Know that all strength, all healing of every nature is the changing of the vibrations from within, - the attuning of the divine within the living tissue of a body to Creative Energies. This alone is healing."
Edgar Cayce reading 1967-1
An introduction to some complementary and alternative approaches that can help heal the body, mind and soul.
For generations, people have been exploring a variety of approaches to treat the physical, emotional, nutritional and biological effects of illness. In Western societies the practice of medicine mostly relies on therapies that typically undergo rigorous testing for safety and effectiveness before they are accepted into mainstream use. But there are many practices and products that are used around the world that while unproven by Western standards, have provided reassurances and relief of discomfort and distress for centuries.
In many cultures these are considered traditional medicine. In the West, we call these approaches complementary and alternative (CAM) treatments. They can be used in combination with conventional Western medical therapies such as medications, surgery and other standard procedures (complementary medicine) or alone (alternative medicine).
Recently, the practice of integrative medicine is gaining popularity and many mainstream medical practitioners now fully embrace and trust some of the better-studied alternative approaches, such as acupuncture, as a highly effective treatment.
Why CAM?
People who use CAM treatments do so for a variety of reasons. Mostly they are used to accompany conventional care to improve general health and wellbeing. They are also used when conventional therapies for illnesses fall short or have failed. Still, others forgo conventional therapies altogether because they do not want to experience their potential side effects. And some prefer alternative therapies because conventional treatments do not align with their personal or spiritual philosophies.
Whatever the reasons, CAM therapies can bring comfort, control and calm to the people who use them. Nearly 40% of adults have used CAM therapies at some point in their life, mostly for back and neck problems, headaches, insomnia, colds, joint pain, anxiety, depression and cancer relief.
Types of CAM therapies
Here are some of Dr. Oz's favorite CAM therapies that energize, sooth and support the body, mind and spirit.
Reiki
Reiki is another popular energy healing therapy, which is typically performed by a trained Reiki master. Here the practitioner's light touch on, or slightly above, specific areas of the body is used to balance the flow of energy throughout the body. The laying on of hands on the head, face, neck, chest, abdomen and back delivers varying degrees of natural vibrational "heated" energy as needed, to strengthen the body to heal itself. Reiki can also be self-administered.
Special note: Because a CAM therapy is natural it doesn't mean it is necessarily safe, or safer than conventional treatments. Beware of unrealistic advertising claims that sometime accompany CAM products and always select an experienced practitioner to perform body manipulations. Let all the practitioners - CAM and Western - involved with your care to know about each of the therapies you are taking or undergoing as some may interfere with the effectiveness of other treatments.
https://www.doctoroz.com/article/alternative-medicine-treatments
Money Reiki
We all know Dr. Oz. He is an amazing conventional doctor who helps America on the path to better health. In this wonderful video he shares that his wife is a REIKI Master. He also explains how REIKI assists individuals on their path as a complementary form of alternative healing. Enjoy!!
Reiki is a Japanese healing modality which was developed in 1920 and brought to the United States in 1937 by Hawayo Takato. Reiki is the channeling of the primal life force energy through the Reiki Master to the client. A Reiki treatment allows stress to be released and thus and promotes healing in the mind, body & spirit. Although it is not a replacement for medical or psychological treatments, it complements traditional methods. Please discuss with your doctor the addition of Reiki to your health treatments.
According to the Center for Reiki Research, "a study done in 2007 by the National Health Interview Survey indicates that 1.2 million adults and 161,000 children received one or more sessions of energy healing therapy such as Reiki in the previous year. According to the American Hospital Association, in 2007, 15% or over 800 American hospitals offered Reiki as part of hospital services."www.centerforreikiresearch.org
Reiki may be done in person or from a distance. Either way, the client is fully clothed and the energy is passed without touching the client. A calm and relaxing feeling is often experienced by the client. Each session is as unique as the person who is receiving it.
Reiki is a powerful yet subtle energy modality that can support improvements in the mind/body & spirit.
Dr. OZ and Reiki:https://www.doctoroz.com/article/alternative-medicine-treatments
Want to read more about Reiki?https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/308772.php
.
