It’s been 27 years since Reiki found me. Lately, I’ve found myself telling this story to clients who ask, and so decided to share it with you on this eve of a new year and new decade.

It happened one day when I was about halfway through a six-month massage therapy program at the Healing Arts Institute in Fort Collins, Colorado. I was on an unpaid leave from my work as a systems engineer at Hewlett-Packard. My massage teacher, Barb, asked the class if we wanted to do some Reiki on each other. We hadn’t studied Reiki, which she described as a form of energy healing, but she said that all we needed to do was send love to the person on the massage table. 

If this had been one of those team-building exercises at HP, I would have been the last person to volunteer. A couple of months of massage school, however, had me learning how to go with the flow. I wasn’t sure how to “send love” to a classmate, so I volunteered to be on the receiving end first.  Barb showed the other students where to put their hands on my body, and then she put her hands on my head. For several minutes, the class sent me energy through their hands.  I didn’t notice much at first, but then felt as though I was being wrapped in a warm, snug cocoon.

Too soon, my turn was over and someone else got on the table. It wasn’t hard to close my eyes and focus on sending my wishes for my classmate’s health and happiness through my hands.  At first, nothing happened.  Then I started to shake.  I felt like a garden hose with the water turned up too high.  I opened my eyes to see if anyone else was shaking.  They weren’t.  With the next person, my body shook even harder and I started to cry.  The tears just leaked out.  I opened my eyes again, this time to see if anyone had noticed. The rest of the class had their eyes closed, seemingly peaceful. I kept my head down so no one would see my red-rimmed eyes when it came time to place my hands on the knees of the next person.  Again, the shaking and crying took over. I opened my eyes to see my teacher looking at me. When I shrugged, we both closed our eyes again. 

It was then that an image of a pink rosebud appeared as if in a daydream, suspended over my left hand that was touching the student’s right knee. This didn’t feel like my daydream. The rosebud looked like it was just starting to open, and I somehow knew that this image had come from my friend on the table. She was struggling with a painful marriage and I imagined that the rose symbolized the emergence of her empowered self.  With each new student, the storm within me grew stronger. I was overwhelmed. By the time we had finished with the entire class, I couldn’t speak.  I felt jittery, yet crystal clear. My husband picked me up from class so we could head up to the mountains for a weekend of skiing.  As we drove west, I noticed that my senses were turned way up.  The colors were brighter, and I felt as though I could hear the snow falling outside the car. 

I didn’t know what had happened to me that afternoon, but it certainly got my attention.  I had spent my life immersed in the sciences.  I started college wanting to be a physician. Part way through my undergraduate degree in biology, I realized that medicine wasn’t the right choice for me, so I went on to get a Master’s degree in Genetics.  This was in the early 1980s when gene cloning was first happening in the research labs.  It was an exciting time to be a scientist, but I discovered that I hated spending all of my time in a sterile laboratory environment.  So I turned my attention to engineering systems instead of genes, earning a second Master of Science degree.  The engineering work was satisfying, but after several years, I became restless and enrolled in massage school.

I had discovered that I liked the immediate reward of watching people’s faces soften, muscles unwind, and their posture straighten as I practiced massage. I could let my mind wander as my hands applied traditional Swedish effleurage and petrissage strokes and eased tender pressure points.  I understood the therapeutic effects of massage on our neuromuscular, circulatory and lymphatic systems, and had gained an appreciation for the importance of touch. Massage school had broadened, but not challenged, my understanding of myself and the nature of the world. My afternoon with Reiki, however, changed the direction of my life irrevocably - though it took me another several years to figure that out.

Upon graduation from massage school, I found myself pregnant with my first child and back to my work as an engineer. Over the next several years, I found that receiving regular massage and another form of energy healing called Jin Shin Jyutsu kept me healthy and sane, especially through two miscarriages and the birth of my second child.  When receiving energy work, I could often feel warmth and tingling spread throughout my body.  It was a bit like when your hand falls asleep, and you feel the blood rushing back in.  Occasionally, I felt twinges of sharp pain or a momentary dull ache.  Curiously, those sensations would often be disconnected from where the practitioner had her hands.  After a treatment, I usually had a great deal of energy and by evening, would be ready for a deep sleep. Once in a while, though, I would get up off the table feeling as if I were coming down with a cold.  I was told that I was releasing toxins from my system.  If I drank lots of water and took it easy that day, I’d feel alert and refreshed by the next morning.

Other times, I would cry during a session, releasing pain or sadness. Those days, I would walk away feeling lighter and less burdened.  The energy work wasn’t as dramatic as my first encounter with Reiki, but it was tangible and repeatable. It also helped me to feel the very real interconnections among the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of myself. I discovered what all healers know – that our biology mirrors our biography. All of our life experiences are reflected somewhere in our body. 

I didn’t encounter Reiki again until I met my teacher, Zari, a petite woman with an exotic look and lilting voice.  A friend treated me to a facial from her. It wasn’t until after I left her office with a brochure, that I realized she did energy healing. I came back for a Reiki treatment and began scheduling monthly appointments.  Our first few sessions weren’t dramatic, but the work somehow felt deeper than what I had experienced before.  It was several months before Reiki once again grabbed my attention, much like it had during massage school.

That day, as soon as Zari placed her hands on my heart, I felt a great river of golden light flow into me.  It was bright and warm, and filled all of the cracks and dark places within me that I thought nobody knew about.  To borrow a phrase, I felt like I had come home. This was love, but not like anything I had ever felt before. This love was impersonal. It came through Zari, but wasn’t from her, and was independent of my achievements or actions.  Yet it was also intensely personal in that I was accepted absolutely as I was. I had never been religious, but I felt touched by God that day. Somehow, Reiki connected me to the eternal mystery.

I continued to receive monthly Reiki treatments for a few more years before I felt ready to step into Reiki with both feet. I arrived at my first Reiki training class armed with a notebook and pen, expecting a typical class where I would learn techniques.  I hoped that I would be able to construct a rational explanation for how it worked.  That wasn’t how the day went.

Reiki is passed on in a somewhat mysterious way from teacher to student. The teacher energetically opens and then widens a pathway for the student to connect more easily to the universal life force energy. The teacher also demonstrates a basic set of hand positions. I began by putting my hands on my partner’s feet, and mentally asked to bring healing energy to her.  Almost immediately, my hands got hot.  I could feel a subtle pulsing between my hands with one side being stronger than the other.  As I held this position, the pulsing grew stronger and more rhythmic until both sides were balanced.  As I moved along her body, the pattern repeated itself. The energy seemed to flow effortlessly through me. My partner said that she could feel the heat from my hands, along with tingling sensations and a rainbow of colors passing before her eyes. Working this way felt natural, as if it were something I had always known how to do. 

That happened 20 years ago and I haven’t looked back. I completed my Reiki training, opened my own energy healing practice, and have had the great joy of sharing Reiki with hundreds of clients and students. We all have the power to experience the unconditional flow of love that is Reiki - even a somewhat reluctant engineer like me!