Good Vibes Only: How Reiki Uplifts & Energizes

A movie about male strippers is the last place you’d expect to find Reiki energy healing and meditation, but if you’ve seen this summer’s hot new Magic Mike movie, you’ll see one of the lead characters giving Reiki healing to his friend who’s lying injured in a hospital bed.

Many viewers may have wondered what he was doing, hovering his hands above his friend’s body. In simple language, he was beaming good vibrations to his injured friend. This is what happens in a Reiki session – the giver channels Reiki healing energy through his hands to the recipient, who may feel warmth, coolness, or tingling coming from the Reiki giver’s hands, or just feel extremely relaxed and fall asleep.

Channeling energy may sound a bit “woo woo” for some, but Reiki is a legitimate form of alternative healing that is has been around for almost 100 years. It has improved the health and lives of countless people (and yes, animals too) around the world. With more and more people becoming interested in holistic health and natural wellness, it’s moving from the New Age realm into mainstream awareness – such as appearing in pop culture entertainment movies like Magic Mike.

Tania Ho, founder and director of Museflower Retreat & Spa Chiang Rai, has been practicing Reiki since her early days as a management trainee with Six Senses Resorts & Spas. She explains, “Reiki is an alternative healing technique founded by Dr. Makao Usui in Japan in 1922. Reiki is a Japanese word coming two characters, ‘Rei’ meaning spirit or the universe and ‘Ki’ meaning energy. It can help to release any blocks in our energy field, and restore us back to a state of balance”.

You don’t need to “believe” in Reiki for its healing energy to take effect on your wellbeing. In fact, most people are quite skeptical about Reiki when they get their first Reiki treatment. But they are usually convinced when they see and feel the noticeable results for themselves. They may start the session feeling stressed, angry, tense, exhausted, or in physical pain, and after the Reiki session they leave the table feeling relaxed, calm, uplifted, lighter in mind and body and with their physical pain lessened or gone. This is what Reiki energy does; it clears away and dissolves negative energy such as anger, stress, or tension that stiffens our muscles or our mind, which is why you feel lighter and uplifted afterwards.

“Holistic wellness is not just about the physical body or the mental body, there is also the emotional body and the energetic body,” says Tania. “Most of the time people only believe what they can see with their physical eyes. But we cannot see energy nor see Reiki. Only by experiencing it ourselves then we can feel it exists, a subtle yet powerful and loving energy that surrounds us all the time.

Reiki healer and trainer Nikorn Banjerdlert, a Phuket-based holistic therapist who teaches retreats at Museflower Retreat & Spa Chiang Rai, says he first learned about Reiki when he began working at Banyan Tree Spa Phuket over 20 years ago and has been practicing Reiki since 11 years ago when the tsunami hit Phuket. “I saw lots of tsunami victims damaged physically and mentally, so I started to treat them with Reiki.”

“After the Reiki treatments, I could see that people have more sense of wellbeing, balance, and happiness, and can overcome their challenges easier than most people! They become more positive about life and things around them and can manage to see good in everything, even when they are in a bad situation”.

During a Reiki session, the healing energy passes from the giver to the receiver and usually benefits the giver as well during the process. Through giving Reiki to others, Nikorn experienced the positive effects on himself. “Through doing Reiki on the tsunami victims, after about two weeks, my kidney stones disappeared! Because of that, it inspired me to commit to continue studying to become a Reiki Master and teach others.”

Many people find that after experiencing Reiki and seeing its positive effects on their energy level, it then makes them more aware of their own energy state, and therefore more aware of their overall health and wellbeing. They become more aware of when they are feeling “low energy” or “high energy,” or feeling positive or negative. In this way, it can change people’s lives because it gives them a new perspective on looking at life in a way that they may not have known before. For example, they can be in a difficult or negative situation and still be able to see the positive things about it.

“The key thing to understand about Reiki or any other energy healing modalities is how energy is related to our overall health,” says Tania.

“Dis-ease of the body actually stems from the energetic body first then appears in our physical body the last, so if we want to find out the root cause of what’s going on with our health, we must look into what our energetic state is like and start taking responsibility of our own thoughts and actions.”

 

Your Wellness Tip To-Go:

Museflower Retreat & Spa offers Reiki and meditation retreats, plus Reiki training, taught by Nikorn throughout the year. Get more information on the Reiki and Meditation programs available on spafinder.com. Plus, from Reiki to Crystal Therapy, check out our guide to alternative healing.