Richard Gordon

Richard Gordon is an American energy-healing teacher and the founder of Quantum-Touch, a light-touch modality built on breathing and body-awareness techniques.

His path began in the early 1970s at the Christos School of Natural Healing in Taos, New Mexico, where he studied therapeutic massage, spiritual healing, and herbal medicine and, by his own account, first “felt energy” around his hands.

He was then introduced to polarity therapy and wrote an early book on it, Your Healing Hands: The Polarity Experience (1978). The same year he met Robert (“Bob”) Rasmussen, whose apparent facility with hands-on “energy” healing impressed him; Gordon apprenticed with Rasmussen and, when Rasmussen retired, took over and systematised the work as Quantum-Touch.

His best-known book, Quantum-Touch: The Power to Heal (first edition 1999; expanded editions 2002/2006), codified the method, and the modality has since spread through an international network of instructors and workshops.

Gordon’s place in the Atlas is as a contemporary originator of a breath-and-attention energy-healing system that sits squarely in the energy-psychology cluster alongside Bartlett’s Matrix Energetics, Kinslow’s Quantum Entrainment, and Reiki.

What is distinctive about his teaching is the mechanics: rather than channeling a tradition’s named energy, he gives a concrete, repeatable recipe — specific breath ratios plus a “sweep” of body-awareness — that practitioners use to build and “run” a felt sensation out through lightly placed hands.

The contemplative and physiological substrate he leans on (slow paced breathing, focused interoceptive attention, deep relaxation, calm reassuring touch) is real and has measurable effects. The framing layered on top — that this “raises your vibration,” transmits “life-force energy,” and works at the “quantum” level — is unproven, and the “quantum” label is a metaphorical misuse of physics.

He represents the point where breath/attention practice crosses into the energy-healing and self-healing field.