Monthly Archives: September 2020

I’m not sure your energy is blocked

Posted on by

If you type into Google ‘energy blocked’, depending on the day, it comes up with between 350 and 499 million results. Seriously.

A typical website, as from Integral Psychology, will tell you that people suffer trauma and the trauma gets stuck in the body. It comes from the field of Somatic Therapy, which ‘looks at the connection of mind and body and uses both psychotherapy and physical therapies for holistic healing’.

Many more websites will tell you how to find out why your chakras are blocked. How can you tell? A typical answer:

You may feel more tired or lacking energy, you may feel unmotivated or experiencing more anxiety 
and stress, dealing with digestive issues and just not feeling like your true self mentally, 
physically and spiritually.

I have to admit that when I first put up this website, and was trying to explain reiki, I explained reiki in this way too. I said that that we gather stress or blockages with time, and so reiki works to get rid of those blocks and help our energy move more freely.

I don’t know where I got that explanation from because I don’t believe it anymore!

I think my doubt started with so many of my clients coming for treatments for energy blockages and blocks in their chakras. But when asked how they were, the answers were much more simple. Rather than their heart chakra being blocked, preventing them from finding a good relationship or because they were hurt, it felt more true to me that they had been through a bad relationship, and that finding good relationships is difficult and needs work! Or that they were hurt, in a romantic or family relationship. When people said they are tired, it was likely that they live a busy life, or have young children to look after, or aren’t getting enough sleep. And the idea of ‘not feeling like oneself’? The older that I’ve gotten, the more I realise that we have many selves, and that it is a mistake to create a story about how we are always the same.

I feel a great fault of the new age movement and new age language is convincing so many people (and so many of my clients) that something is wrong with them: their chakras are blocked or not aligned; they have accumulated negative energy and they need a clearing. A few clients say they have negative energy and need it cleared, but this is a lesson, not necessarily easy, that we can learn for ourselves. If someone is angry at us, we can both see if there are valid reasons for it, and if there are not, to see that their anger is their issue, it is about them, not us, and try to not be affected by it.

What I also take issue with is the story that the older we get, that we accumulate pain and trauma and blocks: life is dangerous and we need to be healed from it. What if we told ourselves a different story, a more positive story? What if the older we are, and the more wise, the more we learn to be less stressed, less blocked and less troubled? I think that’s as good a theory as any. As my reiki teacher, Frans Stiene, says, if the energy in our body was truly blocked, we’d be … dead.

I should clarify what I’m saying. I don’t discount the idea that we can suffer trauma and that it can affect our bodies, and therefore our energy. But I don’t think it’s useful for most people to believe that we have suffered trauma and that it has affected our bodies. If you think this might be the case for you, DO see a somatic therapist or a psychotherapist or another counsellor, and uncover and define what trauma you might have suffered and address the issue directly. But don’t self-diagnose yourself and believe without questioning that you have something blocked in your body, which is the reason for not feeling great.

It’s just not healthy to walk around believing that there’s something wrong with us. There are a lot of good reasons why we might not feel great in our lives. Convincing people that our mysterious energy system is malfunctioning, I believe, takes away the power from people to address why we might not feel great. Many of the websites that tell people their chakras are blocked advise buying crystals or visiting someone who can clear their chakras. Has this all been invented as a commercial scam? I think it’s a terrible thing to convince people they are walking around with their chakras blocked and trauma stuck in their body. If you believe this, ask yourself why. How did you come to believe this?

If you know that work and life is busy, too busy for you, then you can consider finding ways of carving out time for yourself, of treating yourself well, and finding ways to slow down. If you feel tired, would taking time to yourself, or going for a walk, or doing some exercise, help you? It could be a physical issue that you should chat with a doctor or nutritionist about. If your heart is broken, perhaps talking to friends, or a counsellor, or treating yourself nicely, and also recognising that you are hurt and that there are good reasons for it, will probably help more than a rose quartz crystal for your heart. I believe that looking to ourselves to understand why we might be feeling low (or happy) is a way to give the power and responsibility back to ourselves to be able to do something about it.

