Everything is Energy

Chapter Five of Cosmic Heart, a spiritual memoir

Cosmic Heart is a spiritual memoir. You can learn more and read the previous chapters here. When you subscribe, you’re keeping me going - supporting my work, and linking hands with me as we navigate the cosmos, Thank you for reading - it means the world.

What I knew about Reiki, I learned from the books I found on the shelves of used bookstores. I sat on my futon with my cats and shaped energy balls with my hands. I experimented with making my aura larger and smaller, and practiced seeing it by spreading my hand in front of a white wall and sliding my eyes out of focus.

I wish I could tell you my desire to learn Reiki was purely altruistic, but I’m not sure that’s true. What I remember was that I was fascinated by it. I was drawn to it. I was interested in all sorts of complementary medicine, natural remedies, and holistic approaches to wellness, but not only so that I could share these things with others. I was mostly interested because I wanted to feel better in my body, my soul, and my mind.

I was tired of anxiety, stomach issues, and headaches. I was tired of feeling tired all the time. The idea of Reiki felt beautiful to me. Easy. And somehow, familiar.

rei·ki

/ˈrākē/

noun

a healing technique based on the principle that the therapist can channel energy into the patient by means of touch, to activate the natural healing processes of the patient's body and restore physical and emotional well-being.

When I moved home, from New York to Kentucky, a friend of my mother’s, who was a nurse, invited me to come with her to a Reiki share. What was a Reiki share, I wondered? I told her I’d only read books and hadn’t been trained in Reiki, but she assured me that didn’t matter.

We arrived at a house in a sweet subdivision where a small group of women, all of them nurses, it turns out, sat in the living room, a tray of snacks on the coffee table. After some introductory chatting, we got to the purpose of the gathering and followed the woman who lived in this house to her healing room.

It was an inviting space lit only by glowing amber salt lamps. A massage table in the center of the room was draped with blankets. A small desktop fountain bubbled in the corner, water spilling from the Buddha’s hand into a lotus basin. As comforting as it was to be in the room, breathing lavender, I felt out of place. These women were accustomed to meeting and sharing energy. They knew what they were doing. I had no idea what I was doing.

We began by standing in a small circle, holding hands, reciting the Reiki precepts- For today only: Do not anger, Do not worry, Be humble, Be honest in your work, Be compassionate to yourself and others -- and sending the energy through the palms of our hands to one another. I could feel the energy coming into my left hand, but I was certain the person to my right could not feel the energy coming from me because I didn’t know how to channel energy. Indeed, my suspicions were confirmed when the person to my right said she hadn’t felt the energy flowing from me to her.

I was a fraud, an impostor, and wished I could be an invisible observer in the room. I wanted so much to be able to do what the other women were doing, but I wanted to learn without being on display. It was certainly not the only time in my life I’d wished to be invisible, and looking back, I wonder how differently things might have gone in my life if I hadn’t always been so aware of being perceived.

We took turns lying on the table and allowing the others to scan our energy and send energy. Those who weren’t on or at the table stood around it, palms facing out, beaming energy just like the woman on the cover of the first Reiki book I’d seen years earlier. I stood with them, pointed the palms of my hands toward the table, and felt conspicuous.

When it was my turn to lie on the table, I did so and closed my eyes. I reminded myself to breathe. The first woman began to scan my energy and stopped immediately over my right hip.

“What’s going on here?” she asked.

I was stunned. I explained about the pain I carried there. I felt it in my lower back and hip almost all the time, a nagging, persistent discomfort that I attributed to the backpack I used to carry.

“It feels like something is twisted,” she said.

And that was my proof that this was real. Some people can sense and manipulate energy. More than ever, I wanted to be one of those people. I didn’t want it because I desired to be special in some way. I wanted it because it seemed to me like something so loving that had been locked away from humanity. I wanted to unlock and open the door. I wanted to explore.

On the ride home, my mother’s friend said that when I was on the table, she saw a male figure standing at my head saying, “Wake up, Lori-Lyn, wake up.”

I wish I could have seen or felt him, whoever or whatever he was. I craved to know him, and I wondered, in what way was I asleep? And if I were asleep, how could I wake up? I wanted to be awake, and I wanted to be a Reiki practitioner, but I didn’t go back to the Reiki share. I was surprised and glad to know there were energy workers in my town, but I didn’t feel I belonged with this particular group.

It was a couple of years later, 2007, when Tracy and I went to an opening at an art gallery in a neighboring town, and I noticed a stack of business cards on the front desk. To my surprise, the cards belonged to a psychic medium and Reiki Master. I picked one up.

