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My First Reiki Healing Session
It’s funny that I run a website dedicated essentially to encouraging people to talk about personal paranormal and spiritual experiences but that I am somewhat shy about my always sharing own. Actually, that’s not totally accurate. I usually am pretty open about it, unless they are of a fairly personal nature. This one, which I am about to hesitantly share publicly, is one which falls right on the line of me not being sure whether I ought to talk about it.
Mainly because I don’t want people to think I’m nuts. I know, that’s probably a ridiculous statement coming from someone in my position, but hey, even I worry about people thinking that I have finally crossed the point of no return. But hey, I guess that’s never stopped me before, so here goes. You can take this story however you want to and are welcome to make whatever strange judgement calls about me based on it that you see fit.
Basically, my sister thinks I’m Jesus.
Okay, okay. Let me back up and start at the beginning… (and no I don’t mean two thousand years ago with when I was on the cross and everything!)
My sister has always had a parallel interest to mine in these types of subjects: shamanism, healing, psychic stuff, you know the drill by this point. But she’s had her own very different (and much less public) path with all of it. One of the things that she has gotten into over the years is Reiki healing. She’s gone through all the training and gotten some kind of certification as a master from somebody else is a master. That whole thing is a pretty interesting process, which I have mixed feelings about. Actually, there have been a lot of things about Reiki that have made my opinion of it flip-flop a lot over the years. But I’m interested in giving everything a chance at this point, and my sister offered to show me some things which I really appreciated. Because as much as I violate this advice all the time, you can’t really know about something like this until you experience it - and sometimes not even then.
Needless to say, my experience of it was - I think - pretty unusual. But maybe other people have had similar experiences either with Reiki or other healing systems. So I think it could make for some interesting conversation. Also, I’d like to preface this by saying that I don’t know a great deal technically about the ins and outs of Reiki healing and tradition, so if I’m making any kind of bold factual errors, please let me know…
So anyway, where were we. Oh right. The first night my sister performed two separate Reiki rituals on me. One was an attunement and the other was an initiation. I’m not actually altogether clear on what the differences were between these two things, or if they were maybe just different “levels” of the same thing or what. From what I understand, she was kind of freewheeling the whole thing and just shooting from the hip - which is fine by me. Tends to be how I approach this stuff anyway.
I know this is probably going to ruin my credibility among skeptics, but I should probably preface all this by saying that I feel that I am very “energetically sensitive.” I seem to have some kind of untrained ability to put babies and cats to sleep, cause orgasms across the country, and to sort of be able to “see inside of” a person’s body when it comes to massage and energy healing. I am, as I said, untrained in any particular school or system of energy work, but it’s something I would like to find out more about and possibly get more actively involved in. But the point of all this New Agey confessions is to say that I was expecting my first experience with someone else doing energy work on me would be an interesting one.
At the opening of the very first part of the ritual, I think my sister was drawing some of the Reiki symbols in the air behind me. These are designed to invoke power, create a sacred space, and a variety of other things. As soon as that happened, I felt the center of my back twitch with small pulses of energy, which continued on for some time, even after we’d stopped and eaten dinner. During the second session, my sister did whatever was necessary to instill the Reiki symbols “into my hands.” From what I gather, the idea is that these symbols are somehow psychically or energetically impressed into your subconscious, your energy field and your hands. And that they enable you to access later on the universal Reiki energy in your own healings of other people.
Here is where the fun starts.
Bear in mind that I didn’t hear about any of this until afterwards, when she asked me if I’d felt or experienced anything odd. I told her that I had become very calm, of course. And that I’d felt this jolt of energy, almost like a line of electricity running from shoulder to shoulder. I also was thinking a bit about the spiritual significance of the whole ceremony and was realizing that for me it was one of the more important-feeling rituals that I’ve ever had performed on me. Certainly much more than my totally lame Confirmation into the Catholic Church back when I was a surly artistic teenager. One of the images that I kept in mind was when Jesus was baptized by John in the River Jordan, and the Holy Spirit descended onto him as a dove.
