The Benefits of Reiki & How it Changed my life.
Everything is energy. Your words, your thoughts, your emotions, your experiences… Our bodies are made up of energy. It would be silly to think that our experiences do not have an effect on our physical bodies. The root cause for everything is energetic in nature.
I believe energy healing is going to be part of standard healthcare one day. It is truly powerful when we address the root cause of emotional and physical health issues. When we hold onto frequencies that do not resonate with our deep rooted truth, we create energetic discourse. This can further manifest as health problems, attracting the wrong partners or friends, mental health issues, feeling “stuck” in life, etc. Energy healing has been around for centuries. Jesus, for example, was a very powerful energy healer. Reiki is a beautiful form of energy healing that was introduced in 1920. It is speculated that this healing modality is much older and was reignited in the 1920s. Nevertheless, energy healing has been around for eons. Reiki just so happens to be a very popular form of it.
So what is Reiki? Reiki is a Japanese healing modality that promotes emotional, physical, and spiritual healing. “Rei” means “Universal Higher Power” and “Ki” means “life force energy”. So essentially, Reiki is universal life force energy that can assist bringing the body back into natural balance and harmony. Reiki healing was channeled and downloaded by Mikao Usui during meditation. Here you can read more about Usui and the history behind Reiki. What is so cool about Reiki is that as the practitioner, I am not generating any of my own energy to facilitate healing. I serve as a channel for Reiki healing and that is it! It simply flows through me and into the receiver.
Why energy healing? The Mind-Body Link.
I truly believe that energy healing is going to eventually find its way through hospitals and medical centers and be fully accepted as a legitimate therapy for healing. We’re already getting there! There is a reason why energy healing works. Caroline Myss and Louise Hays are two of my favorite spiritual leaders that discuss the link between physical issues and spiritual/emotional issues. Anatomy of the Spirit by Caroline Myss and You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hays are my favorite books that go into detail about this topic.
The link between our body and our mind always continue to fascinate me. When we experience something in our life, whether it is positive or negative, our body stores this as information in our nervous system. We subconsciously build our life around these experiences for survival. If we hold onto this energy long enough, it becomes stored in the body and can manifest as health issues. Furthermore, our nervous system becomes dysregulated, making it difficult for us to go into that surrender state that all of the spiritual people talk about. This also creates a lot of stress and inflammation in our body because these energies and emotions have nowhere to flow. This is huge considering stress is one of the highest risk factors for health issues.
For example, if we learned from our father that love must be earned, we subconsciously attract in partners whom we are constantly having to “earn” their love. If this belief is held onto long enough, it may manifest as health issues that relate to the rejection of the feminine such as ovarian cysts. To heal this, we must energetically shift this vibration that is held in the body and transmute it to the belief that you are whole and lovable as you are. This is where Reiki and energy healing comes into play. It is challenging to shift a belief if it is lodged inside of our body.
Reiki also brings our pain and trauma to the surface so that it can be released. Sometimes, when we experience something traumatic or painful, it is completely natural and human of us to suppress our pain as a form of protection. We distract and numb ourselves through our phones, TV, food, alcohol, work, etc. This is especially common with empaths who feel very intensely. I touch on this here. So it is not uncommon to experience intense emotions during and after Reiki. An emotional release can be a beautiful process of healing. It is always important to have someone, such as a Reiki practitioner, to hold space for you during this release. Once this release is done, many people report feeling lighter afterwards, like they have gained more clarity, or feel more at peace. This in turn helps lessens stress on the physical body.
Reiki or any other form of energy healing can assist in regulating the nervous system through unraveling deep rooted traumas, beliefs, and experiences. Sometimes it takes one session, sometimes it takes ten. It depends on the nature of your energetic body and how deep your pain goes. Sometimes these energetic wounds go further than your life time—it can be past life related, passed down from your parents, their parents, etc. Generational trauma is another topic for another time. :)
Reiki can help bring you back to alignment and help you attract in the life you have always dreamed of
Any healing modality that helps bring your body back into alignment can assist you in coming back into wholeness again. With Reiki, working on all layers of your body, you are able to clear out everything that no longer resonates for your highest and best. I often find that as people raise their vibration, many things in their life start to fall away unexpectedly. These things fall away because they no longer resonate with your new vibration. Reiki can also assist you in this process. Many people begin their spiritual awakening process by looking around in their life and thinking “there has got to be something more than this…” Well, that’s because there is! That is your intuition nudging you to make some much needed changes. It is your soul crying out to you ready to be heard.
Ever since we start grade-school, we are fed beliefs like: you have to get a 9-5 to be secure, if you aren’t skinny enough then you aren’t worth loving, if you can’t do math then you’re not smart, eat this, be this, buy this, and then you’ll be successful and happy. We are fed SO many lies! The first part of our spiritual awakening is getting a glimpse of the truth. The truth that we are in fact whole and we do not need a structured idea of “success” to be lovable because it is already in our birthright!
