What I Learned About Love From Becoming a Reiki Practitioner
On my desk is a card, framed for the quote beneath the picture of a mouse tiptoeing in front of a sleeping cat: “Do at least one thing every day that scares you.” The quote is Eleanor Roosevelt, whom, incidentally, I wrote a report on in the second grade, so it’s fitting that her words are ones I live by now.
Yesterday I did something that scared me enough to write about it: I became a reiki level two practitioner. People ask me what reiki is; put simply, reiki is universal life force energy. It is also unconditional love. When you give reiki, you are channeling the energy that is all around and within you to pointedly direct it somewhere or to someone who needs to heal. The healing can be physical, emotional, or mental.
The mental experience of giving reiki is counterintuitive. On the one hand, because we are a conduit for the energy, we are supposed to quiet our minds. On the other hand, we have to visualize moving the energy, which involves a certain amount of trust, or faith, in the energy as something that can be moved.
I’ve often wondered how much the experience of receiving reiki is influenced by the mind, which is very powerful. I’ve also wondered about the experience of people who don’t know they are receiving it, whether they’ve accepted it but may not know it is being given or they’re on the other side of the world.
In any case, we, as healers, have to have a sort of faith that the love and light we are sharing will act upon the world to improve the lives of those to whom we are sending it. We do this believing that the positive energy we send out into the world will come back to us, which in its own way seems to be a law of the universe.
Practicing reiki in the second degree is a very emotional experience. Giving reiki was definitely emotional for me — more so than receiving it. While I can’t say I was entirely surprised by the fact that I became emotional, as I do sometimes become teary in hip-openers (not from the pain but from releasing the negative energy stored in the body), I didn’t expect to become so when giving reiki. It makes sense, because when we give reiki, we also receive it as we channel the energy. Still, the experience was intense.
As I stood over my partner with my palms angled down, creating a “bubble” of energy (or, as I think of it, a sort of energy field), tears started streaming down my face. They might have been due to my mind’s wandering and the healing I was doing in my own self. When I received reiki, smaller tears ran out of the corners of my eyes twice, both times when my partner’s hands were by my temples. I would love to know what this means.
Receiving reiki felt like energy swirling through me, and later, moving in waves. I noticed many sensations:
o First, a feeling of heaviness, as if my whole body were being grounded, followed by a feeling of lightness, as if having been grounded, I could be lighter.
o Second, pressure in my lower abdomen — my root chakra? sacral chakra? It could have been both, from thinking so much about fear and unconditional love, and from feeling blocked creatively and sensually.
o Third, when my partner stood over me, creating the “bubble,” I felt as if I were floating. My spirit was decidedly still in my body — but I had my first out-of-body experience this morning, during a sound bath, and I can’t help but wonder if it was on some level led to by the reiki.
I’ve thought a lot recently on soul and spirit. To me, soul is a person’s core. People can change dramatically throughout their lives, and whether we accept it or not, change is constant. It’s a question I’ve considered for a half year or so: Is there any part of a person that cannot change, that defines that person? I’ve come to believe that this is the soul. Spirit is how you approach the world. It’s how you act, how you perceive what is beyond your control, and your outlook on life. To be happy with someone, I believe your souls have to match or complement one another to make the other stronger, and your spirits must be compatible in that you bring joy to the other person.
Together, the soul and spirit allow us to move forward through change and find stillness in love. The spirit loves and experiences life while the soul provides stillness. That’s why the soul is the part of a person you have to trust you know before you spend your life with them. This person will bring you stillness by grounding you, and they will love you unconditionally. The unconditional nature of this love is what I think we all, really, want of love.
Until yesterday, I hadn’t realized that love itself is a thing you can trust. Trusting someone’s love may come with trusting that person, but I have a theory that it’s separate and deeper. We know there are different kinds of love, but I’ve come to believe everyone has their own quality of love in each of those capacities, and that in choosing to trust another person, you have to trust that you’re not making a mistake. You have to trust yourself.
Love is its own energy, and it is healing. Energy is physical, but when we love someone, we direct a kind of energy to them. We can also direct energy to ourselves, in self-love. The phrase “love yourself” doesn’t begin to capture the importance of self-love. After we gave and received reiki with our partner, we sent love to ourselves as we were at a former time in our lives, and I discovered just how powerful self-love is.
Reiki, for context, does not know time or space, which also makes sense if you think about it: who you are is an evolution of who you have been, and so this goes with the idea raised by people like Joan Didion and Alexander Chee who tell us not to feel ashamed of or forget who we have been. That’s not to say we have to be proud of who we were or disallow dreams, but in reiki, we love the shadow — within ourselves and others — to bring light to it. When we send reiki, we are sending love. I have to remember that just as important as loving yourself is allowing others to love you, too.
Reiki is intimate, for all of the above reasons, and so it’s okay if a person decides it’s not for them and they don’t want it. It involves trust in another person as well as something higher. I admit, I’m not confident that reiki works. My self-preserving mind questions its own role in reiki (How much of what we perceive is effectuated by our expectations of what’s supposed to happen?).
For now, though, intellectualizing it is a little fun, and as I practice on myself and others, maybe I will bring my mind and spirit into balance.
