REIKI

Reiki flows to the areas of need, soothing pain and supporting the body's natural ability to heal itself. (Anamica Goyal)

Reiki restores balance in one's life. Energy is intelligent and knows what it needs to do and the therapist acts as a conductor of the energy. It works with the Chakra system and complements traditional medicine. Hermeticist’s and other esoteric philosophers noticed that every chakra is linked to an endocrine gland: the crown chakra with the pineal, the brow centre with the pituitary and hypothalamus, the throat centre with the thyroid gland, the heart centre with the thymus gland, solar plexus with pancreas, sacral chakra with the reproductive organs and the base chakra with adrenals. They then reasoned that the function of the associated endocrine gland must have something to do with the spiritual, psychological, psychosomatic and physiological functions attributed to the chakra, or energy centre.

When our hormones are balanced we feel happy and able to go out into the world and live our purpose with enthusiasm and joy. Our relationships are improved and life flows. The adrenal glands also produce cortisol in the fight or flight response. The adrenal medulla helps the body cope with physical and emotional stress by releasing hormones. They increase the heart rate and blood pressure. Looking after our adrenal glands is crucial because they help us in staying grounded and calm and they support our parasympathetic nervous system which in turn, restores the body.

“After years of observing very impressive results of symptom reduction with Reiki performed by Reiki volunteers at an inpatient hospice unit, I could no longer deny its effectiveness and have decided to learn Reiki myself. I wanted to see what it was that those volunteers were doing to help hundreds of my patients, beyond what I, The Doctor, could do after all the years of medical training, residency, 4 fellowships and clinical research training. What were those Reiki volunteers doing that helped reduce pain, improve delirium symptoms, reduce nausea, control anxiety, help insomnia, that no matter what I (and a whole team of best-trained physicians and health care professionals) could do? It took me ten years of observing these impressive results in disbelief, before I finally took a Reiki class. After learning Reiki, I proceeded to practicing it (in addition to my medical practice and clinical research), and still this day, I am amazed with its effectiveness.” - Maria Danilychev

“It is not hard to imagine that a hospital patient awaiting surgery or chemotherapy might feel relieved, in that hectic and stressful setting, to have someone place a hand gently and unhurriedly where the hurt or fear is with the intention of alleviating any suffering. That this increased calm might translate into lowered blood pressure or abated pain, anxiety, or bleeding—as has been observed in hospital patients who undergo Reiki—seems logical, too.

The ailments that Reiki seems to treat most effectively are those that orthodox medicine struggles to manage: pain, anxiety, chronic disease, and the fear or discomfort of facing not only the suffering of illness but also the suffering of treatment. “What conventional medicine is excellent at is acute care. We can fix broken bones, we can unclog arteries, we can help somebody survive a significant trauma, and there are medicines for all sorts of symptoms,” Yufang Lin, an integrative-medicine specialist at Cleveland Clinic, told me. But medicine, she said, is less successful at recognizing the way that emotion, trauma, and subjective experience can drive physical health—and the way that they can affect recovery from acute medical care.

Lifesaving surgery is miraculous but requires drugging the body, cutting it open, altering it, stitching it back together, and then asking it to heal. Chemotherapy causes the body to fall to pieces; it can damage the brain, wreck internal organs, and destroy nerve endings, sometimes permanently. Medicine is necessary, but it can also be brutal. Lin, like several of the physicians I spoke with, emphasized that healing is something that happens within the body, enabled rather than imposed by medicine. When we are traumatized, survival is the priority and our healing mechanisms are on lockdown, Miles observed. “We have to pull out of that stress state and get into a parasympathetic-dominant state before the body is able to self-heal and actively partner with conventional medicine.” Jordan Kisner.