All that to say, is that when we step into this wholeness, we choose to let go of what is no longer serving us (easier said than done!), and step into our life path, things just FLOW! Reiki helps us with that process because it helps us see the truth. When your third eye is opened from Reiki, you do not necessarily start seeing the future and seeing angels right away (although very possible), but it is rather that you see past the lies and limitations that we have been fed. My Reiki teacher David would always tell me, “opening the third eye removes the veil of illusion”. All of those limiting beliefs you have about yourself are in fact illusions that society has made us believe to keep us small.
Some other wonderful benefits you can expect from receiving reiki
Calms the nervous system, relaxes the body, and allows you to gain clarity on your life
Can help regulate the nervous system and assist the body in self-healing
Can help improve and deepen sleep
Helps you become more aligned with your soul’s purpose
Raises your vibration through releasing low vibrational energies and helps you match the vibration of what you desire
Helps you bring more awareness to your body by increasing mindfulness and flow
Increases your intuition and opens up your intuitive abilities. I have met many of my spiritual guides through receiving Reiki
After consistently receiving Reiki, you can radically transform and shift your life in seemingly miraculous ways. Reiki not only helps heal our energetic bodies, but it creates space for our soul speak to us. When you heal your limiting beliefs and step into the vibration of love, you embody the natural essence of your soul. I am a true believer that soul remembrance can be one of the most healing processes for anyone.
My personal experience with Reiki and how it changed my life
I was 17 when I felt some of the darkest moments in my life. I had just been diagnosed with an eating disorder while suffering from severe depression and anxiety. I couldn’t sleep, I hated school, and I lost all of my friends. It was one of the loneliest times in my life. My spark had disappeared. I felt trapped, so trapped, in my own body and honestly never thought that I would be “normal” ever again. It is hard for me to admit this but there were many times that I thought about ending my life. I thought there was truly no way out. I felt like I had no purpose, nothing left going for me. I felt hollow and empty.
I was in an incredibly dark place that felt impossible to get out of.
I always tell people that in the depths of our suffering is when we find the miracles. That miracle for me was my dear friend and mentor Leilani and the weekly Reiki sessions I went to her for. She was talking to my mom one day about this healing modality called “Reiki” and how she had recently got certified in it. At the time I thought it seemed interesting but I was skeptical. Nevertheless, I was so miserable that I was open for anything that would provide a bit of relief from my suffering.
If I am being completely honest, I don’t remember much about my first session. I was so outside of my body and SO ungrounded. I was in so much emotional pain that I disassociated from my reality. I refused to feel the emotions that were begging to be felt. I was so boarded up energetically that one session only scratched the surface of what we needed to get to. So, sadly I don’t remember my first Reiki experience but what I do remember was feeling a glimpse of hope. It was small but it was the most hope I had felt in a very long time.
So I went back. One Reiki session lead to many hours of deep healing, releasing, and coming back home to myself. I had to discover my own new version of happiness. This version of happiness was the inner peace that only I could cultivate. It wasn’t the Reiki that healed me. It was the Reiki that guided me to heal myself.
My spiritual awakening began. During one of my many Reiki sessions with Leilani, she looked at me and said “one day you’re going to be a Reiki practitioner…” Honestly, I was like “haha you’re funny”. Well sure enough, I guess she ended up being right.
Reiki literally saved my life.
After a few weeks of working with Leilani, I felt the light shining through again. It took many many sessions to uncover the layers of energetic density that were latched onto me. Don’t get me wrong, I still had bad days and my healing was not liner (it never is). But I knew that there had to be a reason that I was experiencing what I was going through. I had to shed the old Carly and let the new one shine through. Reiki helped me shed those layers, go deep within, and retrieve bits and pieces of my soul that I left behind. I began to dabble in crystals, metaphysics, tarot, numerology, astrology… ALL of the things. There was the part of me that had been missing my entire life and I found her again. Growing up in a Christian household, I never got to explore this magical part of life. Yet it was a part of my soul that was yearning to be expressed. It was the healer within me wanted to be seen. To be honest, I never really saw life the same after my experiences with Reiki.
Of course, I had low moments. My dark night of the soul was nowhere near being done. But whenever I got to that dark place, I could come back home to myself through Reiki. There was nothing like it. Through Reiki, I discovered my life purpose as a healer, I healed YEARS of wounds and trauma, and I learned to surrender to my wholeness—to the essence of my most authentic self. I was able to find unconditional love for myself that had been missing for years. I opened myself up to communicating directly with the Spirit world and began to explore my intuitive abilities. This opened up a whole new realm of meaning for me. That self-exploration that Reiki opened up for me was the healing that I needed. It is truly the biggest gift.
But most importantly, Reiki taught me how to self-heal. It taught me how INCREDIBLE our bodies are. It taught me that healing is our natural state so long as we surrender to it.
I knew that I had to share this with the world and pay it forward. That is why I decided to become a Reiki practitioner. The ripple effect that Reiki can have on our community, our families, our coworkers, our neighbors is the healing our world needs. When we learn to heal ourselves, we can heal the world.
It is truly an honor, a blessing, and a gift to be able to offer Reiki healing to the world. I would not trade it for anything.