Meditation and Reiki Healing
By Jane Sandwood
How Meditation can Enhance Your Reiki Healing Abilities
As a future practitioner of Reiki, you are probably excited about being able to balance the energy fields of the people you treat, helping them utilize the ‘universal life energy’ to fight stress, anxiety, depression and a plethora of other maladies.
You may wonder how to enhance your ability to allow Reiki energy healing to flow from your hands to where the patient most needs it. Since Reiki is such a deeply spiritual experience, it is important to be in a mindful state when practicing it, to share but also feel the powerful currents of energy that flow through many parts of your body, including your chakras, spine, arms, and hands. One way to deepen this calm, focused state, is meditation – a practice that can bring you as many benefits as it does to your client.
The Power of Meditation
Mindfulness meditation is currently an important complementary therapy(Mayo Clinic) in many settings in which battling stress is key to healing. These include centers for eating disorder, substance abuse, and anxiety/depression recovery. In mindfulness meditation, the aim is simple: to keep the mind in the present moment. Recognizing our thoughts and emotions (positive and negative) is vital; we should never suppress these, but rather, recognize that they exist, yet let them ‘wash over us’ like a wave, instead of allowing them to absorb us and lead us into a negative state.
The Difference between Mindfulness Meditation and Psychic/Healing Meditation
There is an important difference between mindfulness meditation and psychic/healing meditation, although both wield very similar benefits (Harvard) on the person performing them (including a reduction in stress, improved mood, better sleep, and increased vitality). Psychic or healing meditation has a specific purpose, however: to enable us to access our inner gifts and lead us to a higher state of consciousness.
How to Perform Psychic Meditation
The process involved in psychic meditation is similar in essence to that of mindfulness meditation, with a few specific differences. In both, finding a quiet place is key, as is performing abdominal breathing (called pranayamic breathing in yoga) exercises, inhaling air for around three seconds and taking a little longer if possible to exhale.
With psychic meditation, however, the aim goes beyond simply ‘being in the here and now’; it involves opening all our senses, so much so that some people see images, hear sounds or messages, or feel a current run through them.
Patience is important, as is persistence. When you start meditating, you may not feel a deeper connection to the universal life force, but little by little, you will feel that you have ‘captured’ a little bit of energy that you can share with clients. Because the experience can be so powerful, it is important to wind down; you can do this by performing stretching exercises, blowing out a candle, or simply relaxing a while before getting back to your daily routine.
Since Reiki is all about sharing healing energy, it is important to use all the tools available to reach a calm, relaxed, and open state in which we are more in tune with our healing abilities. In addition to meditation, we should also aim to spend time in nature and pay attention to our breathing, soaking up the powerful force we need to heal ourselves and others.
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