My Reiki Journey - Part 11: Importance of Permission

The reiki practice attracts and develops healers, and sometimes healers just want to help everyone who appears to be in need.  However, it's very important for us to recognize that there are people out there who DON'T want to be healed and DON'T want help in their suffering.  When you have personally benefitted from healing, you think, why would anyone NOT want healing!?

For some people, the side benefits of experiencing suffering are actually greater or more comforting than being healthy.  Consider someone who receives intensive care when they are ill, but feels lonely and forgotten when they aren't receiving care.  Consider the person who can have a flexible schedule or more control over what they do and don't want to do if they are disabled.  Sometimes the support people receive in suffering is much more comforting than the demands or independence of not suffering.

Obviously this is not the case for people who WANT to be healed and who WANT to feel free and at peace in their mind and body.  There are many people who would much prefer their mobility and independence over being confined to medical care or disablement.  The point is that we need to recognize that there are two kinds of people - those who WANT healing and those who DON'T - and it is pointless for us to attempt to heal people who specifically do NOT want to be healed, because they will likely find a way to continue their cycle of sufferring regardless of our service.

This is also why it is important that if we sense an energetic boundary in one area, we need to share the observation of a boundary that is revealing itself and ask if the client is comfortable with receiving reiki or healing in that area.  When we try to charge forward into healing work and don't ask permission for whatever reason, we cross into the unsavory side of energy work, and we begin to take on client issues that they aren't ready to release yet.

I had always been very cautious in client sessions and never really experienced the unsavory effects of a boundary crossing issue until one day while practicing attunements on reiki students.  I always intuitively ask their energy field how I should enter their field for the attunement to begin, and usually hear a whispered response in my mind like "gently" or "swiftly" or "like a feather" or "firmly" but I got to this one student and the intuitive guidance said "like a sword, three times".  I looked around a bit nervous, not so much about the sword part, but more about the three times part, which fell outside of our standard protocol.  I kind of panicked a little because I didn't want to interrupt the flow of the attunement or take too much time, so I sliced into the student's energy field with my hand, layer after layer of energetic thickness and boundary like a sword, until I reached the truth of who he was before the walls had been built, and then finished the attunement as I regularly would.

Now, luckily, the student gave feedback about his attunement and said that he had a profound healing experience, so I knew that he was not harmed in any way by my choice to move forward in that moment.  That is the beauty of reiki- it will not hurt anyone.  Until I got his feedback, I was really nervous about what had just happened.

However, what I didn't realize, was that I should have been more nervous about what would happened to ME after that attunement.  I realized afterward that I had taken on a heart pain I sensed he had been carrying in his boundaries from the moment he walked in the door.  If I had stuck to protocol and what he consciously provided permission for, and then after listening into the guidance from his energy field, took a moment to ask for permission to change the protocol and do something different before the regular attunement, I might have avoided receiving the sticky pain that wasn't ready to let go of a physical body.  It might have been easier on me afterward with his conscious permission to do additional work in that moment.

After that boundary crossing, I carried around a little ball of pain in my chest, circling around my heart, that I had to keep chasing with reiki over and over again.  It would energetically move from one area to another creating little pockets of pain over and over again that I would need to deal with.  This pain did not exist before that attunement, only afterward.  It lasted for several weeks before I felt it finally dissolve into what is now this story of learning and an example to pass on with caution to others engaging in energy healing work.

This is why permission is so important and why keeping our own field healthy, charged, and clear with integrity is so important as well.  That pain could have taken down someone who wasn't doing their own self-care regularly to the extent I was, which may be why I received the instructions I received, or maybe it all happened just so that I could learn from that moment and share it with others, but that still doesn't make it a good choice for myself or for anyone else to take on.  

People need to deal with their own pain on their own timeline, or they need to be ready to release it on their own- because even if we are willing to take away a pain from someone else to make their journey seem easier- what does that leave them with?  A space of confusion about what just happened and a stunting of their own learning and healing process, because they didn't go through the process of working through it on their timeline.

It only took me one experience to learn the importance of asking for permission before crossing an unexpected boundary, and hopefully it only takes you reading this one story to avoid having a similar experience.  You can never have too much permission, but you can cross too many boundaries.

Anne Ruthmann, Certified Reiki III Master Practioner, www.abundantsphere.com