For Christmas this year, I was in Hawaii, on Oahu, where my brother lives with my family. I flew with Hawaiian Airlines. On the way back, this was one of the meals! I have to admit: I was disappointed. I generally love airplane meals, the jigsaw of how they’ve fit everything onto a tray. So, based on previous meals, I thought this was a pretty poor showing.

So, I was looking for a photo for this blog post as I don’t like using stock photos and almost always use my own. This came up as a recent shot (I was complaining to my brothers about the sandwich) and while I didn’t mean to talk about my airplane meal in this post, the idea behind it is pertinent to what I want to write about.

When you come for a reiki treatment, what are your expectations? 

I think it is unavoidable to have at least some expectations, and that my clients should be able to expect a few things: that I will treat them with respect, that it will be a safe environment, that I will provide an honest service.

The big majority of my clients don’t know a lot about reiki, so most will not have specific expectations about the treatment.

But some do, and I find it interesting how this affects the treatment. I found it especially illuminating when a recent client was describing his treatment afterwards. He said that for the first part of the treatment, he was trying to figure out what he might expect from it, he was trying to feel *something*. And he didn’t.

But then, he said he started to feel things when he stopped trying. When he let go of his expectations of what might happen, he was able to feel something.

I think that my least successful treatments have been when clients expected a specific result. One client stopped me after a fairly short time by saying that it was nothing like her previous treatment. Another client was disappointed because the treatment wasn’t in a spa-like environment like when she’d had her previous treatment in Bali. Some clients have heard from friends about THEIR treatments and wonder if they will have the same experiences, either physically or mentally.

I think that all of this mental chatter interferes with being able to notice what might happen during a treatment, or might happen later. One client, in a follow-up email, said that after their treatment, they had a really good night of sleep, but ‘that was all’. But I thought that a good night of sleep sounds pretty good. I wonder what they were expecting.

I think reiki is a little mysterious and that it is generally positive. All in all, it’s best, when coming for a treatment, to try to be as open as possible to what might happen (or might not happen) and to have minimal expectations, which can then allow you, after the treatment, to gently and objectively ask yourself: Do I feel different? Have I noticed any changes?

… rather than: Did reiki meet my expectations?

For after all, what did you expect? 😃

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 more than 2,900 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. Folks come from all over Sydney and elsewhere to see me. 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.