Abundant Sphere

This is the question I've had to ask myself many times during natural disasters just to get by and back to a place of peace and acceptance about moving through all of it with less anger and fear of what’s ahead. At first it feels like trauma by way of forced separation between us and the things that give us comfort.  Being forced to release ourselves from our material attachments is probably one of the hardest things because of the precious memories or material attainment they represent. When we rely on material things for comfort, this separation feels like the worst thing in the world.  However, having that separation also brings us back to remembering that life itself is a gift and that good health is far more important than any material item we could own.   Natural disaster forces us to take stock in our life and clean out what no longer serves us.  We regain a newfound freedom in our life when we begin to feel gratitude for simply being alive and rel...

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...

During a normal distance session for a client that revealed some difficulty breathing in the lungs, some posture corrections for self-healing guidance, and some medical intuitive findings for the client to discuss with their medical practitioner, it seemed we had a great session that really moved a lot of energy that was stagnant as well as activated some additional solutions for the client to consider for their own self-care. As I was closing the session and getting ready to disconnect energetically, something odd started happening.  My body started physically rocking back and forth on my couch, as if a magnet was pushing and pulling me in a rocking chair.  At first I thought it was just my own natural desire to stretch and move after being in an intensive energetic connection, but when I tried to consciously stop the movement, I felt like I couldn't stop it.  It didn't feel bad, just so much like the feeling of being in a rocking chair that I couldn't ignore it or ju...

I used to eat the worst foods, yet I was a skinny 135lbs as a 5'10" teenager and by all medical measures, I was considered a very healthy person who could even stand to gain some weight, so it didn't seem to matter what I ate.  However, it actually did matter and it was affecting my body, I just didn't link the symptoms to the causes, because doctors refused to acknowledge any nutritional relationships they couldn't prove across hundreds of different people through medical research, and I wasn't body-aware enough at the time to understand how to observe myself and my relationship to food and drink. I had acne, cysts, and benign tumors.  The acne occurred on my face and upper back.  The cysts were on my neck, chest, and underarms.  The benign tumors were in my breasts and occasionally made a random appearance elsewhere.  I started to believe these conditions were permanent, since medical treatments only created temporary relief and never eliminated the ...

One evening during a NYC Reiki Meditation & Relaxation Circle, a regular circle attendee brought a friend in to join for the evening.  This was the first reiki healing experience for the friend, and she naturally came in with no idea of what to expect other than some meditation and perhaps some idea of what the reiki share portion looks like with a gentle hands-on touch. At the beginning of the circle, I ask everyone to set a healing intention for themselves that the group will honor together.  The friend's expressed intention was around healing her feelings of anger.  Nothing more was said, and nothing more needed to be said. We do some deep breathing work, then a guided meditation, and then ask anyone who would like to receive a reiki hands-on treatment to pair up with one of the reiki practitioners in the circle.  This particular evening, we were just focusing on doing some intensive work on shoulders, where people tend to carry a lot of stress and res...

Reiki training gives us a basic framework in which to shape the experience of our reiki practice, but it is our continued practice that gives us the deeper sensory language and more detailed set of experiences through which to understand and communicate what is happening during reiki sessions. Initially, I only sensed changes in temperature, then as I practiced more I began to sense tingling.  This meant that initially, I could only communicate basic sensory changes to clients, but with even more practice, I began to notice that sometimes that tingling had more of a pulse that could change over a short period of healing focus.  As my experiences grew, my ability to be more acute in what I was sensing started to grow as well.  I started to notice that I wasn't just feeling the sensations in my hands, that sometimes I would feel it in other areas of my own body, which would help provide additional information that wasn't available just through what I could feel in my han...

A client comes in expressing feeling out of whack after the holidays with an intensive restart at work and expresses the healing intention to get back into alignment and focus more on self-care and wellness.  They're feeling off to a good new year start by booking the reiki session as a time for self-care and healing into their work week. As I begin an overall energy body scan with my hands, I immediately start to notice that a few chakras are really out of balance, which might relate to some relationship or communication challenges, but otherwise the client's body feels overall healthy and doing well.  At this point, it appears that I'll just be focusing reiki healing on bringing those chakras back into balance, along with doing some extra detoxification work on a few key organs.  After about 25 minutes of chakra work, the chakras feel nice and even and I begin to focus on detoxing. An energetic impression I received during chakra balancing makes me feel d...

