One of my regular clients, let’s call her Anita to keep her confidentiality, switched to remote reiki treatments during the lockdown. In case you haven’t heard of it, reiki practitioners can give treatments at a distance, to a client in another room, neighbourhood or even country. It is often called ‘distance’ healing, though, as my teacher, Frans Stiene, points out, the whole idea is to ‘be one’, and to share the energetic space, the opposite of distance. I usually use the expression ‘remote reiki’ instead.
If I wasn’t a reiki practitioner myself, I think I might find the concept hard to believe. But at the same time, when we talk to each other by phone, or see each other on the computer using Zoom or Skype, we may not physically be in the same space, but we feel each other. Most of us have had the experience too, of feeling someone we are close to, a family member or partner or friend, thinking about us, even when they are far away. The biggest reason that I believe in remote reiki though is because of my personal experience having them, and the experience of my clients.
In the treatments that I’ve given, I think 100% of my clients have reported ‘feeling’ the treatment and having good results. Because it is a bit more ‘out there’ than a treatment in person, I do check, before someone books for a remote treatment, that they’ve had reiki before and are open to it. I think if you are inexperienced with reiki and don’t know what to expect, or if you’re cynical in any way about it, it would be possible to not feel or block out the effects, perhaps like when you’re supposed to be on a Zoom work call, and instead you’ve turned off the screen and are checking your Facebook!
Anyways, for Anita, what I was excited to learn was that while she didn’t find the remote treatments as strong as in-person ones, she still felt effects. And the proof was in her health monitor, which she later showed me: an inobtrusive rather pretty ring, called an Oura ring, which monitors your heart rate, sleep and relaxation. Her ring told her that when she was having reiki, it was like having a nap: her heart rate slowed down, and her ring thought she was asleep.
More recently, Anita shared with me a screenshot of her Oura ring results, during an in-person treatment, and she gave permission to me to share it with you. I was very excited to see it, as it showed that not only during the treatment did the ring think she was asleep, but that the majority of the sleep (60%) was deep sleep, rather than light sleep. And that out of the 50 minute treatment, she was able to go into that sleep-like state for 43 minutes of it, which seems pretty good to me.
To me, this is a very good explanation of one of the ways that reiki works. It allows your brain to tune into the brain waves of deep relaxation and sleep, rather than the day-to-day brain functioning which helps us get to appointments and not bump into things when we’re walking!
And that place of relaxation is healing. I’ve read that sleep it is when repair and healing takes place. Some people believe dreams are the brain’s way of healing and reordering. When we don’t get enough sleep, we feel bad, and if we don’t get enough sleep over long periods, it can have really detrimental effects on our health.
Many clients say after a treatment, ‘I think I fell asleep’, and I think this is a good thing. Some might ask, why not just get some sleep instead of doing reiki? But I think a reiki treatment is intentional relaxation. It is rest with purpose and the best kind of sleep rather than sleep because you are too tired to stay awake, or because you have to.