Lively Dog Blog

I give a discount for dog/owner Reiki sessions, and some of my dog owners decided to team up and get Reiki for themselves and their dogs all in one night. I’d never given Reiki for hours straight, but figured it was worth a try as long as I could take a break for food now and again. Reiki isn’t supposed to drain you, since the energy you give is not from your personal store of energy, but I thought that just keeping mental focus for that long might be tiring. There were three dogs and four people, and we stopped for a nice dinner, so the whole night took about five hours.

I alternated humans and dogs to take it easy on my back. Even with my table set to the proper height, standing for an hour can be tough. Rolling around on the floor with pups is hard on the back in a different way, but the alternating helped. In case anyone is considering trying this, my energy level was fine at the end, but my hips were very sore the next few days. In massage school they taught us to mind our body mechanics and not strain ourselves helping the client. This is easier said than done, especially with dogs. When you finally get the dog settled and allowing you to do what your need to do, you’d to anything to avoid causing the dog to stand up. It’s tempting to just lean over a little farther in your current position than move and unsettle the dog.

I did find that after five hours of Reiki I was pretty electrified. I kept shaking my arms because they were very tingly. I also had trouble quieting myself for sleep, the opposite of being mentally drained.

I loved the pups, of course, but the people were also very interesting. One man was a bit of a skeptic but was willing to try. I do hands-on Reiki whenever possible, but when I did the position where I hold my hands over his eyes, I tried not to touch him. I thought that if I were in his position and thought the whole thing was a little weird, I wouldn’t want some strange lady to put her hands on my face. So, I only touched him if my hands shook. He said it was like having his face “massaged by clouds.” I thought that was very poetic.

Another client gave me my first experience with a healing reaction (sometimes called “crisis”). I always explain to my new clients that sometimes the condition I’m treating will get worse before it gets better as the body heals itself, and not to be overly alarmed. On the party night her foot was in pain and felt a little better after her first treatment. After I checked up with her this week, she said that it had in fact gotten much worse before getting much better. A feel a little bad contributing to someone’s pain, even in the service of healing, but she was fine with it since she knew it might be coming.

When I was attuned, the concept of learning more about Reiki on my own seemed a little strange. After all, an attunement is essentially something that is “done to” you, after which you can suddenly do this wonderful thing, with very little formal training. And being a scientist, I am used to formal training. I’m used to knowing why things work and how they look underneath. But the longer I do Reiki, the more nuances I pick up, the more confident I become in my skills, without anyone teaching me. All I have to do is pay very close attention to my senses. Which, I suppose, was part of my formal science training, though it feels very, very different.

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