In the last five years, I’ve been more and more interested in learning about ways to heal yourself with natural medicine. I decided I wouldn’t be  popping pills for every ache and pain. At first, I had so many questions about general well-being and healthcare. Things like, Why are our bodies getting sick? What creates the imbalance? Is modern medicine better than traditional medicine?

I did a lot of reading, online research, and had many conversations with both professionals and friend. From all the research and the conversations, the word Reiki kept coming up.

This lead me to conduct even more research, and I really liked what I found. Let me share with you what Reiki is.

Reiki is a therapy often described as “palm healing” or “hands-on-body healing” in which a practitioner places their hands lightly on or over a patient’s body to facilitate the patient’s process of healing. Reiki combines the Japanese and Chinese word-characters of “rei” (spiritual or supernatural) and “ki” (vital energy). The technique is used for stress reduction and a type of relaxation that promotes healing. It’s based on the idea that an unseen “life force energy” flows through us and is what causes us to be alive. If our “life force energy” is low, then we are more likely to get sick or feel stress. If it’s high, we’re more capable of being happy and healthy.

At this point, it may sound like I’m talking about some hippie-dippie psychic mumbo jumbo.

Kind of like in the movie Ghost when Whoopi Goldberg is doing a séance trying to communicate with the dead husband of an Hispanic woman and she says, “Did he know someone by the name of Ana? Consuelo? Lucita? Julieta? Josefina?…Maria? YES!” When she gets to Lucita, our skeptical eyebrows are raised. And by the time she guesses Maria, we’re shouting for her client to demand her money back and get out of there!

That’s not the kind of healing energy Reiki Masters deal with. They don’t predict your future or communicate with the dead. They don’t even make your body levitate!

When I first starting digging in to learn more, I wondered how someone could heal using their hands and energy. I couldn’t imagine how it was possible. But I’ve never been one to just read about something, so I started seeing Reiki healers, Reiki masters, energy workers. They have lots of different names for it, but they all do the same thing. I wanted to experience firsthand what Reiki healing was.

I had a few sessions and talked in depth with everyone I came into contact with, but there was one Reiki experience that was life changing for me. It’s what got me hooked and made me a believer.

I started meeting with a healer named Meredith once a week for about three months. I’d lie down on a massage table, and she started our session by having me do breathing exercises, which were kind of hard to do.

Then she’d start working on me, passing her hands over my body from my feet to my head, going over every one of my chakras. For anyone unfamiliar with that term, chakras are the spiritual centers of our body—like the heart, the throat, the solar plexus, and more.

The feeling of heat going through my body followed by uncontrollable shivering was scary but fascinating at the same time. It didn’t take long for us both to realize that my heart and throat area were the issue. As soon as her hands (without touching me) would go over those areas, tears fell down my face accompanied by a feeling of so much sadness inside me. It’s hard to admit this, but I could not stop crying. What made it more terrifying was that I had no idea why I was crying.

She explained to me that her job is to help me release negative energies and any pain that was stuck in my body or in my subconscious. Every traumatizing childhood event, heartbreak, unspoken words….everything stays stuck in your body and it takes a lot of work to release them and let them go.

As months went by, I could see and feel how much better I was doing. It was unbelievable how for the first time in my life I was feeling happy. This sadness that I’d felt for so long but didn’t know why it was there, it was gone! I continued going to my Reiki sessions with her, and I would feel pure intense love, something like I had never felt before, which is actually hard to describe in words.

Let me just say that I’m blown away by most of the healers I meet. They’re all different and have different techniques to their healing but wow.  Reiki has healed many of my emotional wounds that were making me feel miserable, depressed, and unworthy. Trust me, the list goes on!

I know that the only way to heal is to have a face-to-face confrontation with your issues, to look at them, acknowledge them, understand them, learn from them, and to finally let them go. Reiki was the first step in my journey to doing just that.

I truly believe that everyone should try Reiki at some point in their lives. It’s an unbelievable experience, and for me, I can’t imagine not going to see a Reiki master as soon as I feel imbalance in my body and mind. I actually started to learn Reiki myself to become a practitioner. With the stress-filled holidays on their way, scheduling an appointment with a Reiki healer might be just the thing you need to keep yourself calm and centered through it all.

Please click here to get more in-depth information about Reiki and how it heals the body. Life is beautiful and we shouldn’t let old wounds blur our journey and path to a well-deserved happiness!