By far, the most interesting insights and discoveries after Reiki II training came from doing the practice of distance healing work with people who had never experienced it before and were not trained in reiki at all, but were open enough to work at distance by referral, even if we hadn't met in person before.  I'm so grateful for those friends and family member referrals who were willing to let me connect and practice reiki distance healing early on so that I could understand more of what was possible for them and for myself. Everyone develops their own process over time, but for me, distance healing sessions start with a phone or video call to connect and understand the client's intention for the session, to become aware of any issues or concerns the client may have, and to confirm that the client is in a place and time when they can relax in a way that allows them to more comfortably receive the healing energy available to them.  Technically we don't need to ...

Distance Healing was part of the Reiki II training and practice that surprised me the most.  The level of my surprise was directly proportional to the level of skepticism I'd had around any of it actually working or being validated.  To say the least, I was highly skeptical that any of it would do anything... After spending so much time learning about Reiki I as a hands-on healing practice with all sorts of different hand positions and learning how to understand various sensations through the hands, to then be tasked with completely removing ourselves from having a physical client body in front of us and immediate sensory experience just seemed like hocus pocus at first.  This is where practicing Reiki II with a group of people in person made a huge difference, because we were able to try different techniques and share our experiences in ways that helped us understand what Distance Healing might feel like for the receiver/client and the sender/reiki practiti...

When I entered Reiki II and started to learn about Reiki symbols, I still wasn't quite sure how all of the symbolic stuff fit into the actual practice of Reiki.  Using symbols as a part of my Reiki practice was probably the piece that felt most esoteric to me and took the most time for me to understand and put into practice beyond just going through the motions of using them.  It seemed more removed from the hands-on practice and more mentally centered than the rest of the Reiki experiences, but eventually I gained a deeper understanding around using symbols and their purpose within Reiki. The symbols are easy enough to find on the internet, so the symbols and what they look like are really not that secretive.  What I've come to understand is that symbols really don't mean anything until we give them intention and power.  We can walk by the same drawing on a window every single day and think it's just a cool drawing.  However, if we know the intent or mea...

If you've read My Reiki Journey from Part 1 , hopefully it's all starting to feel a little more familiar and less confusing now.  It seems important to emphasize how different taking a Reiki class is from making Reiki a continual practice in your own life.  Just like taking one piano class isn't going to turn you into a piano player and taking one yoga class isn't going to make your body more flexible.  Reiki is a practice that needs to be experienced frequently in order for it to be better understood. I often hear of programs that suggest fast-track progress, but then don't emphasize the importance of self-care or the dedication to the energetic journey after finishing a class.  Based on my own Reiki journey, the work of Reiki is so much more than a methodology and set of tools.  A class is just an introduction.  It's really in the experiencing and practicing regularly that it becomes real and understandable. Without regularly applying it into our own l...

The most common question after " What is Reiki? " and " How Does Reiki Work? " is "What is the Evidence of Reiki Healing?" Reiki 1: Self-Healing Journey Through the daily self-care practice following the attunement of Reiki 1, I was able to witness a new level healing in myself, and started to witness some additional healing in my family members who received hands-on Reiki healing sessions as well. Faster Recovery from Illness & Better Immunity For my self-healing, I noticed that my recovery times from bruises, cuts, allergies, flu, and cold were much shorter than they had been in the past.  I was able to use Reiki to help relieve minor headaches and to restore my energy after being in an energetically draining environment or interaction.  I became less sensitive to environmental agitators and allergens that had previously knocked me out energetically and became better able to control random surges of anxiety before they had any inhibiting af...

Once I felt like I had mastered my own energy better, and had a better sense of what was and wasn't "mine", it became easier to recognize when things happening in my body were coming from an outside influence.  This is truly the most challenging part of energy work- really recognizing and understanding what energy is originating from within or just visiting during certain circumstances. (Did you already read Part 3 - Managing My Own Energy ?) The big question that everyone asks about Reiki is "HOW does it work?!" While science doesn't have a definitive answer to this question yet, I think the answer lies somewhere in the research behind these kinds of questions... How do  hugs improve blood pressure ? How does staring into a dog's eyes increase oxytocin levels in the blood? How do women who live in the same house sync their menstrual cycles ? How does quantum entanglement work? At a scientific level, we know that these things are observa...

Once Reiki training helped me better manage my own energy and energetic sensitivity, it became much easier for me to distinguish between what energy was actually mine and when I was sensing something from other people.  It's all so confusing at first, because the way energetic sensitivity works (in my body) is that I feel things happening inside my own body even when they have nothing to do with my condition.  So, until we have a very firm grasp on what energy originates in our body and what is actually affecting our body from the outside - it can feel like all energies happening inside our body also completely originate from us.  (Curious about Part 1 & Part 2 of My Reiki Journey?) For someone who is energetically sensitive, "all the feels" can be happening "all the time."  All the icky feelings, all the romantic feelings, all the hurtful feelings, all the health feelings- it's all there, all the time.  Just learning how to manage our own "f...