i’m visiting my hometown right now, and had the opportunity to gift one of my oldest friends his first mini Reiki session.  

i’m from Bellingham, WA, so naturally we were walking by the ocean when he asked me about the “fundamentals of Reiki.” i shared with him while we watched lights on the boardwalk shimmer against black water in that mystic, early part of the night. at the end i said, “i’m a pragmatist. i don’t know how it works, but i know that it works. that’s good enough for me.”

back at the house, he laid facedown on the couch, a pillow propping up his chest, and i spent ten minutes paying attention to his presence and letting the healing energy flow through me.

after he sat up on the couch, he asked me what it was like, how i knew what to do.  for me it comes from a direct knowing, a subtle but clear inner sense. i listen and place my hands where it occurs to me. if i feel a subtle stream of warm energy flowing, i stay, and if i don’t, i move somewhere else. 

i asked him how the session was for him.  he told me he felt calm and peaceful.  he said that’s a big deal for him~ his norm is to have these different parts of himself that feel at war, sort of constricting against each other and creating chronic tension and pain. during our session, he didn’t feel that. 

since i was initiated into Reiki about a year ago, i’ve brought the energy into grief rituals a lot more than i’ve practiced traditional sessions.  and i think that’s really what it is.  the grief rituals are about ending the war.  cessation of the fighting, pushing, severing the parts within us that we don’t know how to be with, how to care for.  cessation of the running that we do from whatever in our life feels too frightening, too heavy, too impossible.  

i think, we’re not really fighting because our true nature is violent.  we’re not really running because our true nature is cowardice.  we’ve just forgotten, or somehow been disconnected from, the threads of support that hold us through the whole story of life.  

when i give a Reiki session, i share how the energy has its own wisdom, and it just comes into wherever in you needs support.  i sense it like that - in sessions and in the grief rituals - how it’s weaving something like a thin silver chain, holding those parts inside us that feel like they’ve fallen out, like there’s a black hole there, like something is lost.  it holds a strength, a stability, a love ~ a line ~ in those places. 

grief rituals aren’t for the faint of heart… but my experience is that Reiki holds a hand up under the places we have lost our strength. a kind of strength that doesn’t come from some type of sheer, cold will power muscling through, but from the warm, subtle glow of love that holds us as we take one risky step forward, stretching and growing into more of who we really are.  

Reiki helps to bind what hasn’t yet been reconstituted.  grief ritual gathers the missing parts.  and slowly, with breath, with eye contact, with each other, with the great heart of things, we weave ourselves back into the tapestry of life… that beautiful place of feeling ourselves settle into here, now.
 

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