For years, I was intrigued by the healing technique called Reiki. It's brisk Japanese name (ray-key) made it sound like the kind of massage in which someone gets the tension out with hot rocks. Then a few years ago I had a free 10-minute session at my yoga studio. As I lay fully clothed on a massage table, a gentle tug on my ankles by the Reiki practitioner elicited a vivid image that shed light on a painful incident from my past. I felt as if a more objective intelligence were within me, calling attention to one particular knot in my heart.
When I shared this with the practitioner, she confessed that she had simply been "grounding" me. Reiki energy has its own unlimited intelligence, she assured me. It seeks out areas that are out of balance or in need of healing at a given moment. She went on to explain that Reiki, which means universal life force (chi), is an esoteric Tibetan Buddhist practice that was "rediscovered" by a Japanese Zen monk sometime in the late 19th century. Unlike Tibetan Buddhism, however, Reiki doesnt require years of study and meditation to master. I could become a certified "Reiki master" in less than a year, and I could receive the initiation, or "attunement," I needed to transmit Reiki energy myself just by attending a one-day workshop.
For a time, that very accessibility stopped me from pursuing Reiki. I heard stories about it curing cancer and jump-starting car batteries, and I started doubting my own experience. I've always thought of spiritual practice as an art and a science. I didn't know how to relate to something that sounded like faith healing. But a conversation with my friend Rena, a new practitioner, convinced me that Reiki was worth pursuing after all.
"I think of it as a way of focusing prayer," she said. what's more, Rena added, being a channel for healing made her feel part of the whole of life, not separate or special, just a being among beings. What had touched me the most about the brief experience I'd had was the sense of being accompanied by a higher power. I decided that I wanted to learn how to give Reiki as well as how to receive it, because I knew that I would learn the most about this energy if I allowed it to pass through me to others.
On a cold December day, I went for my first private Reiki session with Reiki master Wendy Lipson in her cozy garden apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Lipson, a cherubic brunette in her late forties, has also practiced Therapeutic Touch and shiatsu. A healer and teacher, Lipson is reputed to have a balanced and profound understanding of Reiki. She ushered me to a sofa and sat opposite me in a rocking chair. She asked whether I had any questions or concerns. I wanted to know why I could be initiated or "attuned" to receive and transmit this energy so easily. "I think its because the planet needs it," Lipson said. She dimpled up and broke into merry laughter when she saw the skepticism on my face.
"Total faith isnt necessary for this to work," Lipson assured me. "Human beings are hard-wired to receive this energy and to heal. The attunement is like plugging in the radio."
She held out her hands. They were bright red-the mark, I later discovered, of a Reiki healer. She sat back, shut her eyes and opened her arms as if she were embracing the air around her. "I can feel a lot of energy in the room right now," she said. "Why don't we move to the table."
For the next hour, I lay on a massage table while Lipson placed her warm hands on specific points on my body. Like many other non-Western healing systems, I learned, Reiki healing operates on the assumption that there are seven different chakras, or energy centers, in the body. The upper chakras (numbers five through seven) hold spiritual feelings and perceptions, while the lower chakras (one through three) relate to physical survival and well-being. In between lies the fourth chakra, the heart. The heart is the pivot, or place of integration, between the upper and lower chakras, between the spiritual and the physical. I figured that Lipson was doing heart chakra work on me since she was drawing energy from the greater spiritual world into all the chakras of my body.
Unfortunately, during that first session I felt as if most of my chakras were on strike. I worried that Reiki was just wishful thinking after all, practiced by a bunch of people imbuing human touch with magic powers. The next day, however, I felt light and calm. I could see my behavior with new clarity, the way I clung to certain pessimistic attitudes as a kind of security blanket. Then the experience was gone and I felt bereft.
When I went back for a second treatment, the sensation of flowing warmth in my body made the hour fly by. As Lipson laid her hands on my solar plexus, I felt a surge of energy. After the session, Lipson told me she felt a block in my third chakra, a center that had to do with will and with claiming the authority of my own experience. She sensed that my particular healing had to do with hooking up my busy head with all the "delicious" experiences of my body.