“She’s wonderful,” the gallery owner said to me. I slipped the card into my pocket and decided to book a session for myself as a birthday gift - a psychic mediumship reading followed by energy healing.

The office was on the second floor of a brick building that housed a tattoo studio and hair salon. I walked up the back steps and entered a small, cozy waiting room. A sign on the door to the session room asked me to please wait quietly, so that’s what I did, nervous with anticipation.

When it was time for my appointment, the door opened and I was greeted by one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. She was both grounded and ethereal, with mesmerizing light blue eyes and an energy that put me instantly at ease.

I took off my shoes and entered a room that felt like a sanctuary. We sat on the floor and settled down into overstuffed cushions and white fur. Crystals and candles glistened around us. There was soft music playing. I asked questions and she answered them, but the most important part of the exchange was not the reading itself; it was the way I felt in the space. It was healing just to be there; I had the sense that I was coming home in some way. This room, where I had never been, felt so familiar to me, and the conversation so intimate.

After the reading, we walked over to the treatment table, also covered in soft white sherpa. I lay down and tried to breathe, tried to relax. My eyes closed, and I was aware of her moving around me. I could hear soft swishing noises.

Suddenly, I began to see images in my third eye. A movie started to play on that movie screen I’d created in my head as a child. First, I saw a small woman walking in a circle, dancing ceremonially. Next, I saw a man with the head of a bird. I had not generated these images. They were not daydreams. After the session, when I told her what I had seen, she said, “Oh, those are two of my guides.”

Her guides. It was a thrilling concept to me. She told me their names and explained how they showed up to assist with the healing work. More proof for me that what I was experiencing was real, tangible.

Soon after that session, I enrolled in psychic development workshops and then Reiki classes with her. I loved the small classes. I liked the other people who were learning along with me, and the homework - moving my hands through the positions for self-Reiki every night. I loved sensing and moving energy. I loved the way it felt to move energy through my body.

In class, we learned about the body’s energy system, as well as the origin and history of Reiki, and we were shown our lineage. Once we were attuned to Reiki, we would be able to trace our lineage of Reiki teachers back to the beginning, Mikao Usui, who began teaching in the 1920s in Japan.

We learned that Reiki is a system for accessing something quite natural. The word Reiki is two Japanese characters, rei, meaning universal spirit, and ki, meaning vital life force or energy. The Reiki practitioner acts as a sort of conduit for the delivery of universal energy, or life force energy, in a way that restores and replenishes energy flow back into balance.

We earned that hands-on healing, or the ability to flow life-giving energy to one another, is a completely organic ability. We all do it instinctually and don’t require any sort of training or education to do it, but the system of Reiki gives this practice a particular structure, a shape.

In 2008, when I was thirty-nine years old, I received my Reiki III attunement - the process through which the teacher passes the ability to do Reiki to the student. I knelt and closed my eyes, and my teacher moved through a series of hand positions on and around me. She blew into the back of my neck. I felt something shift in my solar plexus, then energy began to move through my body. I could feel it, physically - new channels opening up, rearranging.

Attunement permanently alters your energy field, allowing you to access the particular frequency that is Reiki. In Japan, it’s called reiju, which means initiation, and it did feel like an initiation to me, this process. I was moving into a different place, a new understanding.

In the weeks that followed, my hands would tingle and get hot at random times. I thought of this as my hands “turning on.” They turned on when I was walking down the street. They turned on once at a funeral. When this happened, I would place them on myself or Tracy, and let the energy flow. It was amazing to me, exciting. It was proof that the unseen world was just as real as the world we could see.

I treasure the time I spent seeing in-person Reiki clients. I loved that work, and I loved those sessions. I wish now that I’d been better at explaining what it was I was offering. Too often, people came to me in pain, looking for a cure, but healing and curing are not the same thing.

I wish I’d stood a little more firmly in my own space and had been less influenced by all of the disparate and loud voices in the Reiki and Reiki-adjacent community; I would have been better at claiming my voice in the world of energy healing. What I understood about Reiki then, I still understand today.

Reiki isn’t something a practitioner does to you or for you. What happens during a session depends on where you and the practitioner meet, and your willingness to come into alignment with your intentions. Energy healing allows you to step into a place out of time, regulate your nervous system, and be in your natural state, which is a state of calm and peace. It is from that place that healing happens.

Everything is energy, and the energy we channel for one another when we move with Reiki is truly what it claims to be, universal life force energy - the energy that flows through everything. The energy itself is neutral and supportive, just as the universe is neutral and supportive. It is the human (the living being) who brings the love, who shares the love, and who receives the love. And it is the love that’s doing the healing if there is healing to be done.

Notes:

You can read previous chapters of Cosmic Heart here.