What Reiki Does

You’re lying on a comfortable massage table, covered with a warm blanket, fully clothed and secure. Two hands settle softly on your fore­head, like butterflies landing. The hands become still. Just their presence is deeply relaxing, as a mother’s hand on the brow of her child.

Then you notice - something different is happening. From where the hands are touching, sensation is spreading through­out your head and the rest of your body. It feels like blissful warmth, or maybe tingling, or maybe blessed coolness in areas that suffer in­flammation, maybe even a mix of these sensations all at once.

It feels just so RIGHT, and so deeply, deeply peaceful. It’s like coming home. As the practitioner moves his hands around your body, just laying them gently and re­spectfully for a few minutes each, places that are chronically tense wake up to this peaceful warm feeling and, just maybe, they decide to let go.

Areas of disease or injury may receive an extra intensity of warmth. If you have an acute pain, the heat from his hands may feel almost like burning but, oddly, you know instinctively that it’s GOOD, and will help you.

Thoughts may swirl around old emotional hurts, bringing them up gently for you to re­view from this place of calm and loving awareness, so that you may practice let­ting them go. The practitioner asks you to breathe deeply, and as you do so, the hurts quiet into a whisper.

Just before you fall asleep, you marvel at how relaxed and at peace you feel. You don’t remember being at such ease in your body since you were a child.

The session seems to last an eternity, yet it is over all too soon. When you finally, slowly, open your eyes and sit up, you feel as if an entire layer of stress and ill-feeling has just effortlessly washed away. Not only that, your (headache/backache/knee pain/worry about the day’s de­tails) is gone like a ghost, or at the least, feels far better than when you first hopped onto the table.

You’ve just received a Reiki ses­sion.