What is Reiki Healing Touch
Reiki is a healing technique originally developed in Japan around a century ago. The name is a combination of two Japanese words, Rei and Ki. Rei roughly translates to our Western conception of God, or to the indwelling divinity within us. Ki means life force energy or the vitality within that exists in all organic life.
Reiki is a methodology that restores health through the laying on of hands, either directly on the body or by hovering close to the body, where the electromagnetic field generated by a living biological entity can be gently accessed and redirected.
Reiki is considered a safe, holistic approach to restoring health through therapeutically manipulating the energetic field of a human being with balancing interventions. Reiki sessions have the advantage of being pleasant experiences, documented to beneficially affect every known system of the body.
How Reiki works is the subject of some debate, primarily due to paradigmatic problems with the idea of the existence of a human electromagnetic field. Due to increasing recognition of the role of the human electromagnetic field in Western medicine, however, prejudice against the model is falling out of fashion.
Like many healing approaches stemming from non-Western medical traditions, Reiki works with the idea that health is inherent and that all we need to feel better again is for our own self-healing mechanism to be freed up to flow as nature designed it to. In this view, any kind of illness, whether it is physical or mental, is understood as an expression of blockage to the flow of vital force.
How Reiki Healing Touch can help improve your health
Reiki works by clearing blockages to flow, promoting circulation throughout all pathways of the body system.
According to the medical paradigm that gives rise to Reiki, there is a vital life force, called Ki in Japanese. This force underlies, perfuses, and supports all life. When Ki is flowing as it should, it is like a pristine river in the wild. It has a way of flowing that works best to support all the life within it.
When this river of life force is polluted, blocked, or constricted in some way or another, the life force is likely to stagnate and create areas of by-water. These places are disconnected from the overall flow. In extreme cases, the river may lose its ability to support life at all.
According to Reiki and most other medical traditions arising from ancient healing practices, our physical, emotional, and mental health all depend on our vital life force being allowed to flow freely as the life within us directs us to, without undue constrictions imposed upon it.
We are resilient and can survive a lot of restrictions to our flow, such as those created through trauma, poor diet, and other ways of creating blockages, but in general it is not preferred by the body itself and has a cost in terms of our health.
Reiki improves health by restoring natural, correct paths of the flow of the vital life force within us.
Benefits of Reiki Healing Touch during recovery
Reiki offers many benefits to people in recovery from mental health problems, substance abuse, and/or trauma.
The key promise of Reiki is that it strengthens your life force. This helps with physical body healing, boosting our physical immunity and causing us to feel better at basic body levels.
Reiki also improves resilience, energy, mood, positive thinking, creativity, and vitality overall. Reiki gives us a fighting chance to face our lives from a starting point of feeling well-resourced and nourished by beneficent life energies.
Electrochemically speaking, Reiki is effective because it restores the efficiency, coherence, and flow of biological information throughout our systems, leading to greater balance and integration of our body’s many operations.
Negative thoughts cannot linger in a strong and healthy body, nor can stagnating, depressing or agitating emotions.
Our most natural state is to be happy, as children are before we teach them to be unhappy. Reiki can restore us to our more original, innocent state, in which we circulate our own self-energies freely, without shame, fear, toxic anger, or any other kind of inhibition on our harmonious, self-balancing nature.
All of Reiki’s health, emotional, mental, and spiritual benefits come from the core premise that Reiki encourages your life force, which you could also call your core essence, to fully inhabit and move fluidly throughout the totality of your experience.
When we recover, we want to reclaim all that belongs to us and make sure that we fully inhabit and command our own selves. This means that we do not rely on any outer force, be it a substance, or the opinions of another person about whether or not we are worthy of love and respect. Rather we consult our own life force.
We must take charge of our own ship, and captain ourselves more fully. Reiki assists with restoring the true you-ness to your experience. It can be a nice surprise when we discover that who we are in our fullest, deepest nature, is quite a wonderful presence.
Reiki can help us experience the inherently positive, worthy, beneficial nature we all have inside of us, as well as the specific beauties of how we personally are, in our core.
Reiki, through circulating your own personal experience of the life force throughout all pockets and corners of your being, assists you to remember your inherent worth, your natural powers of self-healing, and the lightness and optimism that life itself has about you and your path to recovery.
How does Reiki Healing Touch work?
Western medicine has struggled to understand the mechanism of Reiki’s beneficial effects, in part because of limitations to our understanding that boil down to the West’s more materialist bias. Even so, in the face of evidence of its effectiveness in treating nearly every known illness, the Western mindset has developed some hypotheses as to how Reiki and other non-invasive, non-chemical healing methods work.
Reiki may work for the same reason that all living organisms have measurable electromagnetic charges. The cells comprising body systems communicate through the circulation of electromagnetic signals around biology.
Cells operate like batteries, due to valence or charge, in turn, generated by the ways that molecules of substances, and ultimately the subatomic particles comprising atoms, behave.
We know that electromagnetic fields affect each other, just as a strong magnet affects iron filings.
An electromagnetic signal from one person’s body can pass to another through many possible pathways. For example when someone who is feeling love hugs another person, the electromagnetic signals that create the experience we call “love” are passed into the physical body of the person being hugged, (which is why we feel good around people who love us).
However, as we all know from our own experiences, we can feel good or bad around people whether or not we are directly touched. We call these good or bad sensations “vibes” for lack of a more scientific-sounding name, but we know they exist either way. The model of dynamic electromagnetic fields surrounding organisms can be one way of understanding what we’re picking up on when we sense a person’s vibe.
These conceptual maps may be related to how and why Reiki works. Just as a tuning fork responds to the vibrations of a neighboring tuning fork without itself being touched, our bodies are affected by the electromagnetic waves emanating from the biological fields of those around us.
In a Reiki session, through directing electromagnetic waves containing information that describes a health state into another person’s biological field, the practitioner helps a person tune into and recreate their own personal states of wellness.
Reiki Healing Touch options
Reiki is offered at Villa Kali Ma in our inpatient and outpatient settings because of its powerful and transformative effects in support of recovery.
We integrate Reiki sessions into our holistic treatment offerings for women healing from trauma, addiction, and mental health struggles. In each and all of these tracks of healing, Reiki is a valuable support through its mechanism of restoring vital life force, triggering all manner of self-healing operations from within.
Villa Kali Ma’s holistic treatment program is available in our residential setting and in our outpatient, community-based programs too. Depending on the level of care you need, you can receive Reiki as a part of your treatment journey with us.
The way we offer Reiki is as a supportive, adjunct therapy tailored specifically towards recovery-based goals of greater freedom, happiness, and peace.
If treatment at Villa Kali Ma isn’t an option for you, you can likely find a practitioner working in your area. As with any practitioner who will be interacting directly with your body, it is important to find someone who is not only trained and experienced but whose energy feels good to you.
Pay attention to how you feel in this person’s presence and take note of any feelings of unsafety, and don’t override your instincts. With all treatment modalities that use the body directly, it is especially important to feel whether or not the body feels safe and good in the presence of this person. A positive match between your energy and this person’s healing style is a strong predictor of the effects being especially helpful for you.
