Reiki – Star, Sage & Spirit

This week I want to talk about one of the common uses of Reiki. I’ve found so often that what I’m doing with this type of energy work is helping grief move through the body. There are so many forms of grief and they all hang out in our body and clog our energy fields.

You might notice a certain ache or pain that seems to come up whenever you’re aware of a certain sadness. Maybe you notice that ache or pain started right after a significant loss. Maybe you notice a certain ache or pain in your body whenever youargue with your partner.

Sometimes we even see grief in our posture. Maybe we have the sensation that our shoulders are slumped forward or we are finding ourselves with very closed body language whenever someone asks how we are. This can look like crossing your arms across your chest or hugging yourself like you got a sudden chill whenever someone offers you the opportunity to talk about what you have been through.

When I talk about heartbreak, I’m not just talking about romantic relationships ending, I’m talking about a lot of different types of heartbreak. Maybe you have ended a relationship with an employer, a family member, or maybe someone passed away. You might have even had a bad argument or disagreement with your partner that feels like you have a broken heart. Heart break isn’t always about endings.

Heartbreak is about us integrating a lesson and allowing ourselves to sit with the pain of losing who we were before, in exchange for stepping into the new version of ourselves. Maybe it’s the version of you that has one less parent, a new career, or more time alone

So how can Reiki help? Reiki helps to hold space and time for the grieving that you may or may not be aware of. Heartbreak always brings its own dose of grief. Sometimes we are very aware of its presence and it feels all-consuming. If this is your experience, Reiki may help you shift some of that weight off of your heart and move you forward towards acceptance.

If you are less aware of that grief, it could help you confront what you’ve been avoiding. Clients who fall into this camp often find themselves suddenly in tears at the beginning of the session when I am just doing a check in to see how they are feeling. Often, we don’t even realize grief until we pause and it has a chance to catch up to us.

A good energy work session is like coming home to yourself. It resets you back to your baseline. That is where we find clarity and direction.

So processing that grief can actually help us see the future more clearly and open our hearts to new possibilities and support that we need to move towards those possibilities. Grief acts like a kind of fog. When we are grieving, it can feel a bit like slogging through molasses; everything requires more effort. You might be dealing with brain fog or exhaustion. This is all very normal.

Our culture is particularly bad with dealing with grief and we often try to rush people through their sadness because it makes us uncomfortable. I hear clients often express that they “should” be farther along in their grieving process. “I should be over it by now.” “I should have moved on already.”

These are sentiments I hear echoed over and over. The truth is that we just need a little more time and space to process. Grief moves at our pace, not the pace of the world.

Reiki takes that pressure off and is great at moving the grief sensations through the body. In a session, I give time and recognition to the grief and allow the client to feel it in a safe and controlled environment. Usually just that recognition is enough to allow the grief to start to move out of the body. I’ve had clients who have come back after one session amazed at how quickly they felt better.

If you are working through grief or any other emotion and would like to schedule a distance Reiki session, I would love to work with you. You can book a session here.

I’ve been keeping a secret.

Two years ago, I realized I was a medium. I could communicate with the spirits of people who’ve passed.

Out of nowhere, I could feel my deceased friend’s presence and hear him talking to me in my head. It was as if he was sharing his thinking and I was hearing it instead of mine.

He showed me the circumstances surrounding his death and then gave me messages for his family. He answered some of my questions. Then, just like that, he was gone.

Nothing about this experience was scary. It was surprising — and enlightening.

All my life, I’ve had instant and strong feelings about people, sometimes even before they ever said anything to me. My mom would say that I was always a good judge of character.

I would meet people and instantly know things about them that I couldn’t possibly know. I could “hear” if what they were saying and what they were feeling were the same, and I would say extremely specific things about the person that I hadn’t personally experienced, but that I knew were true.

Of course, I thought all of this was normal and that everyone else could do that too.

I grew up in a conservative, Catholic family. From a young age, I was told that contacting spirits was wrong.

That stuck with me into adulthood. Even as I got into yoga and reiki, I didn’t believe in mediums. I didn’t understand why anyone would want to talk to the dead.

Then I heard from my friend.

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Two years ago, I took my first reiki training.

As a long-time yogi, I’d been aware of reiki as a form of energy healing, but I considered it a bit too “woo-woo” for me.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the class and stunned when I realized I actually felt something.

My partner for the class was already a reiki master but was taking the introductory class because she wanted to learn more by adopting a beginners’ mindset.

After working together for the first time, she sat back and said: “You’ve been a healer in many, many lifetimes. When it’s the right time, you will hear, and you will see.”

