Cord Cutting

Subtle bodies in Theosophy and its successors

A 2024 University of Chicago Divinity School dissertation by Rachel Carbonara, based on fieldwork with American energy-healing and spiritual-teaching organizations, describes how contemporary teachers present an energy field, or subtle body, as a human anatomy open to observation. It quotes the teacher Barbara Brennan as naming Theosophists, Rosicrucians and several other traditions as earlier describers of that field, and notes that both Brennan and the Theosophist Annie Besant depict a person as having seven subtle bodies or layers. The dissertation studies these schools. It is not a history of cord cutting.

Theosophical vocabulary was itself contested. A 1995 booklet by Geoffrey Farthing, published by the Blavatsky Trust and revised in 1996, argues that the original system of Helena Blavatsky had an astral body but no separate etheric double, and that the etheric double entered Theosophy through Besant and Leadbeater. The booklet is a critique written from inside the Theosophical tradition, and the summary read here contains no discussion of cords between people.

Where cords appear in the sources reviewed

Carbonara reports that, in Brennan's account, energetic cords develop between the chakras of people when positive connections are formed. She also summarizes a shamanic account by Alberto Villoldo in which a teacher severs dark tendrils joining a woman to a former partner. She reads both as expressing the view that cords can be cut and intrusive energies removed, either by the person alone or with a healer. These are descriptions of what practitioners and their teachers hold, and the dissertation does not test them.

The sources reviewed do not date a stand-alone practice called cord cutting, name who first taught it, or trace it to a single tradition. Statements that it is ancient or shamanic in origin were not found in any scholarly source that could be opened for this page.

Relation to Reiki

The Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota says modern Reiki traces to the Japanese teacher Mikao Usui, with a realization most likely in 1922, and that Chujiro Hayashi and the Japanese American Hawayo Takata carried it through a Tokyo clinic to Hawaii in 1937 and the US mainland. That summary does not mention cords. Whether and when cord cutting entered Reiki teaching is not documented in the sources reviewed.

Vocabulary of cords and energy

In the ethnographic material Carbonara reviews, the relevant terms are Energy, which she capitalizes to mark practitioners' usage of it as a psychospiritual substance, along with Energetic cords, chakras, tendrils and intrusive Energies. Cords are said to link people, to form through relationships and to be removable. The word psychic in psychic cord cutting is a practitioner label. It is not a term the sources reviewed define or validate.

Subtle-body vocabulary is unstable even within Theosophy. Farthing says Blavatsky used astral body for what later writers called the etheric double, and that Besant introduced the separate etheric double. A reader meeting astral, etheric or energy body in practitioner material should therefore not assume one fixed meaning.

Other meanings of cord cutting

Searches of PubMed for the phrase cord cutting return mostly literature about umbilical cord clamping and birth. One qualitative study of postnatal beliefs in Nepal, for example, lists cord cutting and placenta rituals as a theme. That literature concerns childbirth practices, and it should not be read as evidence about energetic cord cutting.

How the practice is described

No standardized procedure for cord cutting was found in the peer-reviewed or scholarly sources opened for this page, so no step-by-step account is given here. Carbonara's material depicts the practice in two broad ways. In one, a healer perceives cords in a person's energy field and removes them. In the other, cords can be removed by the person without a healer.

A 2017 case series of shamanic healing for six US veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder used a semi-structured protocol that included a component labeled forgiveness or cord-cutting among about nine, including power animal retrieval, soul retrieval and divination. The authors do not describe the cord-cutting component in the abstract available here, and its content cannot be separated from the rest of the protocol.

Overlap with imagery and ritual

Where cord cutting is carried out as visualization, it resembles the wider family of mental imagery techniques, which Machipedia covers on its Guided Imagery page. Menzies and Jallo describe guided imagery as a nonpharmacological mind-body intervention. Imagery methods do not themselves involve a claim about energetic cords, so the overlap concerns technique and not theory.

Where it is performed as a symbolic act, such as imagining a cord severed, it can also be compared with closure rituals. Hobson and colleagues review psychological research on ritual and propose that rituals help regulate emotions, performance states and social connection. The review is general and does not discuss cord cutting.

