i haven’t talked a lot about my experiences with reiki here, at least not directly, other than to say that it is a daily practice.

and yet, one of the things i offer is reiki, and there are reasons why i believe in it enough to offer it.

when i was six years old, i had boiling water accidentally poured on me in the sauna and i spent a long time in the burn unit in ann arbor.

after that, saunas were not happy places.

except i grew up in northern michigan, the land of the finnish. saunas were a staple.

every saturday, we’d visit my grandparents for a sauna. every saturday, i’d sit huddled in a corner of the sauna, staring at the stove and hot water barrel, watching and waiting for something bad to happen. i never felt safe until i was back in the dressing room, but i could never tell anyone how scared i was.

later, my friends had saunas, and they were hard to avoid, especially since things like baking in the sauna + jumping into a freezing cold lake were supposed to be fun. i pretended they were.

in the beginning, i tried not to think about it at all. i certainly couldn’t talk about it. as time went on, i figured that it happened in the past and i certainly should be over it already. after all, it was a long time ago. after all, it could have been worse. after all, there were people starving.

then, i discovered reiki, and i started doing a reiki session for myself every night. slowly but surely, i discovered that i was not over it at all. all of the pain and fear and guilt that i had spent 25 years trying to ignore was suddenly right there, staring me in the face. it was like a gigantic knot that was tangled up with every single thing in my life.

to say that facing it wasn’t fun would be an understatement. it felt more like i was falling apart and i had no idea what to do.

i did the only thing i could do – i kept doing reiki sessions for myself. i had lots of crazy experiences during those reiki sessions. once, i felt a wave of intense heat everywhere the water hit. that was neat. i cried. a lot. (a fortunate or unfortunate side effect of this was that i now have no problem crying in public.) i had insights. it got easier to talk about it.

slowly, the knot began to unravel.

for much of the time, it really did feel like i was falling apart. however, the thing i started to notice was that every time something hurt, it would hurt for seconds, sometimes minutes, and then it would end. it felt clean, healing. afterward – always – i felt lighter, more free.

it’s been four years now. i think.

the knot is not completely unraveled. maybe it never will be.

it’s funny .. all those years, i wished that the accident had never happened. that i was me, but without the memories and the scar.

but it did happen. it’s part of me. it shaped me. and now that i am on the other side, i am profoundly grateful that it did happen. i can’t even be sorry that i spent all those years discounting the validity of my feelings. painful as the healing was (and is) at times, i learn so much about myself in the process.

in the end, it is this experience that – more than any other – taught me that whether i understand how this energy thing works or not, there is something to it.

when I say that i believe reiki works because i have seen what it has done for me, this is mostly what i am thinking about.