Reiki One
Before we go to the 3E center in Germany in my story, I have to take you back again to 2016. I have so far written about all the endometriosis related symptoms and troubles. While these very much controlled my life, I did have two weeks every month, when I felt absolutely fine. In those two weeks of "being myself" more, I had come to the realization, that I needed to start taking time for myself.
In early 2016, my local health food shop had sent an email out advertising a Reiki course not far from where I lived. I had heard of Reiki before, when the masseuse I had massages with regularly asked if I would like a Reiki treatment instead of my normal massage. I had never heard of Reiki but was always up for discovering new things, so without knowing at all what I was letting myself in for I just said yes. This was in 2014.
An hour later I couldn't quite understand what had happened. I felt totally relaxed, although I knew she had not touched my body at all. No contact had been made, but I felt like I was floating. As I slowly came back into the room, she asked me if I was pregnant, as she could feel a dense energy in my womb area. I had never talked to her about suffering from endometriosis, so I was absolutely astounded that she had picked up on “something going on” in precisely the area where I was hurting. I was intrigued, but not intrigued enough to find out more about it at this point.
They say Reiki finds you, when the time is right. In spring 2016, the time was clearly right for me, and when I saw the email, I decided to sign up for Reiki Level One. A course for self-healing. It sounded like it was just what I needed. The course consisted of two days that were a month apart.
So here I was, about 30 minutes into the countryside from where I live, sitting on a square meditation cushion in a circle of women I had never met before, feeling oddly at home. There was no rational explanation for this warmth in my heart that seemed to say “this is where you belong”.
Our teachers where talking to us about energy, how you could connect to energy, feel it, and use it to bring balance into people’s energy fields. On the one hand, it seemed utterly bizarre, that through mere intention and focus you should be able to effect anything. On the other hand, I had felt the effect myself two years previously, and was now utterly amazed by the energy I could feel running through my hands and through the room. There was tingling, heat, energy simmering in mid-air like it does on a hot summer’s day, even though we were inside and the temperature was normal. I was ready to admit that I was more than intrigued.
Practicing on ourselves and on each other, we learned about the energy field around us, the energy fields between us, and how Reiki practitioners believed that energy was the key to illness and healing. The idea was basically, that before a physical illness would manifest, it would be preceded by an imbalance in your energy field. This imbalance could be felt by a Reiki practitioner, and re-balanced, preventing the body falling ill in the first place.
Equally, if you already were ill, it was important to balance the energy system around you, so that the body could heal into this balanced energy field. If your energies stayed unbalanced, long-term healing was unlikely. An operation might bring short term relief, but eventually your illness would come back or another illness would appear.
This was a whole new world for me, a new way of looking at the body, at healing and at my own illnesses. My rational mind said, this was all rubbish. There was no way, I could talk to my husband or my friends about this: they would all think I was mad. But then there was a little voice inside me, a feeling in my gut that told me that everything I was learning was actually true. In a weird way, everything about this energy idea made total sense to me.
I looked at Chinese acupuncture books, Indian books showing energy meridians crisscrossing our bodies. Energy systems like the Indian chakra system had been used for thousands of years. Who was I, to question something that humans had valued enough to practice it for more than 5000 years, like the chakra system? There had to be a reason this knowledge was passed on from generation to generation. As a species we were too intelligent to keep something alive that didn’t work.
The meditations we did in order to be relaxed enough to connect to the energy, felt amazing. I hadn't felt this relaxed for years. It was like I could feel my inside expanding. It made me realize, how stressed I was in my everyday life, how tense my body was pretty much everywhere, all the time. Yet here, sitting on this meditation cushion, I felt totally at peace, all my limbs and even my jaw relaxing.
I finished my Level One Reiki and it was like a door had been opened. Being the inquisitive person I am, just learning Reiki wasn't enough. How did it work? How could I feel energy? How is it possible to actually feel energy differences between people? When we treated each other during the course, people felt different. The tingling or the heat would be very intense in the heart area for one person, in the groin area for another. Some people felt really hot, others very cold. At no point did we actually touch the people we were working on, our hands hovered about 4 inches above their body in their energy field. How was it possible, I was feeling all these differences?
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