Reiki

What is Reiki? Reiki is energy therapy used for stress reduction and relaxation.

Early in my chemotherapy treatment process, I heard about LifeSpark. LifeSpark is a non-profit organization in the Denver area that provides weekly healing touch massage or Reiki sessions to cancer patients. They use a sliding scale to determine your weekly payments and the providers are all volunteers. When I signed up, I was told the waiting time was 2-3 months, and that was no exaggeration.

My Reiki practitioner, Jane.
I'm thankful for her volunteering her time and energy
to be part of the LifeSpark program.

In August, I met Jane for my first Reiki session. I thought it was like massage, except the practitioner didn't touch you - the "I'm close to you but not touching you" sort-of thing. Why I didn't look it up beforehand to have a better handle on what I was getting into, I'm not sure. (Maybe just overwhelmed with soaking up all sorts of other information about breast cancer.)

For each treatment, Jane places her hands on me in various locations. We begin with me laying face down on a massage table and her placing her hands on my head. Each position is kept for about a minute. [This is approximate! I've never sat there and counted because I'm supposed to be relaxing.] When she's finished with head-to-toe energy therapy on that side, I flip over onto my back. Similar positions are repeated on my front side.

I've fallen asleep a couple of times and jerked myself awake once, nearly avoiding kicking her. That made us both giggle, but we recovered quickly and soon went back to being quiet and meditative.

For those of you that are curious:

The word Reiki is made of two Japanese words - Rei which means "God's Wisdom or the Higher Power" and Ki which is "life force energy". So Reiki is actually "spiritually guided life force energy."
from: http://www.reiki.org/faq/whatisreiki.html 

I've enjoyed my Reiki sessions. After my appointments - some of which were on "bad news days" - I've felt a sense of calm, peace, and well-being. Do I have any hard-core empirical evidence of these sessions showing a clear health benefit to me? Not really. But I feel better after the appointments, so I consider that a good thing. If nothing else, it's time for me to lay down, focus on my breath, and receive good energy from another human being.