The Energetic Benefits of Being in Touch With Plants

A science for health that looks after our energetic body or aura: Biopsychoenergetics.

It’s common for instinct to guide us towards practices which later science confirms are beneficial for our health. Parks in cities are filled every morning with men and women who occupy the green space with various kinds of physical activities. Even if it is just to take a stroll, natural surroundings immediately provide us with a certain calm that we decidedly cannot find in an urban environment. We wear rubber soles, transit asphalt and concrete paths, and sleep on foam or latex mattresses. A stroll through the park, a recurrent activity for any person that is temporarily freed from his or her professional occupations, obeys an instinctive search for that missing part of our lives, i.e., direct contact with natural elements. But the wellbeing that is experienced when we rest against a tree or while we lie on the grass is not just a fact that has been proven by all of us, but it additionally possesses a precise scientific explanation.

Livio Vinardi, scientist and university professor, was the creator of the Biopsychoenergetics theory. Influenced by the Fourth Way theory by Russian Georges Gurdjieff’s, which advocated the existence of three fundamental centers in man: the physical, the emotional and the intellectual (which must be endowed with balance if we wish to achieve stable health), Vinardi developed his own theory.

After spending thirty years as a professor in his native country, Argentina, in 1980 Vinardi moved to the United States to direct the Bioplasmic Potential Measuring Project in San Francisco’s State University (California).. What was it about? Well, it measured and assessed what we commonly —and under the halo of mysticism— know as aura. Using electromagnetic equipment that he designed, he verified that, indeed, the body, or soma, was penetrated by another energetic body which he called a bioplasmic field. Yes, we could say that Vinardi had scientifically proven the existence of the aura.

Based on different experiments carried out with volunteers, Vinardi could devote himself to the study of bioplasma or energy field to measure and register the changes experimented by it based on the alterations in the subject’s conditions. One of the greatest surprises for the team was proving that in the structure of bioplasma there were certain energetic points that, after being studied, revealed an extraordinary similarity with the chakras of Hinduism. Through different experiments, they were able to obtain a topographic image of the energy field, and even identified the shape of those sources of energy, also called plexus or vortices, which according to results obey a conical shape and register a constant rotation (which also fits in with the Hindu definition of chakra, Sanskrit for “wheel”).

In this manner, following the scientific method and recording each of his experiments, Vinardi was able to systematize his theory about the energetic exchange between man and his surroundings. The bioplasmic body of man –or subtle body— constantly carries out and exchange with his environment, feeding off of diverse energetic sources which determine the quality of his own energy.

In the same manner as we possess digestive and breathing apparatuses, our energetic plexuses process energy that comes from the exterior to facilitate our life. But, like nutrition and breathing, the radiation assimilated through plexuses generates a residue that must be eliminated, and retaining these energetic remnants leads to malaise, giving rise to what Vinardi called blockages.

How to undo these blockages? Well, nothing is simpler than getting in touch with our natural surroundings. Trees and plants possess the extraordinary ability to serve, to put it this way, as a container of our energetic excess. When in touch with a plant we find the necessary path to get rid of the excess that obstruct them.

Of course, it’s evident that if we live in an urban environment and, as we mentioned above, develop our life in complete isolation from the natural environment, it will hardly produce the energetic exchange needed for our physical body and our bioplasmic body to function in balance. Vinardi is clear: being in touch with trees and plants facilitates the discharge of accumulated residues, enabling the assimilation of a clean energy —one that, therefore, heals.

Now every time we go to a park we will understand that beneath our behavior lies something that is more than the need of mere spreading, and perhaps that natural call to hug a tree or to throw ourselves with a bare torso will cease to be so strange. On the other hand, surrounding ourselves with plants at home or in the office may be a good way of favoring Biopsychoenergetics.