This is a piece I wrote about reiki for my workshop this past summer.
“Meow. Meeeeeowwwwwww.”
The cat’s cry gets louder and more plaintive as I approach his cage, and I can’t say I blame him. I am, after all, a grim reaper cleverly disguised in a white lab coat. As a surgical assistant to a neuropharmacologist, I am responsible for recording the vital signs of the cat and helping to administer the anesthesia that will keep the animal unconscious and pain-free throughout the experimental procedure until, in accordance with that great euphemism of science, he is “sacrificed.” This fatal surgery will give scientists a better understanding of the inner workings of nerve networks in the cardiac system that could eventually mean healthier hearts for human patients, but that is little consolation to either the cat or me right now. Once we get to the prep room, I take a few deep breaths. I place my cupped hands side by side over the cat, making light but firm contact on his back. Making sure to not leave any space between my fingers, I hold my hands in place for several minutes, touching but not pressing on his soft tawny fur. I then shift them up a few inches on his back, again pausing for three or four minutes.
As I repeat this process in a few other spots on the cat’s body, I can feel both our heartbeats begin to cautiously decelerate. His breaths slow and deepen, and soon the other surgical assistant, who has been physically restraining the cat, is able to loosen her grip a little and free up one hand to insert an IV. I finally respond to her overt quizzical glances by explaining that I am performing reiki healing, a systematic healing practice developed as a means of restoring energy and promoting healing within the mind, body, and spirit. I don’t bother to explain to her the rest of the story, which is that reiki healing was developed in Japan by a man named Mikao Usui in the early twentieth century following a vision he had at a sacred site that inspired him to develop a system of holistic healing. The practice is based on the concept of "ki," a life force energy that flows through and around us all and imbues us with life. It is believed that the depletion of this energy results in stress, anxiety, and pain. Usui created the system of reiki healing to attempt to restore this life force energy through healing touch. The idea is that the practitioner acts as a channel for this ki, extracting it from the surrounding universal space and transferring it to the client through his or her palms. The practitioner places her hands on very specific areas of the body, covering 12-20 spots in a session, which can last anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes – in a human at least. These improvised sessions on the cats usually last about 15 minutes, which is enough to cover most of the body.
My experience with reiki healing dates back quite far, all the way to before I was born. Linda Keiser Mardis, my mother’s reiki healing teacher and close friend, performed treatments on my mother while she was pregnant with my twin sister and me. Throughout my childhood, my mother would sporadically perform reiki healing on me to relieve the pain of injuries sustained on the soccer field and the congenital anxiety with which she had so generously endowed me.
Though I often was unable to remember how I felt during the session (it is extremely common for the client to fall asleep), I can attest to the almost tangible sense of calm that I felt upon awakening. Whether I had sought the comfort of my mother’s reassuring hands to relieve the physical pain of a torn knee ligament or the emotional pain inflicted by a particularly vicious classmate, the relaxation I experienced as a result of my reiki healing sessions covered me like a silky suit of armor, gentle but solid. When I took up an interest in yoga in my late teens, I mentioned to my mother that I was having a hard time understanding what people meant when they talked about feeling “centered.” She thought for a moment and replied, “Try to imagine how you feel after a reiki session.” I immediately understood.
My interest in becoming a reiki practitioner did not arise until a few years later. The high of having landed a job mere weeks after receiving my bachelor’s degree in neurophysiology quickly faded when I learned that my duties included assisting in the neuropharmacological cat surgeries. Being pretty cat-ambivalent and knowing that the cats were fully anesthetized for the entire surgery did not absolve me of the guilt and heartache I felt at having to sacrifice the creatures, and I spent many a night sleeping fitfully or not at all. I couldn’t just quit or asked to be removed from the surgeries, knowing full well that they would occur with or without me, so I decided that the best thing I could do was to treat the cats with the compassion and care they deserved, and to make the entire experience as painless as possible for them. I contacted Mardis about reiki healing training, and soon was laying my hands on cats in the prep room and sleeping through the night.
The response from my fellow surgical assistant is typical of scientists and the scientific-minded.
“That sounds like a bunch of hooey to me,” she says half-jokingly. It’s hard to argue with her. Reiki healing lacks the scientific evidence base that is required for a treatment to be viewed as “legitimate” in the eyes of modern western medicine. Some of the most salient attractions of the practice, like its lack of invasiveness and sheer simplicity, also make it difficult to test with the “gold standard” of westernized medical effectiveness assessment, the randomized controlled trial.
As a child, I never questioned the effectiveness of reiki healing; my own positive experiences as a client combined with my belief in the absolute wisdom of my mother removed the question of validity completely. But as I find myself on the other side of the table, a grown reiki practitioner as well as a scientist both by training and by disposition, I have struggled to reconcile my scientific sensibilities with my firsthand knowledge of the efficacy of reiki healing. My heart begs my brain to just believe, to let my experience guide me, an especially tall order for an organ so well-versed in skepticism. Meanwhile, my brain wants my heart to be rational – a laughable request. And so I am stymied.
In an attempt to satisfy my cerebral demand for data, I dig around for scraps of evidence, some proof that reiki healing is not the new age, woo-woo practice that my brain snarkily believes it to be. I still have to actively resist the urge to roll my eyes at concepts like “life force energy” and “attunement” (a step of the training to become a reiki practitioner, attunements are adjustments made by the Reiki Master to a student which allows Reiki energy to flow through them), and begin to fear that this cognitive dissonance is hopelessly permanent. But as I wade into the scientific literature, I uncover several studies on the beneficial effects of reiki that show positive changes in measures ranging from heart rate and blood pressure to more psychological metrics like the Beck Depression Inventory and Perceived Stress Scale. So there is hope!
Alas, most of these studies come with massive asterisks attached: some have sample sizes that are too low. Some are not adequately blinded, meaning that researcher bias (conscious or unconscious) could have tainted the results. Some do not account for variables like experience of the reiki healing practitioner or frequency of the treatment.
Whether these issues come down to sloppy science or an inherent inability of reiki healing to be tested by our canonical scientific method is debatable; however, there is no arguing that these results cannot be accepted as reliable evidence of reiki healing’s benefits. Drat. So close.
As this civil war wages on and both sides grow weary, compromise seems increasingly appealing. In this instance, compromise would mean acknowledging that I am dealing with apples and oranges, two separate and ultimately incomparable entities. Similarly to how I can hold in my heart equal affection for two friends who do not get along with each other, so too can I accept two different therapeutic modalities that may not be compatible or comparable, but that are both equally valid and deserving of respect.
Perhaps most challenging for a scientist to accept is that reiki healing may never be explainable by scientific conventions, that some things are inherently unknowable – or at least unprovable. But neuroscience, like many branches of biology, is rife with concepts and phenomena that leave even the brightest minds in the field shaking their heads with bewilderment. It is a science that embodies the expression, “the more we learn, the less we know.” Like an episode of “Lost,” every answer inevitably leads to fifty new questions, so I am pretty accustomed to not having explanations for why things work the way they do. Still, it’s important to remind myself that sometimes just asking the questions can be as much fun as finding the answers, and sometimes even more.
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