A reiki treatment could be part of this. But rather than seeing a reiki practitioner to clear your blocks and align your chakras, I think the real healing comes in being proactive about wanting to feel better, gathering tools for your toolbox so you know what works for you in feeling better, and seeing your issues as something that, while they might not be easy to heal, can be healed with you taking an active part in making it happen.

Discover the gifts and benefits of a session of Japanese reiki therapy, healing energy from an experienced practitioner. Visit my website or Facebook page for more information and SMS, email, call me or book online if you’d like to make an appointment. Since 2011, I’ve given nearly 1,700 reiki treatments.
Clients come to relieve stress, anxiety and for many other issues, or to just give reiki a try to see what it does for them. While it’s easiest to get to me from the CBD, Darlinghurst, Paddington, Kings Cross, Redfern and Potts Point, I’m pretty easy to get to from anywhere in Sydney. A recent client told me she found me by googling ‘Best Reiki Sydney’. Come see for yourself. 

The Goop Lab episode on energy healing

Posted on by

I had at least three clients come to me after they saw the show ‘Heal’ on Netflix (which I wrote about here) and not that long ago, I had a client come because they’d seen the episode on energy healing on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Lab series on Netflix. So, I thought I better watch it and see what it was about.

The premise of the show is pretty simple. Some of Gwyneth’s staff, a guest actor, Julianne Hough, and Gwyneth herself all have treatments with one John Amaral, a chiropractor who has developed a ‘somatic energy healing practice’ which he calls the ‘Energy Flow Formula’. He also tries to show one of his friends how to do it.

In one scene, Julianne and three of the Goop team are invited to lie face down on a treatment table (if you come for reiki, you’ll know I do treatments with you face up). He begins the treatment, with his hands swooping above the body and down towards it, a magician of sorts. Julianne immediately contorts her body into various positions that perhaps only a dancer or actor could do (she is a regular client of John’s I believe). And she shudders and it looks like she’s possessed.

One of the other clients seems to get quite emotional, and she lifts her torso up during the treatment, although John is sort of telling her to do so, so it’s hard to tell what’s happening.

On the other hand, another of the clients, the staff member who admitted being most cynical, is not shown to have any particular reaction to the treatment.

After the treatment, they mainly talk about having emotional releases, and they also interview some of John’s clients who find the treatments really helped them. The cynical staff member said he felt a release.

But the narrative is really short on details or a simple explanation of what the healing practice involves. They use, at one point, an appeal to science and quantum physics to explain it (which doesn’t make any sense) and John sort of goes into a verbal la-la land about the magical process. He also explains why people need it, something about accumulating stress in our bodies so we’re in a constant fight or flight state.

I looked up John Amaral on Google after the show, and I found an article in People magazine, where they paid for one of their reporters to have a VIP treatment of 90 minutes that cost $2,500 (this is US dollars) and described it in the headline as ‘exorcism-like’. The journalist describes feeling deeply relaxed, and then emotional, and then uncontrollable writhing and jerking around. The result: she felt lighter and less tense, though ‘not a drastic difference’.

As a reiki practitioner, the episode does no service to us, as it doesn’t mention reiki specifically at all, and because of that, Amaral, on his website, has to explain under his frequently asked questions that he doesn’t do reiki!

I also have real problems with the elite nature of his work. While he says that ‘anyone’ can benefit from his healings, the truth is that a one-on-one session is far more expensive than mostly everyone can afford. While he offers some free or low-cost online classes or tasters, the fact is still that his treatments cost a huge amount.

The episode would be of far more value to people in explaining that affordable healing is available to anyone, like reiki, meditation, acupuncture, qi gong, yoga, kinesiology: whatever works for you. Exploring accessible treatments would really have been a great service to people rather than an episode on an energy healer to the stars.