I don’t, by that, mean to say I thought I was Jesus. It was just one of the archetypal images which leant significance to the whole thing for me. Interestingly enough though, after I admitted what I’d felt with the energy pulsing across my shoulders, my sister admitted that she had seen (physically or in her mind’s eye, I don’t know - doesn’t matter) what she described as a cross of bright white light super-imposed on me, with the cross bar where my shoulders were. And she said I looked like a monk in prayer or something like that. She also said that she heard a voice instructing her to give me all of the Reiki symbols at once, instead of over many sessions (the significance of which I’m not entirely certain), because - according to the voice - I am a “master healer”, and have merely been waiting to receive them all along.
Weird, but it gets weirder…
The next night she did a regular old Reiki healing on me, while I was laying on my back with my eyes closed. Again, she said she saw something unusual superimposed over me. This time? The Shroud of Turin. Cool, right? Yeah. She said she put her hands on my face and chest and beneath the shroud, she felt nothing but shriveled up bones. I, of course, didn’t know anything of what she was experiencing. And I had my eyes closed as well. Which makes it all the more bizarre that at one point during the session, I got the distinct impression that she was removing a sheet which had been laid over my head and whole body - and that I was a corpse. I’m not sure how to describe that feeling, but it was odd and quiet and still and very somber.
She also said that I felt very ancient and that she said she felt like she was “doing Reiki on Jesus.”
I’m sure this is the point where all but my most open-minded readers are letting out loud guffaws and rolling their eyes. Good. You should be. I think doubt is an excellent pathway to the truth. But it’s not for the foolhardy. If you do find yourself having trouble with this story (and I honestly do too), then simply consider it as an account of two people’s experiences with alternative healing. It’s not meant as a statement of metaphysical truth. Or at least not a universal one. And if you want to reframe it in a safer psychological setting, we could maybe talk about how when the mind accesses raw archetypal components, that the content tends to be of a grandiose mythical scale, rather than the ordinary and the every day. One interesting possibility that my sister put forward as an explanation had to do with perhaps that due to my parents’ lifelong religious influence and my own personal explorations, that my aura, my energetic body, has taken on the attributes of an extraordinarily important and powerful symbol from my life. I like this explanation because it doesn’t necessarily violate my rational mind’s eager insistance that I am not, in fact, the Second Coming of Christ. Although, hey, who knows - maybe he resisted it at first too! 
Another interesting experience I had during this healing session. My sister located a spot near my right armpit that she said seemed to be a problem. She began what seemed like she was pulling things out of it. Small black snakes is what I initially saw in my mind’s eye. After that I had the distinct impression that I was laying in a field and that she (we were both different people in this impression/vision) had just pulled an arrow out of my shoulder, and was now putting pressure around the wound to slow down the flow of blood. Whether you want to call them memories or vivid imagination, it’s really fascinating the way that the mind clothes all of these occurences in visual, emotional, physical and symbolic language. The study of that in itself - without even trying to decode the mystical meaning of it all - would be a worthy one.
Afterwards I felt completely drained and took a water-only shower to bring me back down to some semblance of reality. But the next day I slept for over fifteen hours (something I almost never do) and felt just completely bombed out. After a good Fourth of July barbecue today though, I am back to normal (whatever that means), I think. In any event, it was a strange and powerful experience. And it has gotten me interested in learning and experiencing more metaphysical and spiritual phenomena first-hand. I mean, after all, I have to figure out if I’m really Jesus, right?
July 2nd, 2006 at 10:14 pm
How interesting. I do internal healing work in which I use a whole host of symbols (both archetypal & personally relevant to the person without knowledge of it beforehand) and one of the forms negative energy takes on consists of black snakes.
July 2nd, 2006 at 10:47 pm
Perhaps you are a mini-Christ.
Seriously, I think you doubt yourself too much. It’s good to have some grounding, but I feel like you just need to go with it right now.
I’m sure we’ll all tell you when your megalomaniac messianic pretentions get out of hand
July 2nd, 2006 at 10:51 pm
I havent read Zac’s post you linked to yet, but I was thinking about how the Second Coming of Christ, he wouldn’t make the mistake of making a single Incarnation this time…
And yes I know I need to just go with it and that I doubt myself too much. This is me trying to work through that publicly rather than just plug my ears and pretend its not there…
July 2nd, 2006 at 11:49 pm
When I was in the hospital, one of the counselors was describing different ways in which people could behave irrationally. “For example, some people might think they’re messengers from God.”