There are a lot of life coaches out there today offering the same or similar services. Dawn has so many qualities that set her apart from the rest, beginning with that incredibly warm smile of hers. From the moment you meet her you can tell she is able to quickly connect and understand what you are feeling. She is a special healer.
-Tami, Tampa Florida
Reiki is a form of alternative therapy commonly referred to as energy healing. It emerged in Japan in the late 1800's and is said to involve the transfer of universal energy from the practitioner's palms to their patient.
Energy healing has been used for centuries in various forms. Advocates say it works with the energy fields around the body.
Some controversy surrounds Reiki, because it is hard to prove its effectiveness through scientific means. However, many people who receive Reiki say it works, and its popularity is increasing. A Google search for the term currently returns no less than 68,900,000 results.
A 2007 survey shows that, in the United States (U.S.), 1.2 million adults tried Reiki or a similar therapy at least once in the previous year. Over 60 hospitals are believed to offer Reiki services to patients.
Fast facts on Reiki
Here are some key points about Reiki. More detail is in the main article.
The word "Reiki" means "mysterious atmosphere, miraculous sign." It comes from the Japanese words "rei" (universal) and "ki" (life energy). Reiki is a type of energy healing.
ADVERTISEMENT Narcolepsy Test - Identify the Symptoms This online test can help identify the signs of cataplexy in narcolepsy. MoreThanTired.com
Energy healing targets the energy fields around the body.
According to practitioners, energy can stagnate in the body where there has been physical injury or possibly emotional pain. In time, these energy blocks can cause illness.
Energy medicine aims to help the flow of energy and remove blocks in a similar way to acupuncture or acupressure. Improving the flow of energy around the body, say practitioners, can enable relaxation, reduce pain, speed healing, and reduce other symptoms of illness.
Reiki has been around for thousands of years. Its current form was first developed in 1922 by a Japanese Buddhist called Mikao Usui, who reportedly taught 2,000 people the Reiki method during his lifetime. The practice spread to the U.S. through Hawaii in the 1940s, and then to Europe in the 1980s.
It is commonly referred to as palm healing or hands-on healing.
Reiki is best held in a peaceful setting, but it can be carried out anywhere. The patient will sit in a comfortable chair or lie on a table, fully clothed. There may or may not be music, depending on the patient's preference.
The practitioner places their hands lightly on or over specific areas of the head, limbs, and torso using different hand shapes, for between 2 and 5 minutes. The hands can be placed over 20 different areas of the body.
If there is a particular injury, such as a burn, the hands may be held just above the wound.
While the practitioner holds their hands lightly on or over the body, the transfer of energy takes place. During this time, the practitioner's hands may be warm and tingling. Each hand position is held until the practitioner senses that the energy has stopped flowing.
When the practitioner feels that the heat, or energy, in their hands has abated, they will remove their hands and may place them over a different area of the body.
The techniques involved have names such as:
Some Reiki practitioners will use crystals and chakra healing wands, because they find these can enable healing or protect a home from negative energy.
However, Annie Harrington, Chair of the Reiki Federation of the United Kingdom (U.K.), told Medical News Today:
"Reiki relies on no other instruments beyond the practitioner. We do not use crystals, powders or wands as a general rule. However, one of the benefits of Reiki healing is distance healing (where Reiki is sent over several miles) then, many practitioners will use crystals to assist with the energy vibrations."
Sessions can last between 15 and 90 minutes. The number of sessions will vary, depending on what a client wishes to accomplish. Some clients prefer to have one session while others have a series of sessions to work on a particular issue.
According to practitioners, the healing effects are mediated by channeling the universal energy known as qi, pronounced "chi." In India, this is known as "prana." This is the same energy involved in tai chi exercise. It is the life force energy that some believe surrounds all of us.
This energy is said to permeate the body. Reiki experts point out that, while this energy is not measurable by modern scientific techniques, it can be felt by many who tune in to it.
Reiki is alleged to aid relaxation, assist in the body's natural healing processes, and develop emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being.
It is also said to induce deep relaxation, help people cope with difficulties, relieve emotional stress, and improve overall wellbeing.
People who receive Reiki describe it as "intensely relaxing."