The other problem I have is that there is a strong underlying message that there is something wrong with everyone (and thus, everyone can benefit from a healing). I used to also believe that we get blocks in our energy, but I no longer believe this: I’m going to write a separate blog post on it. But I think it’s a dangerous thing to tell people that life is dangerous and unhealthy and you need healing because it.

Goop’s message does seem to be that we can feel better and feel healthy and that we should explore different ways to do this. And their web page on energy healing does describe reiki in a positive way. But this episode of the Goop Lab seems to really be what the opening warning says, to be taken as entertainment rather than medical advice, and that by focusing on a healer so dramatic and showy, I think it makes viewers wonder if something is wrong with them and wish they were as rich as Gwyneth Paltrow to be able to afford such treatments.

Discover the gifts and benefits of a session of Japanese reiki therapy, healing energy from an experienced practitioner. Visit my website or Facebook page for more information and SMS, email, call me or book online if you’d like to make an appointment. Since 2011, I’ve given nearly 1,700 reiki treatments.
Clients come to relieve stress, anxiety and for many other issues, or to just give reiki a try to see what it does for them. While it’s easiest to get to me from the CBD, Darlinghurst, Paddington, Kings Cross, Redfern and Potts Point, I’m pretty easy to get to from anywhere in Sydney. A recent client told me she found me by googling ‘Best Reiki Sydney’. Come see for yourself. 

Music for reiki healing

Posted on by

I first put up this blog post in Oct 2017, and then did a little update in May 2019. So, it’s time to repost it!

In the meantime, I’ve created another playlist, which I’m calling ‘Reiki Best’ and it’s on heavy rotation! So, if you’ve had a treatment with me in the last year, then you’re likely to have been hearing music from this list. I think once you get into Spotify than you can bookmark it! In the meantime, below is the previous post with the other three playlists!

Here’s a different than usual blog post! I’m also a musician as well as a reiki practitioner and I’ve played piano and written songs for many years. So I consider the music that I play during my treatments very important. I want it to be beautiful and restful, calming and relaxing, and maybe even a way to transport the mind to another beautiful place (and block out the ever-present street noise of Surry Hills and other random sounds).

Occasionally I’ll find a song that I like that has an unfortunate huge dramatic swell in the middle of it. I really like the music of Sigur Rós and Jónsi but found a few of the tracks have samples that could be a bit disturbing during a treatment (like the sound of a ship cracking, or children’s voices). I also don’t generally like the music that some people associate with massage treatments and new age therapies: too many sounds of bells and suspended, floating notes that don’t seem to resolve, or else the resolution is too simple and the music sounds too major key, too much like children’s songs.

In any case, if you happen to be on Spotify, you can find the music that I play during treatments. I’ve got three playlists at the moment. Find them here:

 

You can see that their names are ‘Reiki Spotify’, ‘Reiki 88 keys’ and ‘Reiki Third’.

It would be my pleasure if this beautiful music helps you meditate or feel calm or remind you of your reiki treatment.

Finally, a few of my favourite artists to give reiki treatments to: Olafur Arnalds, Max Richter, Nils Frahm and George Winston. Probably my favourite songs to give reiki treatments to: Bobby McFerrin’s Common Threads; Max Richter’s On The Nature of Daylight; Olafur Arnald’s Undan Hulu (though it’s hard to pick just one from Olafur); William Mathieu’s To the Well (with Bobby McFerrin as guest vocalist) and I love Jan A.P. Kaczmarek’s piano songs from the Finding Neverland soundtrack.

Discover the gifts and benefits of a session of Japanese reiki therapy, healing energy from an experienced practitioner. Visit my website or Facebook page for more information and SMS, email, call me or book online if you’d like to make an appointment.
Clients come from all over Sydney to see me, and I’ve also had clients who are visiting Sydney from Melbourne, Brisbane and the Gold Coast come and see me while they’re here for business, conferences or meeting families. While it’s easiest to get to me from the CBD, Darlinghurst, Paddington, Kings Cross, Redfern and Potts Point, I’m pretty easy to get to from anywhere in Sydney.