To which I responded, “what, you don’t think God sends messengers to Earth anymore?”
He stopped, looked genuinely surprised (shaken?), mumbled something, and went on. I was quite amused because I knew there was no way to address what I’d said without dealing with a whole mess of assumptions implicit in his statement.
You could be an avatar of God - why not? The thing to keep in mind though is that each of us is, or can be. Which is why I don’t think it’s totally insane that Pinchbeck thinks he has a role to play in bringing humanity to a new level of consciousness. Of course he has a role to play! Each of us does, especially when we discuss matters of a spiritual nature; to do so is to openly invite possession by gods (or demons ?). Hell, he might even be a legitimate prophet of Quetzalcoatl, like he says. He is certainly in a position to be. The mistake would be for him to think he’s the only one who could be in that position, to mistake the privilege of being a prophet as meaning he’s the “chosen” one, à la Neo.
———–
I went through my own experience of being very close to the energies surrounding Jesus. I felt there was a moment of crisis - literally - in that I was given the opportunity to take my place on the cross. I shrank back in fear, mainly fear of the pain of torture. This was in my mind - I didn’t literally think I was being crucified - but it was also quite real. Following that, I experienced the destruction of the earth in nuclear war, and the unraveling of the universe (subjectively, that is). I felt this was due to my unwillingness to sacrifice myself. I suffered terrible guilt.
(My failure to allow myself to be sacrificed was on a Friday. I know the timeline of my spiritual crisis by heart, but I never pondered the significance of it being that day until now)
One or two days after my refusal to be nailed to the cross (again this was all in my mind, and I knew it was all in my mind, but it still felt very significant), my mom told me she had a dream about my nephew, who was only three at the time, just about to turn four. She dreamt that he was spewing blood from every orifice in his body, from his eyes and nose and from holes in his chest. I felt horrible, like somehow my sacrifice had gotten passed to the next person in my family, someone too little to know what was going on or refuse.
(I have a scar on my abdomen, from surgery, in the same area where Jesus got speared by the Romans. For a while I fell into the trap of thinking this was a sign of my Jesus-ness.)
My point is that anyone can carry the energy of Christ. Maybe we all can’t at once. Maybe only one person at a time does. Maybe several people do. Maybe we all do! Who knows? You’re probably as well-suited as anyone to do a good job of it, being the stand-up guy that you are. But you’re also, still, ordinary Tim Boucher. And you are a very special individual in your own right.
July 2nd, 2006 at 11:51 pm
I took a long time composing my above comment and I didn’t see this until after it posted.
Great minds, and all that!
July 3rd, 2006 at 2:23 am
I read a piece of channeled material a long time back, and I wish I could remember who it was, but in answer to a question about the second coming of Christ he described Christ as ‘the Christ Entity’ and said he was already here, but not in not in just one incarnation. Also, according to this source, Christ wasn’t just one man the other time either. The 12 disciples were aspects of the same Entity. And even that configuration wasn’t the only one. Within that gestalt, Jesus was at the top of the pyramid, so to speak, as far as awareness, but they each played a vital role.
This conversation reminded me of that so I thought I’d throw it in there.
Tim, thanks for trusting us enough to share that story. I understand the reluctance, but what I’ve been telling myself lately is, why pander to the skeptics? My experience is what it is.
Trust your own experience and see where it leads. And keep us in the loop.
July 3rd, 2006 at 5:08 am
I am a skeptic. I am a skeptics skeptic. And basically skeptics make no sense. Skepticism has been applied to mysticism or whatever as though only skepticism exists fully, in reality — however the same rigor of skepticism has not to my knowledge ever been popularly applied to mysticism.
Why?
Because the inexistence of mysticism is the thesis and the rest is all argument.
