They Don’t Want Healing.
Now What?

For many people, learning to heal with Reiki is a revelation. You get attuned and voila! You have the power to both charge your body with life-giving chi, and use this energy to help others.

This is particularly exciting when you have friends or loved ones who need healing. For now you can do more than just offer them consoling words. Now, you can do something to help. Now, you can positively impact them physically, emotionally and mentally.

In such cases, it can be hard to restrain yourself from seizing them by the arm, ushering them to the massage table, and getting straight to work. For with their need and your skill, how could the world be in anything but perfect alignment?

Except...when they don’t want your healing!

To the logical mind, refusing healing seldom makes sense. They are suffering. What they have been doing to fix their issues hasn’t worked, and you have a potential cure.

So why not at least give things a try? At worst, Reiki does diddly-squat and nothing has changed. So what to lose?

It can be hard not to insist on giving them healing in such cases, especially if the person is someone you live with. After all, if they are depressed or suffering from health issues, that tends to affect you. And if it is someone you love, it can hurt to see them suffer.

Unfortunately, if you do insist, and through strength of will ‘force’ them to have a healing session, it is rarely an uplifting experience. They generally won’t be fully ‘present’ for the session. They probably won’t be as receptive, and something about the entire experience will tend to feel a little off.

Of course, even knowing this, letting go of your desire to heal them can be tough, and it used to drive me bonkers when people I cared about didn’t want healing. It just seemed so irrational!

Ultimately, I’ve come kicking and screaming to the realization that just as you need to let go of control during a Reiki healing session, you also need to let go of control of who it heals.

Your job is just to do your best when the ‘stars align’ and someone genuinely wants your help.

Interestingly, resistance to being healed shows up in many forms. For instance, sometimes people will accept distance healing so long as they don’t need to sit or lie still for the session. Yes, you can send healing energy their way, but only so long as they don’t have to interrupt their everyday life!

Sometimes, we want to give someone healing so badly we accept this arrangement, but if you think about it, this doesn’t generally make much sense. If they don’t want to be healed enough to take 40-60 minutes out of their day to sit still in a quiet place, then healing clearly isn’t a major priority for them!

So my general rule of thumb for healing sessions is to only give them to someone who really wants them (and genuinely wants to get something out of them) – something that applies to both regular and distance sessions.

The Need Not to Judge

Before we judge people for not wanting to receive healing when – at least from our perspective – they clearly need it, we should remember that we can never know what someone’s ‘life journey’ is.

Maybe they actually need to hit rock bottom so they can have an epiphany that will radically change the trajectory of their life. Maybe if we heal them too soon, they will never have this epiphany!

Think of cancer survivors. How often do they say (admittedly after recovering) how getting cancer was the best thing that ever happened to them?

They don’t typically say it was enjoyable, but they do recognize that they got a lot out of it.

The gifts came from the challenges, and without the challenges, they wouldn’t have had the same incentive to grow and change.

Lead by Example

The best course for dealing with people who resist your healing is simply to be a living example of all the good that healing work can do.

If you learn to be patient, you’ll often be surprised how, bit by bit, those around you become more open to Reiki and the like.

Over the years, I’ve seen countless cases of partners (of my students) gradually changing their minds about Reiki. Initially, they don’t want to have anything to with it. Sometimes they are vehemently against it. But then, over time, they ultimately develop an appreciation both for it and their partner’s skill in using it!

They go from healing hostility to pride in the healing work their loved one does.

They see the positive changes healing work has made to their partner, and after that, usually even get curious to see what it can do for them.

Then, after they get a taste for it, they are typically eager to receive regular healing. It was simply a question of waiting until the time was right – for them!

Whatever they decide, however, practice letting go.

It isn’t always easy (even for me), but you feel better when you do so.

You let go of the inner strain.

You relax.

And you free up time and energy to help the people who really want healing.