Conditions that Reiki has been used to help treat include:
According to the University of Minnesota, patients who have undergone a Reiki session may say:
Cancer patients who have Reiki say they feel better after. This may be because it helps them relax. Another reason, according to Cancer Research U.K. could be that the therapist spends time with them and touches them. This has a soothing effect on patients who may be overwhelmed by invasive therapy, fear, and stress.
Individuals report different experiences. Some say that the practitioner's hands become hot, others report cooling hands and some people feel pulsating waves. The most common reports are of a release of stress and deep relaxation.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/308772.php
This is a content preview space you can use to get your audience interested in what you have to say so they can’t wait to learn and read more. Pull out the most interesting detail that appears on the page and write it here.
Jordan Kisner
“When I started it, they all just called it that crap. Like, ‘Oh, they’re over there doing that crap.’ ” This nurse, whom I’ll call Jamie, was on the line from a Veterans Affairs medical center in the Northeast. She’d been struggling for a few minutes between the impulse to tout the program she’d piloted, which offers Reiki to vets as part of their medical care, and the impulse to “tread lightly,” because some of the doctors, nurses, and administrators she works with still think that Reiki is quackery or—you know.
Reiki, a healing practice codified in the early 20th century in Japan, was until recently an unexpected offering for a VA medical center. In Japanese, rei roughly translates to “spiritual”; ki is commonly translated as “vital energy.” A session often looks more like mysticism than medicine: Healers silently place their hands on or over a person’s body to evoke a “universal life force.” A Reiki treatment can even, practitioners believe, be conducted from miles away.
Reiki’s growing popularity in the U.S.—and its acceptance at some of the most respected American hospitals—has placed it at the nexus of large, uneasy shifts in American attitudes toward our own health care. Various non-Western practices have become popular complements to conventional medicine in the past few decades, chief among them yoga, meditation, and acupuncture, all of which have been the subject of rigorous scientific studies that have established and explained their effectiveness. Reiki is the latest entrant into the suite of common additional treatments. Its presence is particularly vexing to naysayers because Reiki delivers demonstrable salutary effects without a proven cause.
Over the past two decades, a number of studies have shown that Reiki treatments help diminish the negative side effects of chemotherapy, improve surgical outcomes, regulate the autonomic nervous system, and dramatically alter people’s experience of physical and emotional pain associated with illness. But no conclusive, peer-reviewed study has explained its mechanisms, much less confirmed the existence of a healing energy that passes between bodies on command. Nevertheless, Reiki treatment, training, and education are now available at many esteemed hospitals in the United States, including Memorial Sloan Kettering, Cleveland Clinic, New York Presbyterian, the Yale Cancer Center, the Mayo Clinic, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
When Jamie introduced Reiki at the VA center 10 years ago, she overrode the objections of some colleagues who thought it was pseudoscience and out of step with the general culture of the VA, where people are inclined to be suspicious of anything that might be described as “woo woo.” But she insisted that the VA—which also offers yoga, acupuncture, massage, clinical hypnosis, and tai chi—should explore any supplementary treatment for chronic pain and PTSD that doesn’t involve pharmaceuticals, especially narcotics. The veterans started coming, slowly, and the ones who came started coming back. Jamie didn’t promise anything other than that it might help them feel calm or help them with pain. The Reiki practitioner she hired was a local woman, somewhat hard-nosed, not inclined to offer anyone crystals. Soon after the program began, Jamie was getting calls from doctors and nurses: “Hey, is the lady here? Someone wants that crap.”
The effects were startling, Jamie told me. Veterans who complained that their body had “forgotten how to sleep” came in for Reiki and were asleep on the table within minutes. Others reported that their pain declined from a 4 to a 2, or that they felt more peaceful. One patient, a man with a personality disorder who suffers from cancer and severe pain, tended to stop his normal routine of screaming and yelling at the staff when he came in for his Reiki sessions.
Popular though her program has become, Jamie still hears from colleagues who dismiss the results of Reiki as either incomprehensible or attributable to the placebo effect. As we talked, a little noise of frustration came through the phone line. We take people seriously when they say they’re in terrible pain, even though we can’t measure that, she said. “Why do we have a problem accepting when somebody says, ‘I feel better; that helped’?”