I stared at her thinking, “OK, lady. This is the exact reason why I avoided this woo-woo nonsense.”

After taking the level two a month later, I got really sick for about three weeks — maybe the flu, or something.

I was congested and coughing. My ears were blocked. My stomach was upset. My skin broke out like I was back in middle school.

My acupuncturist had a different idea.

This wasn’t the flu, he said, but a full-body detox. I’d gone through a reiki attunement and this was a top side effect.

When I came out on the other side, everything started getting strange. I got ringing in my ears I thought was tinnitus. I had strange pains — in my right shoulder, the outside of my shoulder joint, my bicep connection or deep inside my collarbone.

I couldn’t replicate the pain by lifting weights or doing yoga. It would come at random times and then pass just as quickly. I went to the chiropractor and acupuncturist, but neither could find a physical reason for the pain and neither could resolve it.

After about a month, I had a breakthrough.

I had a dream about a friend who had passed a year and half earlier. In the dream, he was trying to talk to me. I could see his mouth moving but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. In the dream, I was having the shoulder pain. When I woke up, I had the sharpest pain to date. I was so confused.

I explained what happened to my acupuncturist. He thought the pain was because fear was making me block a message. I was ready to try anything at that point to make the pain go away, so I obliged him. He put a couple of needles in me. I laid there and waited for something to happen. To my genuine surprise, after about five minutes, it did.

That’s when I felt my friend’s presence.

My acupuncturist came back and took the needles out and I basically ran home without telling anyone what had happened.

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Over the next few weeks, I debated if what I had experienced was real. Was I losing my mind? Did I imagine it? Would anyone even believe me if I told them what happened?

The pain in my shoulder persisted. Finally, I went to see my reiki teacher. On the drive to the appointment, I was talking out loud to my friend’s spirit. I was in the bargaining stage. I said that if my teacher confirmed what my friend had told me, I would talk to his family like he had asked.

I told my teacher about the shoulder pain and asked him to see what he could pick up on. He gave me a more general but still accurate description of what was going on: a male spirit that was connected to me — more as a friend than a romantic interest — was trying to get a message across, and he was being so persistent because he was concerned about someone in the living world.

This was exactly what I needed to hear, and exactly what I didn’t want to hear. I knew I had to talk to my friend’s parents.

I was so nervous walking in. My palms were sweaty. I didn’t know where to start. I told them what had happened and what my friend has said. They were floored. We were all in disbelief.

Yet, it was what I needed to see.

That experience showed me how much closure these experiences can bring, and it opened my eyes to how healing this work can be.

After that, the floodgates opened. I was getting contacted by spirits left and right. I could feel them trying to talk to me while I was driving and teaching and at work meetings.

I didn’t know how to control it. I was overwhelmed, anxious and exhausted. What had started as a gift turned into a bit of an overwhelming mess.

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I needed help.

I learned a lot: how to control my abilities, how to tune in and tune out, and how to set strong boundaries.

That was critical. It calmed me down and helped me feel more like I was running the show, rather than spirits inundating me.

Over time, and with a lot of practice, I learned how to better communicate and how to sit and read someone.

I’ve also taken reiki level three, Kundalini reiki certification, and reiki four. My gifts, suppressed for far too long, have only grown with practice and additional trainings.

With reiki, I’ve been able to zero in on specific issues I see in people’s energy. I’m not just seeing that a person has grief in her abdomen, but that she has a complicated relationship with food stemming from comments her mother made when she was a kid.

My mediumship has also come into play. I often feel spirits come in with my clients. Inevitably, I find that whatever a client is struggling with is tied to his or her relationship or perceived responsibility to the spirit that came in with them.

Doing mediumship readings is the scariest thing I’ve done.

I feel open and vulnerable. I get a ton of information and have no context or knowledge to know if what I’m saying makes any sense. It takes a lot of trust and ability to let go of the need to be right.

I would always feel a moment of pure panic before I started and then as soon as I settled in, I would see, or more likely hear, that it was connecting for the person.

The past two years have been a wild ride, and I’ve been navigating all of it while working a full-time corporate job, part-time yoga-teaching jobs, and living with a boyfriend for the first time ever. So much change in such a short period of time.

So why am finally going public now?

Because I’m finally making the leap. After two years of doing energy healing and intuitive coaching on the side, I’ve decided to make it my full-time gig.

In future posts, I’ll answer some common questions people have about reiki, mediumship and tarot. I’ll be using this blog as a way to catalogue my experience and make some of these complex, abstract ideas more understandable.

Tag: Reiki

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