If you’ve read my first blog post, you know that reiki was my kundalini jumpstarter. The first time someone practiced reiki on me as a treatment, I didn’t believe it was real. Which is amusing, if you know me.
Reiki is a Japanese word, a combination of rei (spirit) and ki (vital energy). It is the name of a form of energy healing that Wikipedia (the purveyor of all earthly knowledge, as previously discussed) describes as a pseudoscience. And for now, that is technically correct; there is no scientific way to measure its physical effects. But remember that science hasn’t had a way to measure the body’s electromagnetic fields for very long yet, nevermind trying to image it while a reiki treatment is going on.
Just for fun, compare these two images:
The first is a depiction of the electromagnetic field of the human heart, as measured by magnetocardiogram. The second is a drawing representing the human ‘astral body’ as pertains to auras, from ‘Hands of Light’ by Barbara Ann Brennan. Interesting, right?
Aside from this, consider how–sometimes–you can tell that the mood of a person near you has changed, despite the fact that they are silent, have been facing away from you, haven’t altered their posture in any way, and aren’t really doing anything. I suspect that in time, there will be scientifically measurable proof that this isn’t imaginary.
If our electromagnetic field is measurable up to 3 feet away from our bodies, as some research suggests, then whenever I do a massage therapy treatment, I am well inside my client’s electromagnetic field. Energy is already being exchanged via the force of my hands (fists, elbows, you know… the good stuff) on the tissues of my client. But often my hands are drawn to problem areas that have emotional context as well as physical pain. During my treatments, the room I am working in almost always heats up a LOT despite the inherent gentleness of myofascial work. In fact, sometimes during public teaching clinic at massage school, my teacher could tell which cubicle I was in because of how much heat was radiating from it.
In the course of my (admittedly still short) career, several reiki practitioners have been on my table, and have asked me ‘are you doing reiki?’ Usually I said I was not, because I had never learned how. I figured I was just using my own energy and intuition to work stuff out. Sweet summer child…
At some point, I thought I should probably check out how reiki is supposed to be done. If people were asking if I was doing it, maybe I was and just didn’t know. Maybe I was doing wild reiki! (Spoiler, I was.) So when Monica (the Jedi master) offered my massage therapy students a two-day reiki 1 class, I took the class with them.
On the first day, we learned our Usui Reiki lineage. That was particularly emotional for me because Monica’s mentor was Ana Wagner, who was one of the first people I met at the first job I had in Halifax at ICT Northumberland College. Ana had recently passed away, but I feel like I have a little piece of her energy with me now, in my reiki practice.
We were asked to think about whether or not we wanted to work with a particular guide. Since I’d had the kundalini integration experience the week before, I thought I might try Shakti on for size as my guide, since that’s how my kundalini presented itself.
We also learned that distance reiki can be practiced, and some people channel reiki through their third eye. This is where I started to feel a little foolish… I HAD been doing reiki. I’d been using it my whole life, and I already use my third eye. When I was a child, I would think really hard at animals who were afraid or hurt, trying to let them know I was not scary and I just wanted to be friends. Most of the time it worked. I was a tiny Snow White with feral cats following me around all over the yard or birds letting me pet them and scritch their feathers. Sometimes I did the same thing to babies if they were crying (the reiki, not the scritching), and they would calm down.
Have we noticed the parallels with christianity again? Laying on of hands, and prayer… More connections that religious people generally would never want to own up to.
The second day, we got into the hands-on stuff and I had a ‘client’ on the table. I was working on channeling energy from around me into my hands instead of using my own energy. It felt like I had a soap bubble filled with golden smoke in the palm of each of my hands, all very relaxing. I was working on my client’s sacral chakra when Shakti STEPPED INTO MY BODY from behind. Shakti is often represented by Durga or Kali figures; they are badass goddesses with eight arms and various weapons and trophies from their… victims. Suddenly I understood something one of my massage clients asked me ages ago: ‘how many arms do you HAVE?’
At least now I know why my kundalini was kicking at me to be let out; I’d been using my own energy to practice massage therapy and draining myself to exhaustion instead of using the energy all around me to work on my clients. Something needed to change, and it has. For now, I am working to make new habits so I can facilitate healing and not drain myself in the process. I hope to learn more reiki soon, and maybe I will have more stories to tell!
p.s. You should read Monica’s description of reiki, it’s much prettier than mine.