Reiki First Aid

There is a common perception of energy medicine that it is primarily useful for gradual long term healing, especially for conditions or situations with longstanding and deeply rooted causes in the emotional and/or mental layers of our psyche and aura. While it may be very effective for treating such maladies, energy healing in general and Reiki in particular are in no way, shape or form limited to such "non-physical" uses.

I personally know practitioners who have successfully used Reiki for first aid on themselves and others with great success, and I have also done so myself. Today I will share two stories as examples of this type of "Reiki First Aid".

In April of this year, I was attending a three day class in a hotel with 20 other Reiki practitioners. On the second day of the class, one of the students, a woman perhaps 50 years old who I will call "Nadine" (not her real name), hobbled very gingerly into the room at the start of the day, using extreme caution not to use her right leg or to put any weight on her right foot. In asking her what was wrong, I learned that she had badly twisted her knee the previous evening and done some damage to a tendon. Any movement to the leg was excruciating for her and she did not know if she could continue in the class. She had been unable to sleep all night due to the pain.

Since this was a Reiki class, I had my massage table there and proceeded to set it up and invited Nadine to lie down for some treatment. It took a good fifteen minutes to get her onto the table, since I had to support her right leg at all times without allowing it to move at all other than what she controlled herself from her hip joint. When I started to remove her shoes, she stopped me immediately saying that it took her an hour to get them on!

I enlisted the help of five or six other practitioners, and we surrounded Nadine, all laying hands on her on the table for an intensive healing session prior to the start of class.

Once the class started, we were to pair off and practice some recently learned adjunct Japanese healing techniques on each other as our first exercise. I stayed at the table and partnered with Nadine, telling her that I would work on her first, giving her some additional time to chill out and relax on the table before testing her leg. The other practitioners paired off in their own groups to practice.

During the entire time the instructor was explaining and demonstrating our lesson material, I continued to channel Reiki through her knee first with my hands directly on her kneecap, and then moving to alternate positions with my hands spread one above and one below the knee to flow Reiki through the joint, and finally spreading my hands wider to flow Reiki from her hip all the way to her foot. Even though Reiki will flow to wherever it is needed by using its own intelligence, I felt guided to use the hand positions described and followed the guidance, as I have learned to always do.

The lesson material was on psychic surgery where the healer will visualize extending their fingers to great lengths, and then continue the visualization by symbolically reaching into the client's body at the source of the ailment, pulling out the offensive material and disposing of it into the Earth. My practice of this newly learned technique was directed at Nadine's right knee.

By the time we were ready to change places and have her start practicing the psychic surgery technique on me, she was able to get off the table and stand with some, but not all of her weight on her injured knee. She relayed that her pain had subsided considerably. As the class went on throughout the day, she seemed to gradually improve and by the end of the day, was able to walk with us and join us for dinner at a restaurant several blocks away.

By the morning of day three, Nadine was back to 100 percent and in no pain at all. While she had fully expected to head directly to the doctor and potentially to physical surgery on her return from her Reiki class, she now found it unnecessary to do so. Whatever damage that had been done to her tendon causing such terrible pain and weakness was completely gone.

The second example of "Reiki First Aid" that I'll relate today deals with self-healing. Last month, I was building a fence around my back yard to keep Mickey (my Border Collie) and Runt (my daughter's Yorkshire Terrier) from terrorizing the neighbors. Mickey, in particular, needs a place to run since he is rapidly becoming the only obese Border Collie I have ever seen, and he's just a year and a half old!

Part of the work I was doing on the fence involved fastening the wire mesh fabric to wooden fence posts. I was doing this with heavy metal staples, and because I already had my four pound sledge hammer handy from driving the posts into the ground, I didn't bother to go back to the garage to retrieve my regular claw hammer, which would have been the right tool for this job.

This was a very repetitive and boring task as I installed nearly 300 feet of fencing. About halfway through the job, and not paying as much attention as I should, one blow of the sledge hammer came down squarely on the tip and last joint of my left index finger. This hurt so badly that I first I couldn't even feel it. I immediately began to wonder if I could drive myself to the emergency room or if I should try to call one of my daughters. I had thin work gloves on to prevent blisters and I didn't want to take them off in case that was all that was holding my finger tip together!

Right about then, as is becoming commonplace for me now, my guide put the idea in my head to use Reiki to heal my finger. Still sitting on the ground where I was working, I wrapped my right hand around my left index finger, visualized the CKR symbol flowing in the energy stream from the ground, through my chakras and eventually down my arm and out my palm chakra into the injured finger. I held this position for a good 15 or 20 minutes letting the energy flow...if my neighbors saw me, they would have surely just thought I was goofing off as usual!

After a while, the pain in my finger subsided so much that instead of wondering how I was going to get to the ER, I began once again to fasten the wire mesh to the fence posts - using both hands and the four pound sledge hammer (OK so I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed!).

By the time I finished working on this section of the fence late that afternoon, I took the workglove off my left hand for the first time. The fingertip of my index finger, which I am sure had been flattened and crushed by a full direct blow of the sledge hammer, was intact. The only sign of the injury was dark bruising and discoloration of the entire surface of the skin beneath the nail, but there was NO PAIN. Even if I had not broken or shattered any bones, there should still have been significant pain from the bruising and swelling beneath the nail, but the "Reiki First Aid" had been so effective as to completely heal the injury and allow me to finish the job with no lingering after effects.

So the next time you think that Reiki healing is only for problems with emotional or mental sources, remember that Reiki should also be be part of your First Aid Kit!

Just for today...be kind to all Humans!

Bob McGrath
Master Practitioner/Teacher
Pathways to Harmony