I’ve been absent from my blog for a while, since my Reiki level 2 attunement in the beginning of July. I had some witchy tea blogs in the can beforehand, so I posted them and then stopped writing, because I feel… complicated. About my attunement and about administering Reiki treatments since then.
Attunement to Reiki level two involves treating someone at a distance; sometimes a different room, but usually a different place entirely. Most people–when they do their second level Reiki attunement–will treat someone they already know. I suppose it helps with ‘finding’ the person in space with your energy so that you can work on them. Treating someone at a distance can be different for each student: some Reiki practitioners use their imagination to see the client in front of them on a table or bed, and can work on the image they see. Some practitioners use an alternate object like a doll or a pillow, and decide which parts of the object correspond to their client’s body parts. Some people practice by imagining that their leg is the client, with the client’s head at their knee and feet around mid-thigh, and will treat one leg as though it is the front of their client, and the other leg like the back.
When I wanted to do my Reiki level two attunement, most of the people I know were busy and could not be my ‘client’, so I had to treat someone I had never met. Someone who lives in a different province. I had one photo of their face to work with. And I have aphantasia, which means I don’t see things in my head, and cannot visualize anything, so I planned to use my ancient CareBear from my 10th birthday as a stand-in for my client (who has given me permission to tell this story, but I will not use their name). I was not told ahead of time what issues my client wanted me to focus on, so… I was pretty much sailing in the fog.
My teacher (the Jedi master Monica Perry) started me off with the traditional Gassho (breathing and meditation to get into work mode), and then asked me to connect with my client. I had no idea what that might be like, so I sent my energy out to where it felt like they were. Obviously I had doubts about being able to sense them, but two things happened at once: I had the immediate sensation of being in a taller body (which is funny if you know me, I am 5 feet tall), and I felt a presence show up to my left. I had my eyes open at the time, so the feeling of being a taller human than I am was extremely disconcerting, but it also meant that I got to see Monica react to the presence I felt; she looked at it sharply.
I was uncomfortable enough with the dual body sensation that I had to close my eyes, but I also felt things that were not from me. There was a burning, acidic feeling in my gut, which was more intense on the right, just under my ribcage. My eyes were very tired. And the back of my head felt like it was evaporating, like Marty McFly’s hand when he went to the past and almost ruined his parent’s marriage. I opened one eye and asked Monica how long I had to sit like this. She told me I should try connecting until I felt like I knew what was wrong… I think I got the idea.
Monica CAN see things with her mind’s eye, and she told me that the thing I felt to my left was a huge, old farmer who looked greek (he talked to her, and she has since told me that his name is Hector, and that he was not my spirit guide nor my client’s, but a guide for both of us together in this specific situation). I told her about the things I had felt in my body, and then she showed me what my client had written about what they wanted to have treated: they had an undiagnosed digestive problem that was suspected to be a gallbladder issue, they frequently got migraines that started in their eyes, and an injury and related surgery had fused three of the vertebrae in their neck which altered their sensation at the back of their head and neck.
The next part of my lesson was the actual attunement, where I was given the next level of Reiki, hopefully the wisdom to use it well, and some symbols that can help boost my ability to work with Reiki. Attunement is an interesting experience; the Reiki master sort of infuses the student with extra universe energy. It feels different for different people; some feel heat, some feel coolness, some feel air movement. I’m definitely a heat student; I was roasting, and have been ever since. The new air conditioner I have is not only here because of the weather…
After the attunement, it was time to start the distance treatment. I expected it to be a sort of calm event where the client got to take a short nap and feel kind of nice when they woke up. Haha! Haaa…
Monica told me that if I didn’t feel drawn to any particular area, I should just start with the self-treatment hand positions from the first level of Reiki, so I got to work with the first four positions: over the face for the third eye chakra and cerebral nerves, over the top of the head for crown chakra and migraines, over the temples for balance. Keep in mind that I’m working on a CareBear. Tenderheart, if you must know. I made it to the fourth position, which is at the back of the head for the third eye and sinuses, and this CareBear STARTED MYOFASCIALLY UNWINDING like my massage therapy clients do when I treat their suboccipital muscles. I was slightly horrified, but I kept working.
Myofascial unwinding can involve just one small area of the body, or it can be an entire limb moving through its ranges of motion. It feels like surfing on a client’s connective tissue, and it keeps sort of moving below the surface until it’s ‘done’ (or sick of me) and then it just stops moving. So when the bear stopped unwinding, I went to the next Reiki hand position. But it was ‘wrong’, and my hands knew they needed to go elsewhere; I settled into the hand position for a myofascial vault of the diaphragm, and the bear started unwinding again. I just let it do what it was going to do, but honestly, the feeling of an inanimate object having animate fascia is complicated to process.
When the unwinding stopped, I was about to try another hand position, but a few things happened at the same time: Monica burped, I felt like I was done, and my hands wouldn’t go anywhere else. It is important to understand that I often feel like I am cheating when I work around Monica; she burps or yawns when energy is released. So she burped, and just as I was about to say ‘I think that’s it’, she said ‘I think we’re done now’. See? Cheating.
We video-called my client to see how they were doing. They said they could tell when I made contact the first time because they were out working in their very hot yard, and they suddenly felt cool all over. I guess they’re a cool-sensation Reiki person, lucky. When we told them it was time for the treatment, they went to lie down and got settled in, expecting the same thing I expected, I’m sure; a nice relaxing lie-down.
Well, too bad. What happened instead was that their sinuses released so fast that they choked on their own snot, and then their body rather quickly unwound in all the places I was treating, so they were kind of flailing around in bed (sorry about that…). They did feel better when I was done, so, success? But it was a lot.
I had a few other things to do after that; Reiki 2 is also about learning to send Reiki backward and forward in time, and again I felt like I was cheating because I was treating Monica’s timeline, so whenever I hit something in the right time, she would myofascially unwind. But with time travel Reiki it is harder to see finished results, so I suppose I will have to trust that it works.
The other thing I learned to do was send Reiki to a large area full of people, which is where consent comes in. If I want to treat someone who doesn’t know I’m trying to work with them, I need to send them Reiki only with their subconscious permission, and if they don’t want it, I need to redirect the Reiki into the earth instead. Again, hard to see the finished results on a large area far away, so I hope the region we worked on is full of people who feel a little better.
Of course I feel really odd about most of this, and writing it in a blog feels like telling the entire internet that I am bonkers, but this is my experience. I think it helped that I read ‘Playing With Portals: Notes from an Ex-Reiki Practitioner‘ by Amarachi Ibe and so was better prepared to be mindful of my practice and take personal responsibility for how I work with Reiki. I have a lot of Complicated Thoughts on the broader culture of Reiki as it appears in the west, but that is for another time.