My beautiful friend Jaya, who I’ve known for the last 16 years and happens to be here on Koh Phangan with me, has spent the last week diving into reiki training with full force. Today she completed her level 2 certification at Orion Healing Center down the road in Srithanu and she invited me over to Orion’s yoga dome to do a reiki session on me.

I’ve never really thought too much about reiki. From an outside perspective, it seemed a little like a placebo-ish fad to me. I’ve heard it mentioned several times over the last few years, but couldn’t really fathom how this ‘energy healing’ could have any real effect if the practitioner isn’t even touching your body– how are you going to feel anything?

BOY WAS I WRONG!

 

Wow, it’s been about four hours since I left the yoga dome and my body is still feeling as though it’s pulsing with a refreshed and heightened level of energy. I’m going to try my best, using the limited knowledge I have about this work, to describe exactly how I felt physically during the experience.

So I walk into the yoga dome where Jaya has two extra thick yoga mats stacked on top of one another, and three large pillows laid down across the mats– one for my head, one for under my knees and one laid at the very top of the mats for her to sit on. A soft, beautiful, almost operatic woman echoes through the speaker as I lay down and close my eyes. She begins by asking if she has permission to enter my space and I respond yes, expecting some form of physical contact, but no, that’s not how this works. She tells me to begin by taking deep breaths to relax my body into the present space and if my mind jumps to the past or the future, just send those spaces love and return to present.

First I started to feel a gentle pulsing throughout my body, and although my eyes were closed I could feel different spaces in my body as she moved from one to another focusing on each one. I maintained a pretty steady, deep yoga breath throughout, but about 3 or 4 times over the course of our 30 minute sessions I had to gasp for air– not in a violent or loud manner, but as if I had just forgotten to breathe for a second, or if there was something coming up and being released that required a super large inhale in order to be fully exhaled. At one point a vision of Jaya pulling, dragging a large cement block out of my body came to mind. At another point I see a yellow chord of energy flow across the darkness behind my closed eyelids.

At the end of the session I’m feeling extremely dehydrated, and the palms of my hands and soles of my feet feel warm, tingly, and a bit heavy. I feel so much energy flowing through my body and I know something intense has just happened in my energy field, I’m not sure what, but I know it feels good. I feel as though I’m a bit skeptical of many foreign things, but I’m happy to know that I’m open enough to allow myself the opportunity to experience something I know nothing about, because what I received in return was something was definitely needed.

(*After a little research I see that some forms of reiki do include some physical touching but the style I experienced today did not; however, with or without touch, I can’t imagine it being anymore powerful than it was!)

So that’s my story about how Jaya turned me into a reiki believer; and I cannot wait for my next session!