Carlotta Manaigo
I first learned of Reiki six or seven years ago from a slim memoir by the writer Amy Fusselman. In 8: All True, Unbelievable, she describes receiving Reiki after years of psychotherapy and visits to doctors failed to ease what ailed her. “Doctors, in my experience, touch you with the desire to examine you, and then they use their brains to figure out what to do,” Fusselman writes.
This is fine, but right then it wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was to lie there and not use my brain, and believe someone was trying to help me, also not with his or her brain. I understand how this sounds. But you have to remember that I had been trying to use my brain on my problems for twenty years … I was over my brain. I was over everybody’s brain.
Reading this, I felt a prick of interest. I, too, was over my brain, which has always been as much the cause of my problems as the solution. What would it be like to admit the possibility of being made better by something that wasn’t pharmacological or physiotherapeutic or any of the many polysyllabic options readily available at my doctors’ offices? I believe, I suppose, in the spirit; and if I believe that people have a spirit as well as a body, then I might be willing to believe that feeling better or being well isn’t only a matter of adjusting the body.
This notion felt mildly outré in 2013, though the idea had long anchored Western medicine, until it parted ways in the 19th century with the holistic approach of Chinese medicine and the Hindu system of Ayurveda. Roberta Bivins points out in her history of alternative medicine that for most of Western history, medical wisdom held that physical health relied on the balance of the four humors (blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm). Those in turn were affected by emotions, weather, the position of the stars, and faith just as much as by diet, age, activity, and environment. Reiki’s healing touch also has precedent. In the fourth or fifth century b.c., a Greek physician, possibly Hippocrates, included the following observation in some notes on his profession:
It is believed by experienced doctors that the heat which oozes out of the hand, on being applied to the sick, is highly salutary … It has often appeared, while I have been soothing my patients, as if there was a singular property in my hands to pull and draw away from the affected parts aches and diverse impurities … Thus it is known to some of the learned that health may be implanted in the sick by certain gestures, and by contact, as some diseases may be communicated from one to another.
This passage is now part of what’s called the Hippocratic Corpus, a series of texts written by or closely linked to Hippocrates, commonly known as the father of Western medicine. The precepts laid down there form the foundations of the medical philosophies that shape our health care today.
The Hippocratic Corpus also contains one of the earliest articulations of causal determinism, or the idea that all phenomena have a preexisting material cause. In the section titled “On the Sacred Disease,” the author insists that the illness we now recognize as epilepsy wasn’t a divine affliction at all, as it was believed to be at the time, but a physical ailment like any other, only with as-yet-mysterious causes. “Under a close examination spontaneity disappears,” the author writes, “for everything that occurs will be found to do so through something.”
The text doesn’t explicitly juxtapose these two notions—healing energy and causal determinism—or attempt to resolve any friction that may exist between them. Instead, it suggests that both are true at once: Everything that happens has a natural cause, and some people have a radiating heat in their hands that has curative power.
Even in the early and mid-19th century, physicians were still using humoral theory and competing with homeopaths and botanists for patients; surgeons were a crude last resort. This changed with the ascendancy of germ theory later in the century, when physicians—now focused on professionalizing their field—advanced a new, scientific medicine that they said was beyond dogma. It stood superior to its competitors because it was experimental and rational, requiring no faith—medicine as anti-mysticism.
Since then, the Yale historian of medicine Naomi Rogers told me, what is often called orthodox medicine has staked out “quackery” as its enemy. People continued to go to homeopaths and other extramedical practitioners with their health problems, of course. But after the 19th century, those who put stock in health care that wasn’t based in hard science were deemed ignorant. Physicians are still frustrated by such resistance today, Rogers said, but now when patients insist on a course of action other than what the doctor recommends, they’re called noncompliant.
The ranks of such patients have steadily grown, Bivins notes. Disillusionment with established medicine has been mounting for decades, fueled by the rising costs and more depersonalized care that have gone hand in hand with stunning technological advances and treatment breakthroughs. Eastern medicine and holistic healing models provided attractive alternatives to what critics in the late 1960s called the “medical industrial complex,” and by the new millennium extramedical “wellness” had become big business.
