Are you wondering whether you should try Reiki for yourself or to help others? Are you sceptical about claims made on Wikipedia that it is nothing but quackery? What is the evidence for Reiki anyway?
You are right to be sceptical. There is actually quite a lot of serious hard evidence for Reiki as an effective therapy. A meta-study on seven research studies into Reiki and energy healing found that it helped significantly for pain and anxiety in the elderly, and cancer survivors.
One research project included in the meta-study showed that both Reiki and Physiotherapy outperformed medication in treating lower back pain and slipped discs. And that they were actually equally effective. Since physio is really very effective indeed, this is not a small outcome!
Another study compared Reiki, Reconnective Healing, Physio and sham healing for increasing the range of motion in people with restricted shoulder mobility. Energy healing actually outperformed the physical therapy. And even sham healing helped for pain.
Sham healing is quite interesting because I imagine that it must be quite difficult not to lapse into doing healing just naturally. The study puts the positive effect of the different therapies down to placebo effect, which it may well be – who knows.
The thing is, there is no way to really know what is going on just from research because because people generally cherry-pick their results according to their underlying opinion. Scientific fashions change, and it is very hard to measure results objectively when we are dealing with individual clients and therapists.
I personally am convinced that research will bear us healers out eventually. But that is not because I have studied the research. It is because of my own experience.
My personal experience of doing and receiving energy healing
I started experimenting on my boyfriend’s headaches when I was at university. Practicing something called Polarity therapy which I taught myself with a book out of the town library. And lo, they went away, each time.
Then I got sick with ME for ages, and got better following a spiritual awakening – a major one with suddenly being able to feel chakras and work with my own energy field to heal.
It was a number of years later when I finally got the opportunity to study Reiki. Literally the next day I started using it on my friends – who were wonderfully open to it, thank God.
I worked on my friend who was in the beginning stage of getting her dreadful stomach cramps that lasted for days. The pain disappeared within minutes and she didn’t have to suffer that particular round of discomfort. We were both amazed, I think.
I went on to help with tooth obsesses, boils, bronchitis, asthma, migraines, headaches, faster healing for all sorts of injuries and sprains, and to delay, and defer my partner’s frequent bouts of double pneumonia – which were desperate measures – we lived so far from the hospital.
When another friend’s stage 4 cancer ended her life, I had the privilege of easing her pain and soothing her body in the last few months of her life. for me this was more than enough evidence for Reiki as a way of bringing real benefit to people I wanted to help.
Test the evidence for Reiki energy healing for yourself
You don’t need to pay lots of money for a course to find out if energy healing works. This is how you can test it for yourself: The evidence for Reiki and other forms of energy healing lies in your own hands.
- Find a friend in pain – preferably a sensitive person if you can – they are more receptive.
- Wash your hands thoroughly, visualising white light cleansing your whole body inside and out.
- Rub your hands together briskly
- Open your heart and the top of your head to divine love, grace and light.
- Put your hands on the part of your friend’s body that is in pain.
- Send love with your hands. If you can feel the pain, remove it and give it to God. Send comfort and help the painful part of the body form a circuit with the rest of the body by using the hands like the terminals of a battery to connect the painful area with other points on the body – especially the joints.
- You may feel heat, cold, tingling, the sensation of pain in your own body, feelings of love, bliss, serenity and joy.
- If the pain eases, congratulations!!! You have the gift of healing, which you can choose to develop.
- Now you know for yourself that it works.
So what is Reiki like to give and receive?
Reiki is just one flavour of energy healing. It is like creating a song with a particular instrument, say, a piano, for example. Faith-based healing would be like using a Cello. Using your own energy vibration, maybe like using a clarinet. But the song is the same. We live in a world where everything is measured in certificates and courses. On the one hand that is good and useful and important. On the other, healing is everyone’s birthright. All good healing is about sensing what is actually going on for the client, holding that energy with compassion, and then helping to find the fulcrum on which that energy is free to shift to a higher valence.
This is an example of how healing may feel and progress.
So the bronchitis in your lungs feels like a cloud of gloom.
It is really a cloud of gloom – the bacteria is just doing well in that atmosphere because your lungs are weak and sad – so sad.
The gloom is resignation to loss.
The resignation is truly, if you respect it and listen carefully with your heart and hands and eyes and ears and soul… Truly it is nobility. Because it is about letting someone you love make the terrible mistake of leaving you.
From there, it is a hop and a skip to unconditional love, trancending life and death and fear and all obstacles.
Your lungs breathe this truth in like nectar. This basic connection to the goodness and purity and wonderous ease of Reality. The return and victory of Love over all shadows. To my hands the lungs will then feel pink, joyous, new-born, blessed.
The bronchitis is gone.
Am I healed then forever?
Well, Yes, and no. You are healed of that particular problem, but you have more than one issue to work on and they have many many layers and angles.
Aha! Your tonsils cry. Now you are ready to work through the having the truth choked out of you all those decades ago. Let us help you heal your spirit… And lo, you get tonsillitis.
Reiki as a flavour of healing is very very soft, very kind, very sweet and extremely patient.
It is quite a slow energy flowing, where the practitioner works on a particular area for a few minutes at a time- which is a long time in which nothing seems to be happening except for the flow of energy between the hands and the body of the client. So this encourages a deep state of meditation for both.
And it is also a very trusting, gentle energy – connecting to benevolence and acceptance. It comes from Buddhist and Shinto spiritual practices in late 18th century, early 19th century Japan, and from one man’s spiritual awakening – Dr Mikao Usui.
To understand Reiki, it helps to understand the symbols that are used to transmit it. They can translate as direct access to divine power, holy peace, We remember that we are infinite beautiful pure consciousness, not bodies and brains, and we remember that enlightment is the ultimate reality for all of us – heaven is more real than earth.
What can you expect from a Reiki session?
Evidence for Reiki healing…
What you can expect from Reiki is being held compassionately. That is not a small thing. And you may or may not then experience a shift from a falsehood or mis-alignment with the truth into integrity. If this happens, some symptoms may clear too. We don’t know.
So if I had end-stage cancer for example, I would seek Reiki for my soul and to ease the pain.
I would not expect a miracle. Reiki is ordinary, everyday. And so is death and cancer.
A miracle is when God is sending you back to work and suffer some more before you get to kick back in ecstatic bliss back in your true Home.
If I had a migraine, I would expect the possibility that it may clear completely if the cause is removed and I catch it at the right moment.
If I had a minor infection, I would expect it to heal faster.
I would definitely expect my stress levels to drop and I would expect to feel more at peace, more centred, and possibly quite blissful, serene and alive than before.
Here is a link to another practitioner’s experience of using Reiki by Cheryl Fisher. Published in Counseling Today.
