How Reiki and Shamanic Healing work in synergy

Reiki and shamanic healing work together in synergy.  When a person receives shamanic healing, it works at the core of an issue.  In the case of a  soul retrieval, the soul essence returning will normally cause the old emotions that were central to the trauma to release over the few days or weeks after the ceremony. This is where Reiki can accelerates and facilitates the release of these emotions. I recommend to people to book a few Reiki sessions after they receive a soul retrieval to support them in their process.

Sometimes, the emotional release that occurs after a shamanic ceremony can be intense. On occasion, I get a call from people five to ten days after the healing, asking me to explain what is going on.  The process of the emotions being release is normal and natural.  When it occurs, an effort must be made to honour the process and not prevent it by pushing the emotions away.

Awareness of the healing process and awareness of emotional states

I find it is helpful to have an awareness of the process of healing. Healing old wounds is similar to the process of grieving a loss. I have gone through the process many times, and what I have found is that there is a fairly regular order in which it occurs.

The first layer is usually fear.  Fear is the place where I am most likely to remain unconscious and in denial. It is a vague feeling of anxiety, a feeling that there is something wrong, that I should be on my guard, and it often comes with a super alertness and some stress. A mild paranoia sets in sometimes and I usually cannot figure out where it comes from. The fear is generally accompanied by confusion and indecision. At this level, I have conversation with myself that sound like this: “I felt so good yesterday, what’s going on now?” or “Everything is just fine, I am okay – just a little bit worked up.”

In the second layer, I become aware of tension in my body.  I will get a knot in my shoulder blade or I feel a weight on my chest and then I will wonder: “What is that?” Over the years I noticed that my most important release spot is on the left hand side of my right shoulder blade and it feels like someone pushing a finger in my back – as if pointing the finger at me.  Shoulders usually hold grief.  If the grief is in the past, it normally is buried deep into my back.  If it is more current, it locates itself all around my shoulder blade and my neck.

As the hours or days go by, depending on the intensity, I will notice that I become irritable, angry, and impatient for no apparent reason. Sometimes, my environment throws me an annoyance which triggers me further. During this stage, I am aware of being impatient and angry with myself for being angry! Almost as if one emotion enhances the other in a circle. The anger is usually laden with feelings of helplessness, self-blame and low self-esteem.   My environment will mirror the inner states I am in.   It is the Universe trying to show me my emotional state.  For example, I will go to the bank and the teller will be short with me or I will be surrounded by impatient grumpy people in the line, or I will get honked at while driving, for no apparent reason and then react really strongly.  I think the emotions are being mirrored, but also they affect others who seem to pick up on the anger I feel  and therefore react on the same level I am processing at.

I will make an effort to feel the anger and impatience and try not to direct it at the people or things around me, but sometimes I unconsciously lash out and make the outside responsible for what I feel inside.  As soon as I notice that I am being triggered, I try to make a space for myself, even just a few minutes to self-treat with Reiki, putting my hands where I feel the emotions and tensions to allow the energy to move and to ground myself in my body. This short process allows me to ‘own’ my emotions and not project them around at others or in my environment.  On a few occasions, the anger gets so acute that I have to go for a drive and park the car in a spot where I know no one will hear or see me. I will then scream at the top of my lungs to let the energy of the anger out (I always make sure to open the windows afterwards and intend for the energy released to move out of my car! Or even better, I will sometimes smudge the car afterwards.)  In the moment, I try to verbalize any words that come up.  Anything can come up and I don’t judge it.

Immediately following the anger release, I feel a moment of peace, but it is usually short lived! In many cases, a sorrow or hurt or sometimes feelings of grief and loss come up, and I start to cry, sometimes sob uncontrollably. I try to stay present in my body, breathe normally and feel the emotion fully to ensure I am not impeding on the flow of the emotions being released. I rarely know what the emotions are about at first.  But as I feel them, I will get images and memories. On occasion, a memory returns, and I am able to really make sense of the emotional state.  In some instances, I have no idea why I feel the way I do.  However, in all cases, a gentle peace comes into my being, and I feel grounded and calm afterward.  The process amazes me.  It reinforces the idea that feeling  truly is  healing.  I have to be patient with myself if I create distractions in my life because I am afraid to feel the pain.  Healing and facing inner pain takes courage, but it comes with immeasurable rewards. A peace that manifests within and in the environment, more balanced relationships and a truer expressions of myself are just some of the benefits.

