Have You Got the Time?

A woman called me recently to learn more about Reiki. She’s been having back trouble and someone suggested that a chakra clearing might help. While she didn’t seem to know much about the chakras or Reiki, she sounded like she might be willing to give it a try.

Only thing was she wanted to know in advance whether Reiki would cure her problem and exactly how many sessions it would take.

She then mentioned that she felt resistant to accepting a recent date invitation (her first in quite awhile) and wondered if Reiki could allow her to have a healthy, loving relationship. Again, she wanted a precise timetable for this healing (days, hours, minutes).

I had to be honest and tell her that all I can guarantee from a Reiki session is stress reduction and relaxation. Reiki might very well help heal those problems. Maybe she’s just carrying some extra tension that caused the sudden onset of unexplained back pain. One session of Reiki might be able to take care of that.

But even the woman’s doctor didn’t know what was going on. He just gave her some steroids.

If she had seriously thrown something out of whack, Reiki might not even be the best choice. A chiropractic visit might be in order. Sometimes people with serious back trouble tackle it on multiple fronts (chiropractic work, massage, Reiki, yoga, etc.).

As far as healing all of someone’s relationship issues goes, Reiki can help open the heart chakra to giving and receiving love. But the roots of relationship trouble can run pretty deep. It might take awhile for Reiki to help someone sort all that out. Reiki works well in conjunction with other modalities, so counseling might be in order additionally.

The desire to heal really needs to come from within. If someone is willing to drink in that Reiki energy and allow it to lift their vibration so that they can accept and experience new possibilities, then great wonders are truly possible.

I once had a friend who was totally skeptical about Reiki (she’s now in medical school in Seattle) ask me to treat her back after a rock climbing incident left her hurting. She seemed stunned that a 10-minute spot session made such a difference.

An athletic-type very in touch with her body, she described feeling great vibrations around her lower back, then the pain shifting, then soon fading away completely. Even though she doubted Reiki as a means of healing, she was desperate enough to give anything a try. She truly wanted to heal herself, so Reiki was able to help her.

Usually people who walk through my door wouldn’t be here unless they wanted to heal themselves. But I’ve found that occasionally this is not the case. For instance, I once gave a session to a woman who described herself as spiraling down from high-energy yoga teacher to total mess on multiple levels. No one was sure quite what went wrong with her.

While our brief conversation before the session offered some clues, I got an even stronger feeling while interacting silently with her energy that she had somehow become empowered by illness. I perceived that she was getting attention from family and friends that she hadn’t gotten before. I guess that for her that even negative attention was better than no attention.

So imagine my surprise when a couple of weeks later, she sent me an e-mail describing what a big difference Reiki had made – that every day since she had “been feeling stronger and healthier.” I guess the benefits of Reiki reminded her that feeling better was a great deal more important than feeling attended to.

What this all goes to show is that I really don’t know in advance how someone is going to respond to Reiki. However, I do strongly believe it’s always beneficial, working for someone’s greatest good.

But healing is an endless process. Just as you’ve healed an area, you look deeper and discover that there’s more work to be done (physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually). Sometimes we can take baby steps and sometimes quantum leaps.

I definitely feel like Reiki opened me dramatically in a spiritual sense after my first class (an unexpected benefit as I was initially seeking physical healing). But my spiritual unfolding and evolution is definitely still underway.

From what I’ve read, what our soul wants is not always what our conscious mind would guess. Someone with a terminal illness at the “end of all things” might be stubbornly clinging to life support, but on an unconscious level of the soul recognize that the work is done; it’s time to move on.

In that instance, the benefits of Reiki might not be life saving, but instead easing passage onto the next plane of existence, whatever that may be.

An eternal optimist, I hope to have unlocked all of these mysteries by the time the aforementioned woman with back and relationship issues decides to actually give Reiki a go. I’ll astound her with my specificity.