Twenty three years ago in 1984 I embarked upon a path of healing hands. I was seeing a psychologist in the early eighties because as a young mother in a bad marriage, I was severely depressed. I had a son almost three, was married to an attorney who hated me and my mother-in-law was terminally ill.  My mother, always my best friend and personal advocate, sent me for professional help.  We found a woman psychologist who spent several years helping me to find the personal resources to deal with the curve balls of life. It often felt as if she held my only lifeline in these turbulent times. Some of what she gave me were tools to love myself in the midst of an unloving relationship and how to sit out an anxiety attack. She channeled my doodles into mandelas of personal understanding and she gave me the address of a colleague who was a Reiki Master.

 

I drove to Atlanta with my husband in the middle of the week one winter evening to find Liz Valreious Warkington, a psychologist who had had recently lost her husband to cancer. Together the two had learned this healing method, Reiki, as a way to deal with the pain, sickness and finally her husband’s death. He was an eminent psychiatrist who had once been the president of the American Psychiatric Association. I tell these things to substantiate that I was not introduced to Reiki by a bunch of quacks, but by serious professionals who had utilized it in the direst of circumstances. Reiki was relatively new to the United States, having been introduced to America in 1979.

 

We went to this home in Buckhead and  knocked on the door which was opened by a thin woman in her fifties. She ushered us into her house which was also where she saw her clients.  We are here to to learn about Reiki, I said. She was surprisingly inarticulate about this healing system or perhaps it was just so far out of my paradigm that I didn’t understand what she was telling me. Finally she told me that she would show me.  I lay down upon a table and she passed her hands over me. I got up and I was very hot, felt altered in ways that were indescribable - except, well, hot.  I wanted to be able to do this and I wanted it badly. Liz explained to us that we would have to be attuned and that it would cost $140 a piece.  She could not give the attunement away, this was not permissible to the American International Reiki Association of which she was a part. I did not understand what an attunement was, but I was willing to to pay the fee and so was my husband.  We closed our eyes and she waved her hands around us and finally blew on  our brows.  We had been attuned, but we were obligated to come back to Atlanta for a workshop to actually learn the healing system. Our fee would cover this workshop.  She gave us a workbook which explained the hand positions, gave a brief history and definitions, an index of specific treatments and the Principles of Reiki. We went home and never returned for a workshop.

 

I felt absolutely transformed. My hands felt as if they were holy objects. I clung to the workbook and read it over and over again. I had been handed a life boat of personal transformation as far as I was concerned.

 

My husband treated it all as if it was total bullshit. It was the washing machine we didn’t buy, the money we did not have. It was just another thing I cared about which he disparaged.

 

Everyday I would lay my hands over my eyes, on the top and back of my head, my throat, heart, solar plexus and groin. Slowly I begin to discern that sometimes there wass a wild beat behind my eyes or my throat was throbbing madly. My hands learned things about these pulses, beats, hot, cold and sucking sensations that I had no language for.

 

I tried this Reiki on my mother-in-law. She hated it. I tried it on my friends, they loved it. I did it on myself always, continuously.  I learned what I could do to stop pain, to get through an injury, to reduce swelling, live through anxiety, anger, sadness and sickness. I had found a lifelong tool for engaging the moment, breathing into it and processing it.

 

All of this happened well before the internet - 24 years before I could go online and have access to everyone else’s experiences. I knew nothing of chakras and neither did anyone else I knew. I did not understand anything about Reiki except for my own personal experiences of it. Liz had told me only this: “It is a turning to the Light.”

 

I talked incessantly about the Reiki for a year or two and then gradually I grew quiet. Nobody understood what I was babbling about.  I only knew that my hands and pain worked together in mysterious ways and that became enough.  I found a woman’s mediation group, began collecting gemstones and crystals and essentially fell in with the coming wave of the new age movement in middle Georgia.

 

Eventually even this corner of the world began vibrating with others learning about Reiki and the bookstores began stocking books about it. I found myself resentful that there was now so much information and that others were finding this path. I got over this as I met others in the Reiki community who understood their hands as tools for transformation. Now I could turn to friends who can put their hand on my shoulder or lay me down for a complete treatment and help balance my out out-of-control energies.

 

My path has taken me much further than Reiki, to Healing Touch and beyond. I don’t believe a person has to be attuned to feel and work with their hands transforming the erratic pulses of energy into steady rhythms. I believe anyone can put their hand where it hurts, on or above the body with the intention to sense what is going on and will be able to feel the energetic throbs. I believe this is an ability the western mind has ignored and denied, but that it exists none-the-less. Learning of my personal empowerment to balance my own energy has been one of the best gifts I have as a human being. I have learned that this power has limitations and that I can not heal everything or just anybody. Finding my healing hands has been a very personal journey. Healing means very different things at different times. Sometimes a person recovers their health by getting well but sometimes people have to die to heal on other levels. Many times people rely on being sick as if illness is their oldest and best friend. Always healing comes from within and can not be forced from without. If a person does not want to participate in energetic healing then it is a violation to include them. Mostly I think of it as a prayer for wholeness that I participate in. We all live fractured lives in an out-of-balance world. Personal acts to restore balance are my way of turning towards the Light.