Sketchbook entry

My first Reiki treatments

by Fletcher Kovich

Last Friday I did my first two sampler Reiki sessions on friends. With the first person, I began by placing my hands over her eyes, and I again felt a similar sensation to the “cold column of wind” that I felt at the end of the training weekend. This time, I felt a cold draft blowing out of this person’s eyes.

My Reiki manual says that cold energy is often blocked energy. With my friend, this would certainly make sense. In Chinese medicine terms, she has a long history of blocked liver energy, resulting in migraines and an extremely problematic menstrual cycle. The liver heavily influences the eyes. This is why people often feel migraine symptoms related to their eyes—when the migraine is due to blocked liver energy. So, it was appropriate that I felt this cold draft blowing out of her eyes.

I’ve found these sensations striking, because I had never experienced other people’s energy in this way before. Previously, I had only experienced “normal” or “excess” energy, in the form of various sorts of tingling sensations. But after the Reiki “attunements” on me, it seems that I can now clearly sense the blocked energy within a person in the form of a wind exiting their body—for the moment (who knows whether it will continue).

Thinking about this, this may be because previously my own problems were due mainly to my own deficient energy. I decided to learn Reiki as a way of possibly addressing a problem I had in my acupuncture practice. When I gave treatments to people, I frequently felt their symptoms within me and sometimes those symptoms would remain lodged within my for several days, or even a week or two. To me, the sensations felt as though an external pathogen had passed into me and lodged within me, just as when most people are exposed to a cold wind, the wind can “enter” them and become lodged within them (according to Nei Jing theory); they would feel a strong ache in the part of their body that was exposed to the wind. And at times, I would feel as though a cold were constantly trying to develop within me, due to this constant onslaught of other people’s energy, which I would experience as a wind-type pathogen that was trying to enter me (seemingly).

In the week after learning Reiki, I had a fairly busy week of acupuncture treatments, but this time I felt stronger in some way. At no point did I feel “invaded” by a patient’s energy. It felt as though a layer of protection had been placed around me. It was as though the yang part of my energy had been strengthened, and now I had the normal “defensive energy” (wei chi) that most people already have and take for granted. I’m not giving enough detail here to explain all these concepts properly, but it seems this is what happened. And it occurs to me that, if this is what happened, then my defensive energy is no longer deficient, and that it is this that now enables me to clearly feel this blocked (absent) energy in other people (in the form of a cold wind blowing out of them at various places). But this is very much a working hypothesis.

15 December 2008

[FK Aug 2017. My above thinking, from almost ten years ago, is musing on the Nei Jing notions of wei chi, and the modifications to this introduced in today’s Chinese medicine. However, the Nei Jing notions of wei chi and how this protects us from external pathogens are theoretical and happen to be untrue, along with much of the other theoretical content of the Nei Jing. This is discussed in great detail in my recent book.]