By the time I signed up last May to learn Reiki at a wellness center in Brooklyn, where I live, a $4.2 trillion global wellness industry had already harnessed the collective American obsession with optimizing the experience of having a body. We were putting adaptogens in our coffee, collagen in our smoothies, jade eggs in our vaginas. We were microdosing, supplementing, biohacking, juicing, cleansing, and generally trying to make ourselves immaculate from the inside out. I also noticed that the yoga studios and “healing spaces” in Brooklyn had begun to incorporate new kinds of offerings: breath work, energy healing, and especially Reiki.
The popularity of Reiki made sense as part of a backlash to the wellness explosion, which had lately come in for its share of debunking: It was a new form of consumption, critics argued, one that was more bound up with class, gender, anxiety, and late-stage capitalism than with actual health. Reiki takes only an hour or less; it entails no gear, no subscription, no purchases (other than the healer’s fee, which is often on a sliding scale according to income), no list of dietary strictures or dubious supplements. The practice could hardly be better pitched for the political and cultural mood: an anticonsumerist, egalitarian rite, available to everyone through mere breath and hands.
From July/August 2011: The triumph of New-Age medicine
Reiki looked like the culmination of a broader trend that Rogers told me had been on the rise over the past 40 years, a development she calls a “black box” attitude toward healing. We submit to a treatment, it works on us mysteriously (as if in a black box), and we feel better. Rogers noted that we are most comfortable relinquishing ourselves to methods we don’t understand when the authority figure recommending them seems to care about us. What’s more, we have been acclimated to this form of trust by orthodox medicine.
Precision genetic medicine is inscrutable to laypeople, Rogers pointed out. Much of psychiatry resembles the black-box model too. So little is known, even by prescribing psychiatrists, about how and why psychotropic medications work in the brain. Yet the number of Americans who take SSRIs has been steadily rising over the past 30 years, despite a scientific consensus that the “serotonin imbalance” theory of depression is flawed—and despite a well-publicized controversy about whether the drugs are any more effective than placebos for most patients. Reiki is the perfect enactment of the black box, the healing gesture stripped to its essentials: a virtuous person sitting with you, intending your well-being in real time.
Carlotta Manaigo
I signed up for instruction in two of Reiki’s three training levels. The first enables you to do hands-on practice on yourself as well as friends and family (and pets); the second introduces the mental technique for practicing at a distance. (Master training equips you to teach and “initiate” others.) The studio was a warehouse space, with whitewashed brick walls and plywood floors, exposed piping, and brightly colored garlands hanging along the windows. The windowsills were strewn with crystals, shells, and small bottles of oil diffusing into the air.
Once everyone had settled on seat cushions arranged in a large circle on the floor, the two women leading the training introduced the core belief: Reiki energy exists throughout the universe, and when the body is attuned to Reiki, it can act as a sort of lightning rod through which others can receive that energy. They told us to picture Reiki energy entering through the top of our head and exiting through our hands, suffusing us and whomever we touch with the intention to heal. The healer’s job is not to control the Reiki or to make decisions about healing. “We’re just the channel,” one of the masters said. “The healing is a contract between the person who needs to be healed and the higher power.” Reiki, they stressed, can never harm anyone. It should also be used only as a complement to conventional medicine, never as a replacement. “We are not doctors,” they said several times. “We cannot diagnose anyone with anything.”
You can do Reiki on animals, they told us. “Cats are extra attuned to Reiki—cats almost do Reiki on their own. They can heal you.” No one questioned this. The same goes for plants, the masters suggested. Get two roses and give Reiki to one; that rose will live longer. A student raised her hand. “But you told us never to give Reiki without consent. How can you get consent from a flower or a tree?”
“You can talk to a tree!” one of the masters said. “You should always ask the tree’s permission. Maybe it will tell you to Reiki the next tree.” I glanced around the room for raised eyebrows, but there were only more eager questions: Can you Reiki someone who has transitioned to the afterlife? Yes. Can you Reiki your food to make it healing? Yes, and you should.
We were told that once the masters attuned us, our bodies and spirits would vibrate at a higher frequency than before, and we would stay on that higher frequency for the rest of our life. This would constitute a permanent transition in our physical and spiritual states. I was silently indignant: I do not believe in permanently alterable personal vibrations, whatever that means, and anyway I wanted mine left alone.
