC San Diego guests, faculty, and community members to the CIHS campus to explore the Institute’s history, research identity, and laboratory traditions.

The retreat was designed to help Integral Noetic Sciences students see the campus, meet faculty and guests, and learn about the history and current state of biofield science and measurement at CIHS. It also highlighted CIHS’s long-standing role as an educational institution devoted to subtle energy research, consciousness studies, and integrative models of human development.

The day opened with a welcome from Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, Ph.D., Dean of Integral Education and Program Director for Integral Noetic Sciences, followed by an experiential breathwork and meditation practice led by CIHS student Patty MacRae.

Richard Jelusich, Ph.D., CIHS Board Chair, presented on the history of CIHS and the research of Dr. Hiroshi Motoyama, whose work in consciousness, subtle energy, and spiritual science remains foundational to the Institute’s identity. Drew Pierson, D.A.O.M., then presented on applied devices of neuroscience and neurofeedback for health and human performance.

Cindy Reed, R.N., Ph.D., CIHS Trustee and Director of Research at the Tiller Foundation, presented on the Intention Host Device, continuing the day’s exploration of consciousness, intention, technology, and subtle energy research.

A central feature of the CIHS day was the laboratory tour, which included CIHS’s Faraday cage and biophoton counter, along with technologies such as Bio-Well, AMI, and related biofield measurement devices. The lab portion was led by Sarah Roche, Ph.D., CIHS Laboratory Director; Gaetan Chevalier, Ph.D., adjunct faculty and Director of Research at Psy-Tek Labs; and Bob Hertz, founder of Psy-Tek Labs.

The day also included student research exchange sessions and speed networking, supporting the development of a living scholarly community around noetic science, biofield research, and subtle energy inquiry.

Friday: Student Pathways and Integral Research

On Friday, September 26, the collaboratory continued with events at both UC San Diego and CIHS. The CIHS programming focused on future directions, student pathways, and the development of the field. CIHS-related programming included experiential practice, career-track conversations for Integral Noetic Sciences students, and discussion of possible pathways in academia and research, client-focused healing and coaching, and organizational work.

The Friday CIHS schedule also included an INS update and a discussion of integral research led by Sean Esbjörn-Hargens. These sessions helped translate the collaboratory’s larger intellectual and scientific questions into student pathways, research directions, and professional possibilities.

For CIHS students, the event was not only about attending presentations. It was about seeing how their studies may connect with research, healing practice, technology development, consciousness studies, and emerging professional fields.

From Collaboratory to Graduation

The three-day collaboratory was followed by CIHS’s 2025 graduation ceremony on Saturday, creating a meaningful culmination to the week. After several days devoted to consciousness, healing, subtle energy, scientific inquiry, and the future of the biofield, the graduation ceremony brought the focus back to CIHS students and the Institute’s educational mission.

CIHS celebrated nine graduates across Integral Health, Integral Noetic Science, Psychology, and doctoral programs. Their thesis and dissertation topics reflected the breadth of the Institute’s academic vision, ranging from menstrual mood management through the chakras, maternal praxis and planetary health, yoga nidra and NHI contact, interoception in spiritual states of consciousness, holy basil essential oil and stress, tarot-assisted psychotherapy, trauma and psychospiritual healing, and psychological readiness in return-to-sport rehabilitation.

In this way, the graduation ceremony did not stand apart from the collaboratory. It completed it. The week moved from biofield science and healing research, to CIHS’s own campus-based exploration of subtle energy measurement and noetic inquiry, and finally to the celebration of students whose work carries these questions forward in deeply personal, scholarly, clinical, and transformative ways.

This sequence reflected the living heart of CIHS: research and learning, science and spirituality, inquiry and practice, individual transformation and institutional continuity.

The Biofield Science & Healing Collaboratory demonstrated that CIHS is not only teaching about consciousness, subtle energy, integral health, and noetic science. It is participating in the development of these fields through collaboration, convening, research, and community-building.

As CIHS continues to expand its programs in Integral Health, Integral Noetic Sciences, Psychology, and Artificial General Intelligence, events like this show the Institute actively inhabiting the frontier it asks students to study: the evolving relationship between consciousness, healing, technology, science, and human transformation.