Reiki School Day 24: What Reiki does to your nervous system and heart

Today I want to show you how your energy state impacts the future session you would give to someone. It's important to know we are yes - channeling energy from another place that our own reserve of energy, something that yes, isn't specifically weak (as in less strong than) and would be affected by our auric field. YET. It's important to do you before you offer someone else your resources of time and attention. That's why I'm taking time in teaching you how to do you, consider you, self-heal repeatedly before turning your gaze to others.

Please enjoy reading this from Jill Blakeway's Energy Medicine showing what the practice of Reiki and tapping into different brain waves affect your well-being:

Resonance: what Reiki can do

“I was picking up different frequencies from the fields surrounding me. There are, in fact, fields that emanate from within us. Our brains and hearts, for example, each have their own measurable electromagnetic fields. Medical doctors track the vibrating field of the brain with an electroencephalogram, or EEG. Our brain cells also communicate using electrical impulses, which are always active, even when we sleep; these movements show up as the wavy lines on an EEG reading, a measurement of frequency.

The heart, however, projects the largest electromagnetic field in the body. This can be measured using an electrocardiogram, also called an ECG or EKG. The heart’s field is so impressive, in fact, that modern medical equipment can now measure its frequency from up to fifteen feet away.

Through their pulsating fields, these two organs—the heart and the brain—are always communicating. Medical doctors carefully track the energy fields of the heart and the brain individually, but pay less attention to the ways the two affect each other electromagnetically. There are, however, researchers—such as Dr. Gary Schwartz, a professor of psychiatry and medicine at the University of Arizona, and a group called the HeartMath Institute, founded by both scientists and energy healers—who have pioneered a movement to investigate this connection.

Schwartz and his colleagues Drs. Linda Russek and Linda Song—conducting experiments that simultaneously tracked the EEG and EKG readings of participants—found that when participants were asked to concentrate on their heartbeats there was not only an increased sensing of the heart signal in their brain waves generally but also a heightened registration of the P-wave, which is the first part of the heartbeat, when blood is pumped to the ventricles, and is difficult to feel physiologically.28 This offers evidence that, as Schwartz writes, “when we focus our attention on our hearts, our brains amplify the electrical fields coming from our hearts even during those moments—the P-wave periods—when sensations from the heart have yet to reach our brains.”

Stated another way, the brain has an implicit perception of the heart that bypasses the known communication pathways in the body. I wondered if this inherent communication between the brain and the heart held a clue as to the accommodations my body was making when energy flowed through me.

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear,” and I have found this to be true in my life. In this case, my teacher appeared in the form of a clinical and sports psychologist named Leah Lagos.* She reached out to me after I’d treated one of her patients, an actress who was struggling with stage fright. She told me she had seen a “measurable change” in her patient’s condition and invited me to come to her office to discuss my work. My curiosity was piqued. Among other things, I was interested to find out what exactly she was measuring, so we arranged a meeting.

Dr. Lagos is a specialist in heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback, which she uses to help patients improve cardiac health as well as to teach techniques for dealing with anxiety. A large number of her clients are professional athletes, CEOs, and actors—those who execute the emotional equivalent of a high-wire act every time they go out in front of an audience; they must be in control of their thoughts and emotions in order to do their jobs.

We tend to think of a healthy heartbeat as being regular, but in reality the heart varies the time between beats as it adapts to changing circumstances. Lagos identifies these variations, using an EKG machine, in order to document when a person is breathing at a rate that produces optimum heart rate variability:

“When you inhale, your heart rate goes up, and when you exhale, your heart rate goes down,” she says. “You want these oscillations to be as big as possible, but you also want them to be orderly. When you’re stressed, frustrated, upset, your heart rate becomes erratic. When you are relaxed, you have this beautiful, ocean-like wave. Since your heart is a muscle, this movement can be acquired.”

Her protocol, which allows her patients, as she puts it, “to gain the ability to control their physiology and psychology through their heart rhythms,” is a ten-week program—which includes meeting in her office once a week and doing breathing exercises twice a day. Lagos believes that the heart is at the center of emotional control and has been overlooked by an insistent focus on the brain. (She also envisions a future in which people will see their psychophysiologists weekly instead of their psychotherapists.)”

“Ultimately, Lagos aims to alter the body’s autonomic nervous system response to stress. The autonomic nervous system has two primary reactions: sympathetic and parasympathetic. When you’re scurrying across a busy intersection and the light changes, setting a number of cars in motion, the body goes into fight-or-flight mode, which is also known as the sympathetic response. This is a valuable response: it amps you up and urges you to sprint to the sidewalk before the cars reach you. But once you’ve reached the sidewalk, if you don’t have a strong parasympathetic response to bring you back into balance, you remain in that survival state for longer than is necessary. For those who are chronically stressed, this can last for hours and sometimes even days. Lagos’s regimen helps her patients to bolster the parasympathetic response—encouraging more heart rate variability and a lower heart rate—in order to interrupt the sympathetic reaction sooner.”“Think of a tennis player getting ready for the US Open: they’re not thinking about which muscles to exercise—that’s what muscle memory is, and it’s the same thing with the heart,” Lagos explains. “Enough repetitions at a specific frequency, the heart embraces the pattern and functionally kicks into it on its own at stressful moments. It changes your reactivity and response to stress.”

Lagos studies her patients’ heart frequencies by measuring electrical activity of the heart with an EKG as they breathe at a specific pace.”

“When breathing rate and heart rate coincide, maximizing heart rate oscillations, a patient has reached what she considers an ideal state: they are in resonance. “When you are breathing at your resonant frequency, you’re strengthening the parasympathetic influence to come in and break that fight-or-flight tendency,” says Lagos, “and bring you back to homeostasis.”

During resonance, the rhythms of the heart create calming signals that reverberate throughout the entire autonomic nervous system.”

“Resonance is an important concept in physics too. Defined broadly, it is when one object vibrates at the same natural frequency of a second object, thereby increasing the amplitude and forcing the second object into vibrational motion. It is the reason the wineglass shatters when the opera singer hits an extraordinarily high note. (The word “resonance” comes from the Latin term meaning “echo” or “resound.”) When the singer’s voice reaches a certain earsplitting pitch—one that

“matches the resonant frequency of the glass—the resulting vibration breaks it. In Lagos’s office, however, coming into a state of resonance is the opposite of shattering: it is in fact when a person is operating at the height of her powers.

When Lagos had seen the actress, our mutual patient, after I had given her an acupuncture treatment with energy work, she’d noticed that she’d gone into resonance much more easily than before, as measured by her biofeedback instruments. She wanted to know what I had done that had made a difference. I explained to her what acupuncture points I’d treated and also acknowledged that I’d been feeling an energy come through me for some time while practicing acupuncture. We decided to hook me up to the biofeedback equipment to see if we might glean any information. When Lagos attached the EKG nodes, I instinctively went into the state I enter when I am healing—and, within fifteen seconds, I was in resonance. Apparently, I’d naturally, and blindly, stumbled into training myself to do this as I practiced acupuncture. Lagos theorized that I’d come to this naturally because my increased heart rate variability offered me a greater flexibility “to open to and transfer energy to my patients.”

Excerpt From: Dr. Jill Blakeway - “Energy Medicine”