What is Reiki?
Reiki (pronounced RAY -kee) is a Japanese form of energy healing, a type of alternative medicine. Reiki practitioners use a technique called “palm healing” or “hands-on healing” through which a universal energy is said to be transferred through the palms of the practitioner to the patient in order to encourage emotional or physical healing.
Mikao Usui taught his system of Reiki in Japan to more than 2,000 people during his lifetime until 1926. The first reiki clinic in the United States was started in 1970. Today, there are hundreds of offshoots from the original Usui Reiki technique and some of these modalities incorporate “remote” or “distance” Reiki where the practitioner and patient are not in the same physical location.
What is Energy Healing?
“Energy healing” is the term most practitioners use to describe the more general practice of using universal energy to help a patient heal. Reiki (and all of its different forms) are just one of the modalities included in this group that also comprises Theta Healing, Reconnective Healing, some forms of Qigong, Healing Touch, Pranic Healing, Shamanic Healing, and Restorative Touch, just to name a few.
What happens during a session?
If the session is in person, a practitioner will use their hands to gently move universal energy over a patient’s body, usually concentrating around the chakra areas (energy centers). Not all practitioners use their hands, while others do and also employ other modalities from cranial sacral, reflexology to shiatsu.
During remote sessions, a patient and the practitioner can be miles away from each other, and the practitioner will focus on the patient’s energy body and remove any blocks to healing that are evident.
How does Reiki and Energy Healing Figure into Chronic Lyme Healing?
Sometimes it is important in a patient’s healing to rule out some treatments by experiencing them and having them fail. That was my early experience during chronic Lyme healing. Even though I had been trained as a Reiki practitioner in 1997, when I was finally diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2005, Reiki was the last thing on my mind. My allopathic doctors had convinced me that Western Medicine was the strongest and most effective means to treat chronic Lyme, and they advised me to stay on antibiotic treatment “until I felt better.” I went through three PICC lines, several rounds of painful intramuscular bicillin injections, multiple simultaneous oral antibiotics, opioid treatment for pain, and an Adderall prescription when I complained to my doctor of fatigue. This combination began to destroy my immune system and ultimately the rest of my body during long-term use, but there didn’t seem to be any alternatives until I became desperate enough to seek the counsel of a psychic who came highly recommended.
At that point, I felt forced to look at other treatment protocols that involved the alternative and herbal treatments my doctors warned me would not be effective. To my surprise, when I employed them, they proved to be much more effective. My healing outcomes went from a downward spiral to an upward one.
Mind you, if seeking medical advice from a psychic sounds pretty desperate, then you’re getting the proper picture of how badly the typical Lyme patient is served by the traditional medical community, healthcare system and insurance companies in this country. Never in my wildest dreams would I have considered something like this just a few years prior, but here I was.
My psychic friend recommended two different and very effective energy healers, and I experienced profoundly positive reactions to the healing that could best be described as “miraculous.” The healing work removed the blocks to physical healing I was experiencing along with 90% of my physical, mental and emotional symptoms. Once I employed lifestyle changes (better diet, a meditation practice, and putting gratitude front and center into my daily thoughts), I continued with herbal treatment that brought me over the finish line into complete remission. I wrote about the details of this experience in my book The Gratitude Curve, if you’re interested in how this all unfolded.
Another side effect of these positive changes was my own enhanced abilities in the energy healing arts. In 2017, I became an energy healer as a profession, and I originally focused mainly on chronic Lyme patients who had been experiencing many of the issues I had.
How to put Energy Healing to its best use for Chronic Lyme Healing
If you are experiencing long-term plateaus in your physical treatments and you are looking to break that cycle, an energy healing modality might be the most effective way to help you reach improvement. There are several major factors that can bring about disease and have it become chronic, and energy treatments can address all of them. However, they are particularly good at relieving emotional, energetic and spiritual stress.
- Physical stress: A powerful injury to the body, a concussion, or a trauma from a car accident or fall can cause a healthy person’s immune system to go offline until the injury is healed. If any of these things happen in the middle of treatment, they can block the effectiveness of the treatment until the injury has been addressed.
