The practice of Reiki, which originated in Japan, is catching on in the Western world. It is a holistic modality of healing meant to stimulate the body’s own innate healing ability. You may have heard it described as acupuncture without needles. Well, yes and no. There are basic similarities and Reiki can be wonderful for people who are needle-phobic, yet there are differences as well.
The name Reiki comes from the Japanese pictograms Rei, which can translate to Universe and Ki, meaning energy. In short, Universal Energy. It is a spiritual but not religious practice that promotes balance.
In short, the body cannot cope with stress and pain and heal from stress and pain simultaneously. The sympathetic nervous system, which copes with stress, is the usual dominant system in the waking human body. The parasympathetic nervous system is the system responsible for healing. However, if our stress level, sleep patterns and digestion are not in tune with our body, or if we swallow grief from loss or trauma without giving ourselves an opportunity to express and heal, the parasympathetic nervous system can be over-ridden and not be able to heal our bodies. Reiki can ease the transition from the sympathetic system dominance to the parasympathetic system dominance, thereby stimulating the body’s natural healing abilities.
In a typical Japanese Technique also sometimes called Medical Reiki session, a practitioner will use their hands with a light touch (or no-touch) to stimulate the movement of energy within a client’s body, as well as add or decrease energy where needed.
What to expect when you work with me
Each Reiki practitioner brings a unique and personal style to their practice. The way that I work was actually borne out of a happy accident during my training. While practicing a kinesthetic technique called “embodying,” I thought my teacher wanted me to embody a peer’s chakras one at a time. (He did not, lol.) When I did embody each chakra, I received such deep and nuanced information about their energetic health and healing needs that I decided to make it a cornerstone of my practice.
Here is what to expect if you schedule an intake session with me – when you arrive you will fill out some paperwork, one of which is a health history form. We will chat for about 30 minutes about your health history, including mental and emotional health, trauma history, and physical health. I will go over with you what to expect during the healing process and give you options about communication during the session and how you would like to be positioned (face-up or face-down, both are fine.)
After our chat, you will lie on the table, fully clothed but with shoes off. I will lead us into a meditative state by inviting you to notice your breath, senses, and body. After this I will embody your energy – embodying is a tool where I overlay someone’s energy over my own body, to feel where the excesses, deficiencies and pain might be. It’s how we begin to get a sense of your energy patterns. I don’t use it to read minds or discover hidden secrets about my clients; it is just a physical tool to determine where your energy is being blocked.
Once I’ve embodied the energy of your body as a whole, I begin to embody the chakras one at a time. This gives us rich information about your energy patterns and personal history, as well as what would be best for your individual healing on that day. I call embodying the seven major chakras “getting a baseline” – the baseline being how your energy is presenting in that moment and what it needs overall for balancing.
Once we have the baseline, the rest of the session is spent without a set routine or formula, but asking your body what it needs for rejuvenation and healing. From there, I will incorporate different techniques to address your needs, such as sweeping or extracting old energy, building infrastructure around energy leaks, balancing the upper and lower chakras, draining “sluggish” meridians/energy channels, nourishing specific organs, grounding, etc. I do this through a combination of physical touch and hand movements around the body.
Throughout the session I may receive visions, Spirit or ancestor messages, messages from the body itself or the inner child, and various other cool things. I am always happy to share these with you, because that is central to understanding your own energy body.
During the session I can name what I’m feeling and sensing in real time while recording the audio, or we can work in silence and record a conversation at the end of the session. It is always up to you and your comfort level. These recordings are helpful to listen to again and again, especially to integrate the messages or visualizations that may come from Spirit.
As we end the tablework, I will guide you back to the present moment and back into body awareness, then give you some time alone to come fully back into yourself. I’ll come back with some water for you, and then we will sit down and check in about how you are feeling.
After answering any questions you have and naming all the neat, cool things that occurred during the work, I will take payment and help you schedule a follow-up if you would like.
Reiki Can Help With:
- chronic pain disorders
- sciatica
- arthritis
- sports injuries
- migraines
- gastrointestinal issues
- anxiety
- depression
- insomnia
- symptoms of illness such as the common cold and bronchitis
Reiki can also:
- lessen recovery times after surgery
- help expectant mothers cope with the mental and physical challenges of pregnancy, labor and postpartum times
- ease the transition of patients in hospice care at the end of life
- allow for monitoring the energy, needs (hunger, thirst, etc.) and pain/stress levels of non-communicative patients, such as those suffering from extreme dementia, Alzheimer’s disease or psychosis. (in these cases I am hired by the family of the patient and report to the family.)
- compliment anti-psychotic medications in cases of severe mental illness such as paranoid schizophrenia, decreasing both the side effects of the medicines and the symptoms of the illnesses themselves.
- allow healthy processing of grief following loss or trauma
My Specialty:
My skill set, clientele and case load include all of the situations listed above, but my particular skill is helping clients heal emotional wounds. Since trauma can manifest in our bodies physically as disease and pain, one of my specialties is to work with victims of abuse, grief, trauma (intergenerational, societal, religious, and physical), molestation and rape to process and heal from these tragedies on mental, physical, emotional, spiritual and energetic levels.
