Digital Ethics for Energy Healing Practitioners

Welcome to Digital Ethics for Energy Healing Practitioners. This course explores the ethical challenges—and responsibilities—that arise when healing, coaching, and mental health care move into virtual, AI-mediated, and technology-rich environments. The following Quick Start Guide will introduce you to the course and show you how to move through it with clarity and confidence.

You are about to engage with material that is both timely and essential. Digital tools now shape nearly every aspect of professional care: email and texting, videoconferencing, apps, cloud storage, AI companions, virtual reality, and data analytics. These technologies have expanded access to care in extraordinary ways—but they have also created ethical dilemmas that most training programs never addressed. 

This course will sharpen your ethical judgment in this new landscape. It will help you recognize risks before they become crises, protect client welfare in virtual environments, and practice with confidence, integrity, and foresight. 

I’ve spent decades working at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, energy healing, and ethics. I’ve authored multiple books, led randomized controlled trials, trained tens of thousands of practitioners worldwide, and served as the editor of a peer-reviewed journal. Over the past several years, I’ve also watched technology transform the healing professions faster than our ethical frameworks have evolved. 

This course is my response to that gap.

It’s also a natural extension of the large body of knowledge accumulated in the profession. As the hundreds of citations attest, we “stand on the shoulders of giants” when it comes to the rich literature on ethics, especially in the field of psychotherapy. I and my co-authors, Anitha Vasudevan and Kelly Yousem, are grateful to the tens of thousands of practitioners and millions of healing encounters out of which this trove of wisdom arose.

David Feinstein, leading the Ethics Committee of Eden Method, created the comprehensive Ethics Code you’ll find in Appendix 1, summarized in the 31 Ethics Principles in Chapter 2. This was the result of a decade of practitioners wrestling with these issues in everyday practice, as well as review of the ethics codes of all the major organizations in energy healing. We gratefully acknowledge the countless hours of these volunteers, and David and Donna Eden’s wonderful Ethics Handbook for Energy Healing Practitioners that was the result.

We’re grateful to those who advised and guided us along the way. We’re especially grateful to psychologist Fred Gallo, PhD. Fred is one of the pioneers in the field and literally invented the term “energy psychology.” Fred was the primary peer reviewer for this work, and was especially helpful in sharpening our handling of the Ethical Dilemmas.

You’re about to embark on a wonderful adventure. You’ll develop your ethical fluency—being able to use modern tools wisely, confidently, and in service of human wellbeing.

Technology will continue to evolve. Ethical responsibility remains constant.

I’m glad you’re here, and I look forward to the journey ahead.

Dawson Church, PhD
Executive Director, National Institute for Integrative Healthcare