Reiki School Day 18: How you impact others with Reiki

In the next days we will learn how to facilitate a session for others, I'd love for you to read this from the book The Subtle Body by Cyndi Dale (page 61 to 64 if you have a copy).

It is a chosen extract about energy channeling it with intentions from the heart, being tested by science:

Your energy fields interact with your patients’ fields. How you feel about yourself—what you hold near and dear in your heart-space—transfers into a client’s heart-space, and from there, into his or her body. (There is more information about heart-centered healing below.) As mind-body practitioner Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard puts it, “Our brains are wired for beliefs and expectancies. When activated, our body can respond as it would if the belief were a reality, producing deafness or thirst, health or illness.”

We know that what is believed can become because of two well-studied (but not completely understood) phenomena called the placebo and nocebo effects. The placebo effect occurs when administering a disguised but false drug or treatment. Subjects do not know they are receiving something medically ineffective. In fact, they are told it “will work.” Since 1955, researchers have been tracking the seemingly magical effect of the placebo, sometimes to their own dismay, as studies often reveal that not only do the placebos work, they sometimes work as well as (or better than) “real” medicine or treatments. For instance, many placebos have tested equal to children’s cough medicines during recent studies.

Studies also show that the placebo effect is not limited to drugs. It carries over into devices and physical techniques, such as the use of massage, naturopathic and chiropractic care, hydrotherapy, the use of heat and light, and more.

It also applies to healers and their effects on patients. As Michael Jospe, a professor at the California School of Professional Psychology states, “The placebo effect is part of the human potential to react positively to a healer.”

A healer’s attitude helps create patient outcomes. What can heal can also harm. Consider the reverse of the placebo effect: the nocebo effect, which can be phrased this way: if you believe that something bad is going to happen, it probably will. Researchers have discovered that women who believed they were prone to heart disease were four times more likely to develop heart problems than women who had the same risk factors but lacked the negative attitude.

One study determined that nearly 100 percent of the people undergoing surgery who wanted to die (usually to reconnect with a deceased loved one), did.

The placebo and nocebo effects reduce to empathy: the sharing of energy through energetic means. People empathize all the time, some better than others, as revealed in a study by Levenson and Gottman of the University of California at Berkeley. Researchers examined the physiological reactions in married couples when interacting empathetically and discovered that the heart rates of partners who excelled at empathizing mimicked each other. When one partner’s heart rate went up, so did the other’s, and vice versa.

These and other studies imply that an ethical and effective energy healer is a heart-centered energy healer.

THE HEART-CENTERED ENERGY HEALER

We intuitively know that the heart is the center of love and empathy, and studies are showing this to be true. In fact, empathy manifests in the electromagnetic field (EMF), which is generated by the heart in amounts greater than anywhere else in the body. The heart’s EMF emits fifty thousand femtoteslas (a measure of EMF), in contrast to the ten generated by the brain.

Other research shows that when separated from the magnetic field, the heart’s electrical field is sixty times greater in amplitude than the brain’s field.

Through this field, a person’s nervous system tunes in to and responds to the magnetic fields produced by the hearts of other people.

The heart’s field is therefore one of the means by which a practitioner affects patients. This effect leads to the question, What do you want to share? To generate positive outcomes for a patient, a practitioner must hold positive feelings in his or her own heart. Not only does good will profit the client, but it also benefits the practitioner as a person. A set of studies by researcher Dr. Rollin McCraty of the HeartMath Institute in California, and described in his e-book, The Energetic Heart, helps explain the importance of positive energy.

For decades, scientists have known that information is encoded in the nervous system in the time intervals between activities or in the pattern of electrical activity. Recent studies also reveal that information is captured in hormone pulses. Moreover, there is a hormone pulse that coincides with heart rhythms, which means that information is also shared in the interbeat intervals of the pressure and electromagnetic waves produced by the heart. Negative emotions such as anger, frustration, or anxiety disturb the heart rhythm. Positive emotions such as appreciation, love, or compassion produce coherent or functional patterns. Feelings, distributed throughout the body, produce chemical changes within the entire system. Do you want to be a healthy person? Be sincerely positive as often as you can. You thus “increase the probability of maintaining coherence and reducing stress, even during challenging situations.”

What you as a practitioner believe will be shared—everywhere and with everyone you meet.

Thank you for reading, see you tomorrow!