How uses are framed

Within the tradition Carbonara studies, cord cutting is one expression of a wider claim that the energy self can be acted on by outside forces and that a person, or a healer, can remove them. She links this to contemporary spiritual teachings about self-care, personal agency and the ability to override outside influences. This is her analysis of how practitioners frame the practice, and not a statement that cords exist or that removal has an effect.

Trauma-related use in one case series

Practitioners are also described, in the shamanic case series, as combining cord cutting with forgiveness work for people carrying trauma. The sources reviewed do not document the specific situations for which individual practitioners offer cord cutting, such as the end of a relationship or a bereavement, and this page makes no claim about them beyond what these sources state.

Studies of cord cutting itself

No controlled study or systematic review of energetic cord cutting was found. PubMed searches run on 2026-10-06 for cord cutting with ritual, energy, spiritual, psychic, attachment or visualization terms returned a handful of records, and the ones screened by title concerned umbilical cord clamping, a laser fiber or the shamanic case series above. A search for systematic reviews of energy healing or energy medicine returned 15 records that were not individually screened for this page. A search of the Consensus index could not be completed because its monthly quota was exhausted.

The one relevant clinical report is the veterans case series, in which cord-cutting was one of about nine components. Six people were enrolled, the protocol was judged feasible and acceptable, and the authors called for further research. A case series with no comparison group cannot show that any component has an effect.

Research on rituals and grief

Norton and Gino reported three experiments in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. In the first, 247 online participants recalled either a death or the end of a close relationship, and those also asked to describe a ritual they had used reported lower grief than those who did not (means 2.12 versus 2.37 on the scale used), with a small effect. In two laboratory experiments, with 109 and 172 students, assigned rituals after losing a random draw for a cash prize were associated with lower grief, and the authors suggest regained feelings of control explain the link.

These findings concern general rituals and a lottery loss, not cord cutting, and the grief in two of the experiments followed a minor loss of money. The authors note that destroying a symbolic drawing might have added to the effect and that more specific forms of ritual need study. The effect did not depend on belief in rituals, but the studies measured short-term self-reported grief and cannot show that imagining a cord severed has any comparable effect.

Bereavement and imagery research

A 2025 umbrella review of 33 systematic reviews of psychotherapeutic bereavement interventions found mostly conditional support, with small effects after treatment and no statistically significant benefit at follow-up, and conclusions limited by review quality. Treatment helped most where grief was complicated. These interventions are professional psychotherapies and not energy practices.

A review of guided imagery for fatigue found inconsistent results across eight studies. A Cochrane review of Reiki for anxiety and depression included three small trials with 62 participants and found insufficient evidence either way. Neither review concerns cord cutting, and both show how limited the evidence is for imagery and energy approaches in other conditions.

Indirect harms and care boundaries

No source reviewed reports adverse events specific to cord cutting, but the absence of reports is not evidence of safety, since no studies were found. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health says relaxation techniques are generally considered safe for healthy people, with rare reports that certain techniques might cause or worsen symptoms in people with epilepsy, certain psychiatric conditions, or a history of abuse or trauma. It advises talking with a health care provider first in those situations.

A systematic review of 59 laboratory studies found that free and guided imagery and suggestion induced false beliefs or memories of past events in roughly 20 to 50 percent of participants who underwent the experimental manipulation. A later randomized experiment with 100 healthy volunteers found no increase in false details after imagery rescripting of a mild stressor, but its authors caution that the findings may not apply to people with PTSD. Whether visualizing cords raises the same concern is not known.

Standards and professional oversight

No professional register, code of ethics or training standard specific to cord cutting was found in the sources reviewed, and no statutory regulation was identified. Practitioners therefore differ in training and approach. Anyone with prolonged or severe grief, trauma or abuse history should not delay or replace care from a qualified health professional with this practice. The 2025 umbrella review found that treatment was more likely to help where grief was complicated, which supports seeking professional assessment in those circumstances.