Energy, Illness, and the Body Before Symptoms
A conversation with Dr. Krisnawan. Co-Founder of UbudCare Wellness. General Practitioner MD and Certified Pranic Healing Instructor. This article is also co-published by Usada Bali.
I’ve noticed that more and more conversations around health eventually arrive at the same place. At first people speak about symptoms. Fatigue. Inflammation. Anxiety. Digestive issues. Hormones. Burnout. The physical condition itself. But after a while, if the conversation keeps going honestly enough, another layer appears. Words that touch on energy. Stress. Congestion. Emotions held too long in the system. Something underneath the symptom.
Not in a mystical way necessarily. More in the sense that the body seems to know things long before we are willing to acknowledge them consciously.
In this second conversation with Dr. Krisna, we moved more directly into this territory. Into how he understands energy in relation to illness, and why he believes people are becoming increasingly open to this language now.
“The Energy Body Is the Mold”
One of the first things he says is surprisingly simple. “Our whole wellbeing is composed of emotional, mental, physical, and energetic bodies,” he explains. “But the energy body is the mold of all the others.” These words leave a lasting impression with me.
Whether someone approaches this through Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, spirituality, trauma studies, or somatics, there is often a recognition that imbalance begins before symptoms fully arrive. According to Dr. Krisna, illness starts in the energy body first, before it affects the physical body.
In practical terms, he sees this as an early warning system. If people learn to recognise energetic imbalance earlier, through exhaustion, emotional dysregulation, heaviness, agitation, depletion, strange recurring patterns, then intervention can happen earlier too.
Not everything has to reach crisis point before it receives attention.
People Are More Open Now
I asked him whether people still resist the idea of energy. He laughed a little and said less than before. People today have far more exposure to these ideas. Quantum physics enters mainstream conversations. Meditation and nervous system regulation become normal language. Energy practices that once sat at the fringe of acceptability now appear in wellness spaces everywhere.
That does not necessarily mean everyone understands it deeply or accurately, but the door is more open now. “People are getting more educated,” he says. “They have more accessibility to information.” And honestly, I think many people arrive at this language through necessity anyway.
The body eventually forces the conversation.
Not Either Or
One thing I appreciated was that he never positioned energy work against medicine. Actually, quite the opposite. “When you combine medical and energy approaches,” he says, “the goal can be achieved sooner, faster, easier.” This is important.
People often polarise these conversations unnecessarily. Either extreme science or extreme mysticism. Either pharmaceuticals or energy. Either rationality or esoteric practice. But historically, many healing systems never separated these things so sharply in the first place.
Ayurveda works with energetic constitutions. Chinese medicine maps systems through yin and yang, meridians, organ relationships, elemental cycles. Even modern psychology increasingly acknowledges the physiological impact of emotional and energetic stress.
Different vocabularies perhaps, but often describing overlapping realities.
The Chakra as an Organ That Breathes
One of the more interesting explanations came when he described the chakra system. “The chakra is an organ that breathes,” he says. Not symbolic, instead very functional.
According to him, chakras inhale and exhale life force continuously and simultaneously. Distributing energy throughout the system through meridians and nadis. When the movement is healthy, the system functions well. When it becomes congested, depleted, or excessive, physical symptoms eventually appear in the related organs.
He gives the example of the solar plexus and navel chakras. The stomach relates to the solar plexus. The intestines relate to the navel chakra. Disturbance there can eventually express through digestive disorders. Again, whether someone takes this literally, symbolically, or somewhere in between almost matters less than the observation itself.
The body communicates long before collapse.
Inflammation as Communication
At one point the conversation moved into inflammation. This was interesting because his perspective was not immediately to suppress it. “Inflammation is a warning,” he says. “The body is saying, come here.” That reframing changes the emotional relationship people often have with symptoms.
Not everything uncomfortable is automatically the enemy. Sometimes the system is attempting to restore circulation, attention, detoxification, or correction. Of course this does not romanticise illness. But it does suggest the body may be attempting communication before we interpret it purely as malfunction.
Cultivating Energy
He also spoke about practices like Qi Gong and Tai Chi, and the Chinese concept of the dantian, an energetic reservoir within the body. Practices that cultivate internal energy increase a person’s ability to hold and direct life force. In healing work this matters.
Some systems draw from the practitioner’s cultivated energy. Others work more like a channel, drawing from external energy rather than personal reserves. Reiki and Pranic Healing both touch this territory in different ways. “The origin is the same,” he says. “But it needs cultivation.”
That word feels important too. Cultivation. Not instant transformation or perhaps what we call performance spirituality. Its simply practice.
The Body Speaks All Along
I think what interests me most in conversations like this is not whether every person agrees on the terminology. It’s whether we are willing to admit that human beings are more complex than purely mechanical models of health. There is arrogance whether subtle or abrasive, in all areas of compassionate, spiritual, philanthropic work. Ironically, perhaps at times even more so.
However, when yo meet practical solutions, effort made with the clear objective of finding the most efficient, helpful solutions to the betterment of people’s health and well being, this resonates its own wonder and power.
Most people already know this intuitively.
You walk into certain places and feel different. Some people leave you energised, others exhausted. Stress alters digestion. Grief changes posture. Fear changes breathing. Long term emotional pressure reshapes the body.
We already live with the reality of energy constantly. We just don’t always call it that.
And perhaps this is where these conversations become useful. Not in replacing medicine, but in widening the lens enough to recognise that the body may be speaking long before symptoms become impossible to ignore.