It seems to me a “double bind” for all parties, thrusting them headlong into one another so that the impact conceals through its meaningless chaos what meaningful chaos might be. It shrouds hope through simulations of hope and distancing god from us by placing “him” apart from us through the use of a moat ridden turnpike. You pay to drown and be ripped to shreds by alligators. What an existence!
July 3rd, 2006 at 10:23 am
Have no real insight to provide to the experience. When I started reading the post, I thought oh oh…what’s this about Tim being Jesus? One time when I was in my teens I ate hash and felt / saw lightning bolts traveling up my spine and exploding in the base of my brain. One time with no substances involved I fell 15 ft off the side of a building and landed on my mouth / head - somehow I watched the fall from outside my body, even seeing what happened to change my fall from backwards to front / head first, and re-entered normal consciousness with a groan of pain. It was me making that groan
.
I can’t really explain or integrate those things to regular life. I guess we try.
I have had this sort of thought as well in the form of - if everyone is a king, then there are no need for kings. Or servants / kingdoms.
July 3rd, 2006 at 10:28 am
wel, i`m pleased that you have experienced your own divinity in the physical sense…………the absolute faith you have in the “alternative” will be a strong foundation for your journey. for a religious dogmatist to experience what you did would send him to the nut house. there is no room in religious dogma for that kind of charisma.
my belief is that we all have the potential to experience our neurology light up in this way. i prove it in each session i do with my clients. the bigger a charge that runs through my client , the more likely they are to begin healing. i get the high too. when i feirst started doing this work i found that i needed to sleep heavily the next day too, but eventually you become used to the energy flowing and it envigorates.
i don`t pretend to understand or know any of what is going on in these sessions. i just know that it brings about powerful healing in my clients……..and me.
July 3rd, 2006 at 11:41 am
[…] But the other night when I experienced my first Reiki session, a sports analogy spontaneously arose in my mind. Evidently, part of the Reiki ritual (depending on who is practicing it) consists of the practitioner asking the person to be healed, “Are you willing to let go of your pain and be healed right now?” Or something very close to that. […]
July 3rd, 2006 at 1:23 pm
Is there anything else than just psychotherapy in reiki? Call me addicted to science, but I have to ask the above question.
July 3rd, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Zzig, do you mean is there really energy transferred or is it just in people’s imaginations?
If that’s your question then I would ask you to figure out where energy is, where it starts and stops, what it looks like and feels like, how it moves through people and between people. Pinpoint for me where the division is between mind and matter, between mind and body, between experiencer and experience. Also look at the purpose of science, measurement and instrumentation and whether it too can’t be a mirror of our own spiritual experiences.
Do all that and then I think you’ll maybe find your own answer. Good question to start out with though, I think.
July 3rd, 2006 at 3:05 pm
reiki is just the instrument. we are the musicians. psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, shamanism, voodoo etc. are all instruments that wait to be played by us. the connection is the goal. when that happens anything is possible. science isn`t the right tool to measure the process though. there is only one thing that can measure this……consciousness. science even wants to claim that for it`s self by calling it the observer effect, meanwhile it was us that made all this stuff that we are surrounded by……….long before science came along to predict and control.
July 3rd, 2006 at 3:20 pm
I’m of the mind set that everyone has the potential to access their Christ Consciousness or Buddhahood or whatever you want to call it. Some people really can relate to one religious figure over another. Whatever floats your boat. In the end, it is remembering that we are all divine…no small task for daily life where things do not always feel sacred.
July 3rd, 2006 at 4:32 pm
Yeah I think its really interesting that people seem to resonate more with one particular spiritual figure over another. But I guess it’s sort of like how it would be with a movie - different people will have different favorite characters for whatever reason, since you can identify with their struggle or something about them…
July 3rd, 2006 at 4:36 pm
PS. I am really glad that I decided in the end to share these experiences here. Even though I’m sure a lot of people think it’s weird or whatever, it’s been very refreshing hearing from so many people who *don’t* think it’s all that weird, but who still recognize it as a special experience!
July 4th, 2006 at 4:16 am
Since I’ve once “seen” (felt) this darn White Light people with near-death experiences talk about, you feeling like Jesus doesn’t shock me at all, Tim.
