Have you ever stubbed your toe and bumped your knee and then immediately reached your hands down to cover the area and to soothe the pain? At that moment, you were doing intuitive energy healing on your body.
When I was little, my mom used to come into the room for us to say prayers at night, and she would always put her hands over my right knee, the knee that was swollen and affected the most by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. It was what was limiting me from having free movement. I remember her always putting her hands over my knee and praying to God to take the pain away. I don’t remember if I ever felt a difference between before and after her putting her hands on my knee, but I do remember the love and intention behind her prayers. Even though maybe it wasn’t trained Reiki, my mom was intuitively using the healing power of energy and touch on me. Looking back, this was the first time I remember experiencing the healing power of touch.
The next time I experienced it was one year after I graduated from college at my first reunion. There were many classes that you could go and take as an alum and experience something new taught by other alums. I was really interested in attending this particular talk about healing with your hands. I showed up and just so happened to be the youngest person in the class by a good solid 25 years. Many of the women there were older and were experiencing a lot of pain, and they were interested in learning how to alleviate that. I remember the instructor guiding us to stand behind the other person while they were seated and to rest our hands on their shoulders, and to imagine a white and yellow golden beam of light coming down through the tops of our heads and then out through our hands into the body of the person sitting in front of us. I began to experience intense burning in my palms which I had never felt before. When we were finished with the exercise and shared our experience, I told the instructor what had happened, and she informed me that this was a sign that healing energy was flowing. Much to my surprise, the woman who was sitting in front of me, who I had laid my hands on, told me that the pain in her body left as we were doing the exercise. This experience brought an awareness to me about the power of healing that we all can wield.
I soon after took a Reiki I and II certification class at the Washington Institute of Natural Medicine in Washington D.C. I was already studying there to become a holistic healthcare practitioner and it just felt in alignment to be able to offer this kind of service to clients. I also was thirsty to learn and explore any modality that was available to me at this school. After receiving the Reiki I and II certification, I decided to wait 10 years before I would pursue my Reiki Master certification. Even though you can complete a Level I, II, and Mastership within just a few short months, I felt strongly that I wanted to practice and explore the art of Reiki for many years before I would call myself a master. 10 years came and went, and then finally 17 years later I found my teacher. It was such a relief! I was very excited to get started on the journey. It was a dual course in intuitive healing and Reiki mastership. After a year of study, I received my attunements and my Reiki master title. I still felt hungry for additional information and later got an additional Reiki master certification with the Usui method. This was in late Summer of 2023.
Over the years I’ve had many interesting experiences while offering Reiki to individuals. For those of you who don’t know what Reiki is, it is the study and practice of transference of energy from Universal Life Force through the body and out the hands into an individual who is receiving Reiki. Reiki can be put into objects, food, water, humans, animals, and just out into the universe. It can also be done on the self. It is a beautiful gift and a beautiful tool that I believe every human should learn and practice for themselves and for their loved ones. You don’t have to have special powers to be a Reiki practitioner, only the openness of heart and mind and the intention to allow healing to flow. There is no place for ego in Reiki. Reiki is not about one person healing another. Reiki is about being a conduit to allow healing light energy to flow through you, and as it does, it not only heals the person receiving, but also the person giving. I’ve heard practitioners say that they’re drained or exhausted after a session. I’ve been taught that this is a sign that the individual is not stepping aside and allowing for the healing energy from the universe to do the work. If they’re trying to give their energy, it can drain them. In which case, that energy can transfer to the person receiving it. I’ve also experienced individuals offering psychic information that they received during the session, telling people to leave their job or that their partners aren’t good for them, or something along those lines. This is not Reiki. Be wary of individuals who do this in their practice (unless you are specifically going for a psychic reading).
When you begin a Reiki session, you first prepare the space. The space around yourself as the practitioner and the space around the room using Reiki symbols which you are attuned for in your first, second, and third level Reiki class. These symbols have been passed down from the Reiki masters to their students, through a long lineage of study that began in Japan in the 1920s.