Reiki is an intelligent wise force

We are all similar in our process, yet very different in our experiences. The intensity of the healings I experience and the different emotions are so varied that I am not able to relate each experience to a particular event in my life.  What I sense is that my body, which contains all the genetic code of my ancestors, is a healing instrument. If I allow it, family patterns and old trauma, even far back into my lineage, can be healed within me and allow me to stop perpetuating the negative patterns I genetically inherited from my lineage. The combined process of healing ancestry lineage, healing wounds of my current and past life and the spiritual growth that ensues is, in my opinion, the raising and growth of human consciousness. I believe this growth, no matter which practice it stems from,  to be the key for all humans to attain enlightenment.   I find Reiki to be so incredibly useful because it does exactly that.  It appears to cause cellular memory to release, allowing a person to change on a cellular level, treating the root causes of the pattern. Such healings therefore bypass the conscious mind enacting a core change within one’s body and mind. An example would be how I used to feel so awkward in a large group. Before going to a gathering, I would start feeling anxious and by the time the event would come, I would be so uncomfortable that I would find it difficult to be present and to have a conversation with anyone.  I was very socially wounded from being bullied at school as a child. As I healed the wounds, I found it progressively easier to be in groups to the point that now, I feel no anxiety at all.  If I would have tried to will this kind of change in myself – I really don’t know how I could have done that with only my limited awareness and my intellect!

Surrender and Addiction

Another observation I made about my healing process is that if I prevent the flow of emotion to occur, I find myself indulging in too much work, distractions, and addictions. Addictive behaviours are the protective defense mechanism I create to prevent myself from going deeper into the fear, anger and sorrow that is in my body. I  consider addiction as the effect of emotional wounds. Of course, once one is involved in addictive behaviour, more wounds to the self and others occur thereby becoming a cause of wounding.  But at the source, the behaviour is, in my opinion, caused by the fear of feeling pain. If I remain distracted, I don’t have to look in and there is comfort in being busy.  I observed myself and other people on holidays.  All of a sudden, the busy life comes to a halt and distractions from work and the daily routine stop.  l find buried emotions suddenly start to rise.  If we stay present, we can allow the emotions to come up and give them some space to clear as we rest, rather than indulge in addictive behaviours.

The last idea I would like to mention is that with any type of recovery and healing program, there is a point at which one needs to surrender. Many books describe the meaning of diseases and the causes of mental imbalances and addictions. The knowledge of the patterns, their source and their workings  are an essential part of the process of healing.  However, it puts the brain into research mode and tends to make us mentally busy and carry conversations with ourselves as to the why and when.  Reiki will put a person in a deep relaxed state allowing the mental chatter to fade and tuning directly into the messages of the body.  Reiki truly shines out of the depths of one’s being as it has an intelligence that is incomprehensible to the mind. It brings the root cause to consciousness while bypassing the mental chatter of the mind.  I could spend a lot of mental energy trying to figure why and how, but by simply tuning in with the help of Reiki, the process occurs naturally, in a way than I am always able to handle on all levels of my life. I used to smoke cigarettes. I had a prayer and an intent to heal from the addiction.  On the recommendation of my Reiki Master, Karen Hill, all I did for a while was to pay attention to all the aspects of the addiction such when I smoke more, less, what it did to my feelings, my energy level, the impact on my body and so on.  I gathered a lot of information about it and try to be aware of all the feelings I had around cigarettes. Eventually I felt like I really knew most of the pieces.  However, knowing still was not making me quit, but I had surrendered and kept praying for the addiction to be healed.    One time, I was receiving a treatment and many different thoughts and feeling about smoking were moving through my body.   Then something unexplainable happened.  I felt my lungs open up as if filled with ‘divine breath’ and I heard a great loud breath inside of me – almost like a big sigh of relief.  My being filled up with peace and a feeling of satisfaction seem to heal all my cells.  I don’t know how it happened but it cured me of the desire to smoke.

The process of healing occurred dozens of times in my  life and what is most significant for me is that after such healings, the old triggers do not affect me anymore and the patterns are dissolved.  People around me seem to change and even treat me differently.  The environment once again reflects the inner workings of my being. The encouraging thought is that at the beginning of my journey, in the early nineties, the healings would come frequently, at almost every treatment. But now, they are fewer and fewer and I seem to be much more able than before to  experience inner peace on a regular basis, even through difficult times.