In my case it just needed a bit of music to get catapulted into the light. It is indeed love, it dissolves the “I am”, but first it makes you cry because it is so beautiful. Looks like it just needs a bit of retuning of the mind and the right mood for getting close to the “Christ consciousness” field. I’m not a Christian, I suppose that could even be a hindrance for allowing oneself to look around the corner when the chance is there.
Anyway this stuff is a two-edged sword because most people don’t get it: Either they have a mind caged into the framework of a religion, or they’re materialists who just deny the existence of anything that’s not “hard science”. Their loss. It’s like describing the beauties of the Ocean to a herd of cattle.
The flip side of these experiences is that it’s difficult to find companionship. Having once overstepped the boundaries of shared (allowed) reality, there’s no turning back. But a lot of us got that split reality feeling already because of 9/11, so we stand at a crossroads anyway.
July 4th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
I like that idea of standing in front of a herd of cattle trying to preach to them about the beauty of the ocean. It’s oddly tragic and romantic…
July 4th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
If u could temporarily transfer human conciousness to one of the herd, so they could see the ocean and it’s beauty through your own eyes / senses, would that help the herd in general to recognize the ocean and it’s properties etc, or freak one cow right the fuck out so that he was running off from the herd to look at the ocean everyday?
July 4th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
Right and what use would a cow even have for the ocean anyway? Likely he would just starve getting there cause he was away from his field and all his friends in the herd. Is the cow any better off?
July 4th, 2006 at 4:20 pm
Its normal to be totally exhausted after doing heavy spiritual work, I was up to something friday night and was wiped out the next day all day and so was everyone else who was there too.
Whether or not you’re Jesus - I dunno - sure, probably.
Trance possession is a very strange phenom, I’ve seen people get possessed by 2 or 3 different spirits in the course of one evening and claim to have no knowledge of it afterwards…
Anywho, point being, the person is not that spirit but is inhabited by that spirit which could simulataneously be running all over the surface of the earth mounting and possessing any number of different people and effectig healings and passing messages - autonomous archteypal complexes we tap into, not some exclusive thing.
I think thats where some people go wrong actually they have an experience like that and decide “I am that person, I am the reincarnation of an exclusive representative of that person or god or whatever so now the people around me have to acknowledge me as the exact same fellow described in such-and-so a holy book” and start reading books to see what they’re supposed to act like or do or so now, instead of just rolling with it, they literalize it instead and let it get to their heads.
Which is why there are so many kooky geocities sites by people who had one or two transpersonal experiences and suddenly decided “I am Elijah” or “I am Homhammmed” or whatever - the experience was real but they drew the wrong conclusion from it.
Like Manson said, its all symbols, even your body is a symbol…
Y’know we’re all Jesus in a way, and the devil too… some people tap into that, others dont. It is very hard to explain though, definitely take much courage to even try. People in this culture are so literal minded they find these concepts hard to understand, so I don’t bother myself.
Well, thats just my opinion, your mileage may vary.
Congrats on yer great courage, I don’t think your nuts at all, just stay grounded!
July 4th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
Homhammed? He sounds cool. I’m gonna try to be him next!
July 4th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
Actually, the point of view of spirit possession I think is a really good one here as well. That presents an alternate interpretation of an event like this: that you are visited by a spirit who is there to assist and heal you. And the way that it does it is by going inside of you, and becoming you temporarily. After which you may retain traces of it’s presence, even after it has left.
The symbolism too would be obvious given the above events. The idea of being “dead” and then revived back into life by removal of the shroud, and so on.
July 4th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
I was thinking about how the Second Coming of Christ, he wouldn’t make the mistake of making a single Incarnation this time…
——–
agree totally
July 5th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
[…] I thought that part about the dragon leaping up was perhaps relevant to some recent energy work I had done on me and maybe shadows some kind of kundalini experiences? […]
July 5th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
[…] I was having a conversation recently with my sister (the one who did the reiki on me last week) over email and she said something about my website having a very strong and positive “maleness” to its approach. I tend to agree but as a male, it’s hard for me to really separate out what it is that would make it lean in that direction. […]