The masters warned us that once they had opened us to Reiki energy, we should expect to feel a little emotionally drained and perhaps light-headed. They also suggested that many people experience drastic life changes after their first attunement. Major emotional issues come to the surface and require resolution; people suddenly lose their tolerance for alcohol or other drugs; friends, able to sense vibrations “on a different frequency,” distance themselves.
And then, the moment for attunement having arrived, we were led in small groups to a narrow, darkened room. Before we passed through the doorway, one of the masters traced Reiki symbols in the air over each of us. “You guys,” said the other, making what I hoped was a joke, “we’re going to visit some other planets.” I can’t describe what happened next, because our eyes were closed while the masters performed silent rituals that aren’t explained to nonmasters.
A few weeks later, I met with Pamela Miles, an international Reiki master and the leading expert on incorporating Reiki into medical care. Miles has been practicing Reiki since 1986. She has introduced programs into prestigious hospitals and taught Reiki at academic medical centers such as Harvard, Yale, and the National Institutes of Health. Miles has the soft voice, long hair, loose clothing, slow gestures, and easy smile characteristic of someone involved in healing arts. She also has the sharpness one sometimes observes in people who have devoted their life to a discipline—an exactitude and authority. When I told Miles about my training, she looked incredulous. “When they said you were going to have energy shooting through your head from the universe, were you scared?” This afternoon, she was patiently attempting to reeducate me.
Miles falls on the conservative end of Reiki evangelists in that she’s careful not to make claims about its mechanisms or efficacy that can’t be supported in a scientific context. She does not, for example, subscribe to the belief that Reiki energy is a substance that can be given, received, or measured. No evidence of this has been confirmed, she pointed out. “Reiki is a spiritual practice,” she said. “That’s what it was to the founder, Mikao Usui. And all spiritual practices have healing by-products because spiritual practice restores balance, bringing us back to our center, and enhancing our awareness of our core selves.” When I asked her to explain what that meant practically, she chose her words carefully. “Through an unknown mechanism, when a Reiki practitioner places their hands—mindfully and with detachment—it evokes the healing response from deep within the system,” she said. “We really don’t know why this happens.”
This agnosticism is not shared by all of Reiki’s powerful advocates in the United States. The array of psychologists, physicists, and physiologists on the boards of various national Reiki organizations I spoke with—many of whom are eager to develop a standardized method of training and accreditation—champion different forms of energy measurement. In conversations, I heard quantum physics invoked, as well as biophotons, sodium channels, and “magnetic stuckness,” and tools like EEGs and gamma-ray detectors. Ann Baldwin, a physiology professor at the University of Arizona and the editor in chief at the Center for Reiki Research, suggested that people who claim to have measured Reiki using energy-sensing machinery are instead measuring something else, such as heat—but she holds out hope that someday we may be able to measure Reiki.
Research this for too long, and you start to sound vaguely stoned. Is Reiki real? Does it matter whether Reiki is real? And whose definition of real are we working with: Is it real according to the presiding scientific and medical framework, which tells us that phenomena need to be measurable to be taken seriously, or is it real in the looser, unquantifiable way of spiritual practice?
Read: The evolution of alternative medicine
There are those who will tell you that Reiki is absolutely real because people experience it to be real. It is real because we feel it, and feelings are produced in the body. Skeptics are quick to point to the placebo effect: The body’s capacity to heal itself after receiving only the simulated experience of medication or therapy is well documented. But precisely because that capacity is so well documented, reflexive dismissal of the placebo effect as “fake medicine” demands scrutiny—and is now receiving it. In late 2018, The New York Times Magazine reported on a group of scientists whose research suggests that responsiveness to placebos, rather than a mere trick of the mind, can be traced to a complex series of measurable physiological reactions in the body; certain genetic makeups in patients even correlate with greater placebo response. Ted Kaptchuk, a Harvard Medical School professor and one of the lead researchers, theorizes that the placebo effect is, in the words of the Times article, “a biological response to an act of caring; that somehow the encounter itself calls forth healing and that the more intense and focused it is, the more healing it evokes.”