The first Reiki session that I did for a paying client didn’t go very well. They came in, fell asleep, left, and then later told me they didn’t feel much. I was a little disheartened, but knew what I had been taught is that the person will receive what they need, whether we know it, or they know it, or not. So I just trusted that that person got exactly what they needed that day, even if it was just a nap. As I practiced more and honed my meditation skills, I started to have more interesting experiences during sessions, such as the person feeling my hands on their back even while I was walking across the room. A lot of the time, people experience a feeling of heat or tingling or cold in the area where the hands are focusing the energy. Oftentimes, this is a sign of activation and movement of energy through that area. When I first learned Reiki I thought only heat occurred, but then many years later I received a Reiki healing session where I felt ice cold in my body. I had never experienced that before. As years went on, I started to experience other things happening such as mantras and words coming to me, or a supplement that would be helpful for this person. In the last couple of years, I’ve started to experience physical sensations in my body and receive smells. One very interesting example was a time when I was working on a client who told me there were energies she wanted to release. I was working my way around her body and came to her left upper thigh, and I felt a very strong draw to stay in that area. I started to feel sensations in that area. During this time, the smell of cigarette smoke wafted through the room. When we finished the session, I brought that to her attention and she told me that her daughter, who was an avid smoker, was one of the energies that she wanted to release. The left-hand side of the body is associated with feminine energies. Another time I was working with a client and I felt this sharp pain in my toe, so I went and focused on their toe. Afterwards when we talked, they told me that their toe had been bothering them for a very long time now with sharp pains. I learned later from one of my master teachers that this is because my energy field is very open and that I can protect myself from receiving these types of physical sensations in my body, or at the very least making an agreement with the universe that I’m willing to feel the feelings, but that they are to pass through and not linger. Most recently I had a session and about 20 minutes before the person arrived, I started to feel this pain in my right pectoral region. Of course at this point, I wasn’t really thinking it could possibly be associated with the person who was coming for healing, but then as I was in the session I realized what was happening. I spent extra time working on that area and afterwards found out that they were having major issues with a frozen shoulder on the same side that I worked on and where I had experienced the pain. I coached them to use a foam roller and roll out their pectoral muscle to help with the frozen shoulder. I have yet to check in on this person to see how they’re doing, but the possibilities of what can occur whether it’s through visuals, auditory, physical sensations in the body, etc. are quite amazing for both the practitioner and the receiver of the Reiki energy.
Once the room is prepared, I call in the ascended Reiki masters and the person’s guides, angels, and all of the higher powers that I choose to work with. The light begins to help bring healing, balance and restoration and whatever else is needed for that person on that day. I ask for help from all of these sources, and then I use the Reiki healing symbols on the person’s body in order to help open up healing channels for the universal life force Reiki energy to flow more easily and freely. Besides symbols, another thing that can enhance your practice is the use of crystals. Different crystals have various frequencies and vibrations, so it makes sense that if you are offering vibrational healing through frequencies and energy drawn from the universe, placing a crystal over the person’s chakra or on their body in a particular area would amplify the healing power of the practice. Another beautiful tool that can amplify healing is crystal singing bowls. The bowl can be played over the top of the person’s body, or even rested on their abdomen and played directly in contact with their body to receive the vibrational frequency of the singing bowl. Reiki sessions can go anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour or more, depending on what the person needs. It’s okay for there to be talking and distractions. You don’t need to have complete silence in order for Reiki to work.
One experience I will never forget was on a trip to Ottawa, Canada with my grandparents for my 30th birthday. They had rented a room in a beautiful hotel and had planned to take me around the city as a birthday gift. As we were preparing to leave the hotel room, my grandmother started to feel very sick and experienced intense pain in her right ear. I asked her if I could perform Reiki on her and she gave me permission. I started utilizing a technique that I learned in my very first Reiki class, where you bring your thumb and first 2 fingers together to create almost like a laser. When you put those 2 fingers and thumb together and set the intention of the energy shooting out of your fingertips like a laser into the area of healing, you can affect amazing support in someone’s body. I had used this one other time with my mom after she had sliced her thumb open with an exacto knife, and she was in intense pain before going to the hospital to get stitched up. I did this on her thumb for a good five minutes and she’d said it took the pain away, so I figured maybe it was worth a try for my grandmother. She was very upset because any other time that this had happened in the past, she was down for the count for the whole day, so she was already thinking that my birthday was ruined and she wasn’t going to be able to go anywhere. Regardless, she sat there, breathed and allowed the Reiki healing energy to flow through her body. She was open and willing to receive the healing. Within minutes, the pain passed. She couldn’t believe it, but she was so very grateful. To this day at age 93, whenever I go to see her, she’s always happy to receive Reiki healing energy.
What a beautiful gift that we can give one another, and that you can give yourself. I do hope that you will read and learn more about this beautiful healing art, and possibly even become a practitioner yourself. It is something that we always have with us, no matter where we are. We always have our bodies, our souls, and we have the energy field around us to call upon and to be a conduit for beautiful healing in this world.