- Chemical stress: Ingesting toxins from an unhealthy diet, being exposed to toxins like heavy metals, mold or rotten food, or being exposed to viral or bacterial infections can all cause disease, and they too can impair treatment if a patient is exposed in the middle of an illness.
- Emotional stress: Intense stress at a job, the death of someone close to you, or disruptions in your finances can all impact someone so intensely that it can bring down the immune system. Remaining in a constant state of emotional distress, grief or panic and fight or flight will make it almost impossible to heal until the issues are addressed.
- Energetic/Spiritual stress: Past-life traumas, psychic attacks, energetic attachments, energy leaks, and other non-physical forms of stress can cause physical blocks to energy flow and treatment. They can also trigger disease.
Your Role in Your Own Healing and the Importance of your Mindset
Being on both sides of the equation — as a Lyme patient as well as an energy healer of Lyme patients — has given me a unique perspective that I’d like to relate to anyone currently going through that illness or any other chronic disease.
When I first experienced some healing miracles at the hands of some very experienced healers, I recommended several of my friends (who were also chronic Lyme patients) go to these healers. I expected they would have the same or similar experience as me, and I set their expectations as such. Some of them DID have an almost identical experience as me, but most of them didn’t. They came back to report their disappointment. One of them said, “I thought the same thing that happened to you would happen to me. But I’m not YOU!” Lesson learned.
I also began to realize that it’s much better if a patient understands their role in the healing equation. I had one patient come to me for energy healing, and after describing the long details of every one of her symptoms, she stopped herself and laughed, “You’ve got a lot of work to do!”
This didn’t make me laugh. It made me think she was absolving herself of any responsibility in her own healing, and by doing so, it would diminish the effectiveness of it. With the diminished effects, she would probably stop believing that energy healing was really effective or that she didn’t deserve to heal because nothing had worked for her so far. This all sped through my mind, and I asked her, “What role do you think you should play in your healing?” This started a great conversation that allowed her to re-imagine what healing could be like for her.
It also taught me the importance of mindset. When I looked back on why my experiences had been so effective with these two energy workers, I remembered that I had suspended my expectations in both cases. It wasn’t because I held a guru-like state of awareness prior to the sessions. I was just too sick to think about what might happen. As a result, I didn’t get in the way of the healing and cause a “nocebo” effect, or the very opposite of the “placebo effect” we’ve all heard so much about. If a patient can be given a treatment and told it will have a very positive outcome for them (even though it might just be a sugar pill), that patient can enhance the effectiveness of the treatment in an almost magical way that has been borne out by scientific studies.
However, a patient can have exactly the opposite effect. I’ve seen herbal treatment that has worked amazingly well for hundreds of other patients suddenly not work for an individual who expects nothing to work for them. Unfortunately, in that mindset, they will always prove themselves right. The best thing for a patient to do is get out of the way and to let the treatment do what it’s supposed to do. Don’t keep monitoring it every step of the way, either. Give it time. Try to move on with your thoughts, and most importantly, relax.
Can Reiki and energy healing work for you? If you hold the above mindset, your chances are very high that it can be effective. I’ve been honored to help dozens of Lyme patients into spontaneous Lyme remission or unexpected improvements. I’ve also seen dozens of patients get stuck but then experience miraculous ancillary healing. In other words, I’ve had patients come to me for Reiki healing for Lyme treatment and during the ongoing treatment, these patients have also experienced unexpected improvements from unrelated injuries like torn rotator cuffs, sprained wrists, etc.
During Reiki treatment, the needle moved frustratingly slow on their Lyme healing, but they experienced miraculous healing with the more immediate physical problems. Rotator cuff tears healed overnight (as was reported in a CAT scan the next day), and a sprained wrist was completely healed in 48 hours. Cysts, benign tumors and other infirmities have healed almost instantaneously and without a good explanation. The point is, you’ll never know how you’ll react until you give it a try. And when you do, relax and let it all happen… and keep an open mind to having more than one session. It’s extremely rare for a “one and done” situation. An effective outcome takes some practice for both the practitioner and patient.
Gregg Kirk is a certified Reiki master and energy healer. Click here to reach out to him with any questions about your personal healing journey.
The above material is provided for informational purposes only. The material is not nor should be considered a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.