Whether you see it or believe it or not, you have an energy body. It can be clean or dirty. Ripped and scarred. Vibrant and beaming. It runs around and throughout the physical body that is easily seen with the physical eyes.
Energy work soothes and heals the energy body, just as massage soothes and heals the physical body. Here’s a tricky part, though. When you heal your energy body, the correlation between the work and outcome is often not straightforward .
When people come for Reiki, they may feel disappointed if, for example, the pain in their right foot isn’t gone at the end of their session. Sometimes the pain is gone, but it doesn’t always work that way.
Sometimes the Reiki went to work on something that operates under your radar. That something will eventually help the foot or it will help something that is related energetically to the foot.
The relationship between that “something” and the foot is often not a connection that would be registered as logical by our thinking process. When you ask for help from Reiki, you will be disappointed if you expect it to work like our reasonable [sic] minds. We may never know what that “something” was. Or eventually it may make sense, when we look at it with hindsight.
Reiki doesn’t always go straight to your problem and zap it like “Poof! Be gone!” It may work that way if the problem is new, minor, or transient. For example it might quickly soothe a tension headache after a tough day.
More commonly, if you build the Reiki in your energy body over time, you begin to see new patterns developing in your life, leading you toward the changes you desire.
One of my teachers called it “working out the energetic muscle.” The more you give and receive Reiki, to yourself or others, the stronger it gets.
As you build your energy body, unwanted things may fall away. Wanted things may find you, seemingly without effort, at least without “effort” as we commonly know it. Do you connote effort with ideas like this: paying your dues, pulling your own weights, and hauling yourself up by your bootstraps? To many of us there is great honor in our responsibilities, our relentless pushing. Our drudgery and guilt.
In Reiki there are five principles upon which we meditate. One of them is to work hard. There is no feeling of drudgery in this precept, though. It means to work diligently and with conscious integrity, to engage the spirit.
It is hard to first wrap your head around this idea of working with the spirit instead of with the blood, sweat, and tears. It is even harder to consistently position this work ahead of grinding though to-do lists and five-year plans.
In this way, spiritual work can get a bad rap. Some think it’s hocus pocus, pie-in-the-sky living, waiting around for that unicorn to appear.
There are still things to do on a spiritual life-style to-do list. It’s just that the items on the list might be misconstrued as wasting time in a world of text alerts and deadlines. “Doing” meditation and Reiki means sitting in one place with not much action that can be seen with the naked eye.
Or here’s another energy task: clearing your energy field. Like your liver and kidneys, your energy body should be cleaned. You can’t count on a single Reiki session to clear up years of debris and oozing wounds. You constantly use your energy body, so you have to constantly clean it, like taking a shower, brushing your teeth, or taking on the newest detox fad.
This murky fog is a reasonable representation of how your energy looks to me during an energy work session when it needs cleaning. “Physical” manifestations of energy like this are often fear, pain, or a sense or heaviness, anxiety, or depression. Through various energy techniques, this picture will look different by the end of the session. The fog may be gone and the sun shining. Or the fog may have begun to lift and the sun beginning to peak through. Or it may still be foggy, but not as dense.
You may feel amazing, full of joy and vitality. Or you may feel more peaceful, with a glimmer of hope beginning in your heart. Just like after leaving the gym, you will probably feel good for a few days. If you don’t go back, though, little by little the heaviness will creep back in.
Use the moment when the fog has lifted to sneak a new routine into your day. Get back to breathing exercises or meditation. If you are attuned to Reiki, get back in the habit of Reiki-ing yourself every day. Give Reiki to your friend and family. Work to build your energy body and watch for little changes in your life.
There was a person in my professional life who needed to fall away. As I’ve worked my energy muscle, that relationship dissolved naturally, through a series of events that I didn’t necessarily plan. Looking back, though, I see how, as my energy body got stronger, Reiki did the magic work behind the scenes of making it easy to say good bye.
The day after that person was released, I woke up and did my Reiki routine. A pain in my hip did dissolve with a poof. Later that day I was contacted by a new person with a new business suggestion. It came after weeks of sitting still in meditation, weeks of Reiki-ing the situation. Weeks of “work,” but then POOF!