Carlotta Manaigo
To note that touch-based healing therapies, including Reiki, simulate the most archetypal care gestures is hardly a revelation. Several scientists I interviewed about their work on Reiki mentioned the way their mother would lay a hand on their head when they had a fever or kiss a scraped knee and make the pain go away. It is not hard to imagine that a hospital patient awaiting surgery or chemotherapy might feel relieved, in that hectic and stressful setting, to have someone place a hand gently and unhurriedly where the hurt or fear is with the intention of alleviating any suffering. That this increased calm might translate into lowered blood pressure or abated pain, anxiety, or bleeding—as has been observed in hospital patients who undergo Reiki—seems logical, too.
The ailments that Reiki seems to treat most effectively are those that orthodox medicine struggles to manage: pain, anxiety, chronic disease, and the fear or discomfort of facing not only the suffering of illness but also the suffering of treatment. “What conventional medicine is excellent at is acute care. We can fix broken bones, we can unclog arteries, we can help somebody survive a significant trauma, and there are medicines for all sorts of symptoms,” Yufang Lin, an integrative-medicine specialist at Cleveland Clinic, told me. But medicine, she said, is less successful at recognizing the way that emotion, trauma, and subjective experience can drive physical health—and the way that they can affect recovery from acute medical care.
Lifesaving surgery is miraculous but requires drugging the body, cutting it open, altering it, stitching it back together, and then asking it to heal. Chemotherapy causes the body to fall to pieces; it can damage the brain, wreck internal organs, and destroy nerve endings, sometimes permanently. Medicine is necessary, but it can also be brutal. Lin, like several of the physicians I spoke with, emphasized that healing is something that happens within the body, enabled rather than imposed by medicine. When we are traumatized, survival is the priority and our healing mechanisms are on lockdown, Miles observed. “We have to pull out of that stress state and get into a parasympathetic-dominant state before the body is able to self-heal and actively partner with conventional medicine.”
Many physicians and scientists still believe that allowing Reiki to share space with medicine is at best silly and at worst dangerous. In 2014, David Gorski, a surgical oncologist, and Steven Novella, a neurologist, co-wrote an article calling for an end to clinical trials of Reiki and other forms of energy medicine. To assess approaches rooted in “prescientific thinking” with tools designed to evaluate “well-supported science- and evidence-based” treatments, they argued, degrades “the scientific basis of medicine.” It saps resources from research into valid therapies, and misleads patients.
Other doctors and researchers have accepted the line of argument that Miles and many other Reiki advocates have put forward: The practice has no known negative side effects, and has been shown by various studies that pass evidentiary muster to help patients in a variety of ways when used as a complementary practice. Unlike the many FDA-approved medications that barely beat a placebo in studies and carry negative side effects, Reiki is cheap and safe to implement. Does its exact mechanism need to be understood for it to be accepted as a useful therapeutic option? For decades, experts weren’t precisely sure how acetaminophen (Tylenol) eases pain, but Americans still took billions of doses every year. Many medical treatments are adopted for their efficacy long before their mechanisms are known or understood. Why should this be different?
In the Reiki training I attended, the moment came when we began to practice on one another for the first time. Taking turns, students would hop up on the table, and four or five others would cluster around. The masters told us to breathe deeply, gather our intention, and begin. After one or two minutes of uncertain silence, a woman a few tables away from me spoke up. “What are we supposed to be thinking?”
I was relieved someone had asked. My entire reason for being in the class was to learn what a person is doing when practicing Reiki. But our teachers hadn’t said what, precisely, was supposed to transform the act of hovering our hands over one another into Reiki.
“You don’t have to be thinking anything,” one master said. “You are just there to love them.”
I thought to myself, more or less simultaneously, Oh brother and Of course. That we were simply there to be loving one another sounded like the worst stereotype of pseudo-spiritual babble. At the same time, this recalled the most cutting-edge, Harvard-stamped science I’d read in my research: Ted Kaptchuk’s finding that the placebo effect is a real, measurable, biological healing response to “an act of caring.” The question of what Reiki is introduces—or highlights—an elision between the spiritual and the scientific that has, as yet, no resolution.
In 2002, two professors at the University of Texas Health Science Center, in Houston, gathered a group of people in order to document and study the qualitative experience of receiving a Reiki treatment. The study participants didn’t have any shared belief in Reiki or its possible results, or any particular need for healing; they simply received a session and then described what they felt.
