in a few hours i’m headed to a Reiki appointment. i’m so excited. a friend turned me onto a local guy who is a real guru in the field, a teacher, and whose treatments have produced visible differences in my friend’s appearance, energy and sense of well-being. seriously. i thought she saw a new shrink, or got laid. she went from crazy-hair-on-fire lady, consumed by someone else’s problems and abuse, to someone lithium-calm with a secret smile and a new attitude…not to mention some self-reported physical relief from pain and tension.

i’ll try not to set my expectations too high…a problem exactly opposite my attitude the first time i wandered into the perfect calm of a Reiki Master’s treatment room. it smelled nice, the music was chill, but come on, woman…touch me! don’t i get some kind of massage out of this!? how can this possibly work other than by placebo? how easy is it to bullshit this stuff? i guess this lady believes it...

since then i’ve participated in some group Reiki at a retreat i went to almost 10 years ago. it’s the only event of its kind that i’ve ever attended and i’d be loathe to tell you some of the “energy freeing” activities we performed with our am-i-seriously-doing-this eyes cast to the ground. i showed up in my kid-sized saints jersey with my back torqued and holding me at about 160 degrees fully upright. i was late after getting lost and blowing a toll booth because back then i had no GPS lady to tell me there were tolls on my spiritual path through the marsh. man, i was cranky, grrrrr. six other perfectly reasonable, wounded women were already there, just as skeptical and guarded as I was then. over the course of a long weekend, we each cracked our foundations and saw a permanent shift in the color of our worlds. good stuff. but there were dances with scarves involved. i wore my sour tomboy face a lot.

part of that weekend involved doing Reiki as a group on each participant. i’m here to say, publicly, that i actually felt the energy move between my hands and my housemates…without touching them at all. and now i feel like i just admitted witnessing an alien-abduction, an exorcism with visible spirits and fire, a miraculous faith-healing or some other eye-rolling claim…please indulge me. i’m one of those people who takes the right brain/left brain test and gets told to take it again because i come out right smack in the middle. not the most common result, but i’m not the only one. i like to think i’m occasionally original, but i’ve not achieved “freak of nature” status yet.

on the one hand, the dreamer and spiritual being in me wants to let go and flow with whatever it is that i feel energetically, whatever i see as synchronicity and connection. it’s a strong pull…and apparently a rather universal desire among our kind. and then there’s the other hand. the one that thinks the first hand lives in the clouds painting flowers and rainbows on its limited canvas, reading The Secret. it’s the one that has substance in my physical world. that hand is connected to a being that feels the need to touch, see, smell or at least calculate or measure everything in the natural world. i have an emotional investment in research on a unified field theory, though i feel almost nauseous at the thought of getting close to “figuring it all out.” i don’t know why, because ultimately, “figuring it out,” wrapping it up in a nice neat bow, probably only alters navigation methods and results…it likely won’t remove the emotion, the process, the experiment, the navigation of the human experience. i think we’re stuck with some of it.

so i’m going to take both hands to Reiki and let someone else’s take over and achieve what they can. i’ll do my best to hold both of mine open and let truth take care of the rest. i’ve quoted Neil DeGrasse Tyson here before, paraphrased perhaps. he’s known to mention often that one of the cool things about science is that you don’t have to believe in it for it to be true. i’ve heard the same said about God. lucky for me, and my hands.