In this blog post I’ll attempt to describe how Reiki heals injury and illness.
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What is Healing?
I browsed my personal library to find a definition of healing. Healing is a process. It starts with an injury or an illness of some sort. The injury or illness may be sudden, such as an infection or a fractured bone.
Explaining how healing will occur in traditional medicine tends to be fairly straight forward. A bacterial infection is treated with antibiotics, which are meant to kill the bacterial growth. We use surgery or a cast on a fractured bone. These therapies are tangible and easy to imagine.
Reiki heals the mind, body, and soul on an energetic level. this means that the healing process will not likely be visible. Possibly, the receiver may not actually feel the healing working at that time. To accept this means to accept on faith that healing is occurring. Why is this?
The Power of Intention
Reiki treatment is delivered with the intention of healing. The power behind Reiki is that treatment is initiated with mindfulness. All of the treatment is responsive to the energy, it is a belief that Reiki energy has its own intelligence and will go where it’s needed most. This means that the powerful healing intention of Reiki can allow for healing much more than an acute or chronic injury that captures the sufferers attention at that time.
This not to say that healing and other modalities such as allopathic medicine, chiropractor, or psychotherapy do not have healing intentions. All healers of all types intend to heal their patient or client as much as possible. the distinct difference between Reiki and in particular my area of allopathic medicine is that physicians are not trained on mindfulness and self care. physicians trained in allopathic medicine are often taught that care of a patient requires extreme personal sacrifice, pain and suffering, and should be done no matter how the healer is feeling. Naturally, this means that care is often being delivered in a substandard way. If the healer is not feeling well, how can they provide a healing environment for the patient?
Healing That’s Unseen
Most of us like to see results in terms of our healing. If I cut my hand, I see the stages of healing, from the formation of scab, to eventually a scar. If I’m working on weight loss, I will see the number on the scale go down. Having a visual process makes it easier to understand healing.
Reiki heals in ways we can feel, possibly during a session, but the healing may not be obvious. Some people feel sensations while they are receiving Reiki, such as heat, or a cool sensation or tingling. Others may feel relaxed or fall asleep.
Reiki is a treatment modality that does not create any obvious visual changes. This requires both the Reiki Practioner and the Reiki receiver to operate on faith that that healing is happening.
The Healing Intention
The power of Reiki healing is the intention. Intentions are much more powerful than we realize. So many times in life, we proceed through our actions without a deliberate intention. Particularly, when we rush, such as during most settings at work, we fly through our actions focused on productivity, and forgetting what our initial intention was.
The Reiki practitioner, who focuses energy from a higher source, is using a healing intention to help the client. The Reiki practitioner
Reiki and the Precepts
The Reiki precepts are the guiding principles that Reiki practitioners learn and use to guide their practice. These precepts set the tone of a Reiki session to assure that the overall tone of the healing is for the highest good.
Demystifying the Mystical
Reiki is generally accepted as Energy Medicine. The energy from a higher source is channeled into a living entity, person or animal, that supports the optimal function of life. We have some understanding of what energy this may be but overall, it is a mystery.
In a medical practice I prescribe medications on a regular basis. Although most these medications have an understood mode of action, many meetings appear to work by an unknown mechanism.
One example of this is the drug topiramate. It is a prescription medication frequently used to treat seizures, migraines, and psychological disorders.
According to Epocrates.com the mode of action of topiramate is: exact mechanism of action unknown; blocks voltage-dependent sodium channels; augments GABA activity; antagonizes glutamate receptors; inhibits carbonic anhydrase
http://www.epocrates.com
So we we have some understanding of how this medications works, but we don’t exactly know. This drug has been tested clinically as well as prescribed for many years to patients. We have data that tells us overall this drug is safe when it’s needed, but it isn’t prescribed without acknowledging the risk.
We willingly accept topiramate is a valid medical treatment without being able to completely understand how it works. in addition, this is a medication that can have significant side effects. Yet we do this all the time.
The mechanism of Reiki and how it heals appears to be that it heals by gathering subtle energies that are programmed with healing intentions then channeled into a receiver in order to encourage the functioning of the mind as body together .
my opinion is that if we are willing to offer medications that we don’t understand the mechanism action, and other treatments we don’t fully understand, and accept that they carry significant impacts, why can we not accept a subtle energy healing modalities such as reiki? They are very few side effects to reiki. At the very worst it simply does not work. It requires almost no equipment. it can be provided in almost any setting. Most powerfully, the healer and the receiver don’t even need to be in the same time and space.
It is time to move medicine forward. We have to start loosening our grip on what we think works. I believe that as we move forward into the future, we will start to understand that healing is much more than what the eye can see.
Finally, the best way to understand Reiki if you are curious is to schedule a session for yourself.
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