Within the month, I returned to Lipsons Brooklyn apartment to take Reiki I, a one-day course that would culminate in "attunement"-opening me to Reiki energy. I sat with two other aspirants as Lipson shared the traditional story of the discovery of Reiki. She freely admitted that the true nature and origins of Reiki are shrouded in myth. According to the official story, however, the Japanese Zen monk Mikao Usui sat meditating on a mountaintop, when a beam of light literally hit him between the eyes. Certain symbols from an ancient Tibetan Buddhist text appeared in the sky in bubbles and "attuned" him.
I told Lipson it sounded like a Japanese cartoon. "I agree," she said. "But what's really amazing is that Reiki works."
As a result of our attunement, Lipson explained, we would not only become aware of Reiki energy, but we would also begin to notice that we were receiving guidance of all kinds. I pictured little characters surfing in on a wave of Reiki energy like pilot fish and realized that my educated Western brain was like a barking dog, always sending up an alarm at the approach of anything unknown. From then on, I saw that learning to trust was to be one of Reiki's lessons for me.
Late in the afternoon, we three participants sat in a row on straight-backed chairs with our eyes closed, waiting for the attunement. Lipson stood behind each of us tracing symbols in the air with her hand-a bit like a priest making the sign of the cross. She touched each of us in turn on the crown of the head, poked the backs of our necks, touched our hands and folded them into prayer position. I could feel energy rushing into the room like water, if water could be a vibrant stillness, and I became very quiet and attentive inside. It was as if my heart and body knew to be obedient as I was being washed and wrapped in a great mothering energy.
Before we left, Lipson warned us that people typically go through a "clearing" process after an attunement. She urged us to be prepared to confront our "signature stuff," the obstacles and life questions that are most compelling for us. It was hardly a surprise, therefore, that my journal after Reiki I starts off as a record of discouragement. "I did a healing and my hands didn't get hot." . . . "Still nothing." . . . "I feel like I'm getting the flu."
I kept practicing the Reiki hand positions on myself and on my husband, my daughter and a few friends. One day, to my complete amazement, I noticed that my hands could "see." As I touched the body of a friend, my hands could feel the pulsing pain and bottled-up energy in her forehead. And my hands got hot.
About a month later, I took Reiki II and learned three basic Reiki healing symbols (a further masters course adds several more). They are believed to have the power to call forth energies or states: one conjures power; the second is used to calm the mind and emotions; the third, to heal long-ago wounds or people who are not present.
Days later, I tried sending healing energy to my sister in Washington, D.C., who had just lost her husband to lung cancer. I gave up after a few awkward attempts, afraid to believe I could ease her grief at a distance. Then I woke up in the middle of the night seeing the symbol and her face, asking that healing be sent to her. I called her the next day and told her about it.
"Maybe that's why I kept waking up all night long," she said. Or maybe not. But like my friend Rena, I began to think of Reiki as a form of prayer. A friend who complained of a bad back asked me for a Reiki session. This time, each chakra felt different-her throat chakra, which governs expression, burned and prickled, while her heart chakra was a calm, deep cave. Her sore lower back drew my hands like a magnet and spoke to me of heavy burdens she had never discussed with me. Later she called and thanked me. She said she had felt her back pain "bleeding" into my hot hands.
Reiki II is legendary for kicking up vivid dreams, and I had my share: wild nightmares about everything from stormy ferry-crossings to Martha Stewart. But the lesson always seemed to be the same: Look past what you think, my life seemed to be telling me. Trust what you feel. In the weeks that followed, I would suddenly be aware of a new current inside that seemed to be opening doors and ushering me into new rooms in the house. Then I would seesaw down again into doubt.
Now, five months since I began to learn Reiki, I still practice tracing the symbols and placing my hands on the chakra points of my body every day. It has become an extension of my morning meditation, and I am beginning to realize that Reiki, like meditation, is a path. I've had moments full of insight and the sense that there is a luminous, loving force running through me, helping me unfold from the inside. I've also hit rocky patches when all I see is what I lack. Slowly Reiki is showing me that this, too, is part of healing. Healing, I am beginning to suspect, is not about getting what we think we want or slipping through life unscathed. It is about coming to know and trust the benevolent intelligence or higher power that is guiding and connecting us all.
TRACY COCHRAN IS A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF NEW AGE MAGAZINE