After treatment, the subjects spoke more slowly. They described their experience in the language of paradoxes. “In the normal state of awareness, especially in Western traditions, people tend to see disparate phenomena as distinct, discrete, and contradictory,” the authors of the study later wrote. “Most people resolve that disparity by denying or suppressing the existence of one of the poles.” But through Reiki, the subjects entered a liminal state, in which their thoughts seemed both like their own and not; time moved both very fast and very slowly; their bodies seemed no longer separate from the practitioner’s body, though they also remembered that their bodies were their own.
At the end of my training, I did not feel invested with any new power, but I did feel raw and buzzy. Though plenty of things in my training had seemed flatly impossible to believe, I had spent lots of time on a table as a practice body for my classmates. I’d felt more relaxed and calm afterward, but did I feel healed? Healed of what? Healed by what? I’d spent even more time breathing deeply and placing hands on a stranger’s solar plexus, or the crown of her head, or the arch of her foot. In that time, I had sometimes felt nothing other than the comfort of human touch. Other times I had felt odd things: the sensation of magnetic attraction or repulsion between my hand and a rib cage, a burning heat that came and went suddenly. When I gently cupped my hands around a woman’s jaw, the tips of my right fingers buzzed as if from an electrical current, tickling me.
I had spent two days in and out of the liminal state the UT study described, and I felt more sensitive to the world. I had also spent some meaningful time being touched kindly by strangers and touching them kindly, and thinking about what it might be like to feel well, to stop reporting to the doctor every year the same minor ailments: a tweaked shoulder, a tight jaw, general nervousness, scattered attention, my idiosyncratic imbalances and deficiencies. I didn’t personally “believe” in Reiki as a universal energy channeled through the hands, available to cats and plants and the dead. But I believed Yufang Lin and other physicians who attest that the body—helped by medicine and nutrition and all sorts of things—does the work of healing, and I believed Miles when she said that Reiki practice, through some unknown mechanism, may help the body to do it.
Every once in a while, friends will hear that I’m Reiki-trained and ask whether I’ll “do it” on them. They usually ask whether it’s real, and I say I don’t know, but that at a minimum, I’ll have spent some time quietly and gently focusing on the idea of them being well. They usually answer that this sounds good.
Jordan Kisner is a writer in New York City.
WHAT IS REIKI?
Reiki is a Japanese healing modality, developed in 1920 and brought to the United States in 1937
by Hawayo Takata. Reiki is the channeling of the primal life force energy through the Reiki
Master to the client. A Reiki treatment releases stress and thus promotes healing in the mind,
body and spirit. Although Reiki is not a replacement for medical or psychological treatments, it
enhances and complements traditional methods.
WHO MAY RECEIVE REIKI?
Anyone who is open to receiving Reiki may choose to experience it. According to the Center for
Reiki Research, “a study done in 2007 by the National Health Interview Survey indicates that 1.2
million adults and 161,000 children received one or more sessions of energy healing therapy such
as Reiki in the previous year. According to the American Hospital Association, in 2007, 15% or
over 800 American hospitals offered Reiki as part of hospital services”. In addition, family pets
are also able to receive Reiki and may experience improvements in their lives too.
WHAT MAY I EXPERIENCE?
Reiki may be done in person or from a distance. Either way, the client is fully clothed and the
energy is passed without touching the client. Calmness and a feeling of relaxation is often
experienced during the transmission. Each Reiki session is as unique as the person who is
receiving it.
HOW WILL IT BENEFIT ME?
Reiki is a subtle but powerful energy modality that can assist with improvements in your mind,
body and spirit.
Dawn Bowers-Ferrara is a Reiki Master & Certified Life Coach. She has been practicing Reiki
for almost a decade. In her early 30’s her physician told her that she would be dead in a few years
because of her high stress levels. Now in her 50’s, she attributes Reiki in assisting her through her
own healing journey. Enjoy your unique Reiki experience by calling (813) 482-5557, emailing
dawn@dawnbowersferrara.com or visiting www.mynewdawning.com to find out more.
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do. — Steve Jobs, US computer engineer & industrialist
Copyright © 2018 A NEW DAWNING, LLC - All Rights Reserved.
(813) 482-5557 dawn@dawnbowersferrara.com
Powered by GoDaddy
MONEY ARCHETYPE & PRIVATE COACHING SESSION
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.