What is a crisis healing after an attunement?

Most Reiki Master Teachers in the traditional Usui Reiki will strongly recommend a 21-day period between attunements. This is so that you can adjust to the reiki energies. I do agree with this for most beginners as this is the period that the healing crisis takes place. I do also tell my students that get my other reiki attunements to wait at least a week between the attunements but of course this is just a suggestion and that they know what they can and cannot handle energetically.

What is a healing crisis? It happens after an attunement where the reiki energies bring up all that does not serve your HIGHEST good. Most of the time you get sick or if you already are it gets worst before it gets better. I have gone through it a few times with even my other reiki systems. It is defiantly not fun, as it is never fun being sick as it is.

I tell my students about this time and I usually do my best to help them through it the best I can by sending them distance reiki and giving them an idea of what to expect. I know it can be scary facing that time alone. Most of the time the healing crisis happens in levels according to the level of reiki that you are being attuned to.

During Usui Reiki Level 1 it is the physical healing, so you get the purification of the body and the physically sicknesses. At level 2 Usui Reiki attunement comes the emotional healing or cleansing. You become an emotional mess dealing with all those emotional wounds that one tends to try to bury or to not deal with.  Level 3 and 4 (depending on how your Master Teacher teaches this) is spiritual healing. I find that at this stage my reiki students have enough skills in self-healing that I rarely am called for help. They also tell me that it is the least dramatic of the healing crisis. When I got to this level in my formal Usui training, I was the one that my teacher demonstrated the attunement processes on and then I allowed the other student to practice on me, so I received 6 attunements in one 6-hour class, so my healing crisis was more than what is normal. I also don’t recommend doing that or anyone to volunteer to do that.

Please feel free to share your own experiences or ask me questions.

Anxiety and Reiki

I find that a lot of my reiki clients come to me with anxiety, seeking a way to cope without medication. I must say this; I will never tell you to not take something your doctor prescribes to you or to stop consulting your professional medical doctors. I am not a Doctor nor will I claim to be one and if you go to any reiki practitioner that claims such you should ask lots of questions and want to see proof of their doctorate. So with that said I want to start by talking about what anxiety is so that you have a better understanding of it.

What is anxiety? According to medical definitions it is a mental dis-order that lead to excessive nervousness, fear, apprehension, and worry. What my interpenetration is that you are worrying about what is to come or the future. It is: the what could be’s, the what if’s, and worrying about the things that are out of your control.  I know that even talking about all this can cause one to have anxiety so let me remind you that you are safe and you are OK and focus on the here and now. Having anxiety is normal human emotion. Having constant anxiety is where it affects your health. It triggers your fight of flight response. When you are in that fight or flight mood your body sends all of its energy to your limbs and shuts down your digestive system and torso area. So staying in that mood for prolonged time, you then start to see other issues like ulcers.

So, how can reiki help with anxiety? Well first reiki is an energy that helps one to relax. It helps you be in the here and now. I have been told that reiki feels like a weight is being lifted off their chest. I have seen someone with severe anxiety come to me, looking like they are deflated. Almost like they have collapsed in on themselves, they were so hunched over that it was painful to see. After one reiki session my client could stand/sit up straighter than they have in years. She also told me that she could actually take a full deep breath and that she felt lighter in heart. She came back for weekly sessions for 6 months. To date she has reported that she has had only a few moments of where she felt her anxiety surface but she was able to manage it quickly. She comes to see me every so often just as something for her to do as part of her new self-care habits.

The energies of reiki are so gentle and loving that it encourages you to relax into it and just let it do what it needs to do. It is hard to resist that beautiful gift that you can’t help but to do as the energies ask of you and trust it and relax.