What You Need to Know About Healing

It's easy to get frustrated when healing takes longer than we'd like.

It's easy to worry that it’s never going to happen.

But as the saying goes, ‘The Universe's delays aren't necessarily the Universe's denials.’

And if we can understand the mechanics of healing, it will help us to stay positive and serene while we wait for things to shift.

Because often, our fundamental problem is one of expectation.

We typically want instant results after an attunement, a healing course, or a healing session.

Or at the very least, we want a sign that things are on the improve.

And this is a natural enough given that we probably entered the world of healing precisely to work on a specific issue.

But while acute issues can often be fixed relatively quickly, chronic ones do tend to take longer.

Often, we've had them for years.

Often, we’ve spent years creating the necessary inner energetic landscape for them to flourish.

So it can be unrealistic to expect everything to just resolve overnight.

I'm not saying that's impossible, simply that it is less common than incremental healing.

What's more, when we’re impatient, we tend to focus on the issue.

Since what you focus on grows, this typically reinforces the very thing we're trying to get rid of.

Just as bad, focusing on the end result always tends to emphasize where we are.

And if where we are isn't where we want to be, that creates mental suffering and stress.

We feel only too acutely the gap between where we are and where we want to be.

That not only hurts, it also tends to negatively impact the balanced state we want for healing.

The Timeline of Energy Versus the Timeline of Ego

The ego quite reasonably wants the pain or issue to be gone now.

It wants resolution. It wants clarity.

But healing works according to its own logic and schedule, and often that is at odds with the logic and schedule of our rational mind.

It's like with Reiki healing. A tennis-loving client might come to see you because he has a tennis elbow and desperately wants it fixed.

Tennis is the great love of his life. It's what he thinks about when he first wakes up in the morning. It’s what he thinks about as he lies down in bed at night.

So if there's one thing he wants in life, it's to fix his tennis elbow so he can get back to playing.

But the Reiki energy might see things differently. Maybe for it, the priority is to heal the heartbreak from an old relationship. So it sets to work on this and ignores the tennis elbow.

This can be frustrating when all you want to do is play tennis. But it is ultimately for your highest good.

And this leads us to consider things from a deeper, more philosophical perspective.

For on a higher level, why are we suffering from this issue?

Ultimately, I believe it is because we can learn something from it.

And if we haven't yet learned the lesson, then it might be counterproductive (on a higher level) to heal immediately.

If that happens, we might miss out on the lesson altogether and have simply suffered for nothing!

So in a weird way, healing might not be in our best interests.

At least healing right away.

Sometimes we need more time to better process what's going on and to more deeply learn the right lessons.

Then, when we emerge from the issue, when we've healed from it, we're not just going back to Ground Zero. We're going back to Ground Zero +.

We're going back to a superior version of ourselves.

A version of ourselves that is ‘same same but different’.

A version that is older and wiser.

The Need for Patience

Often, we are healing, it's just that the healing is taking place beneath the surface.

It's like the proverbial bamboo roots.

Maybe they're spreading out and out and out, and it looks like nothing's happening, but actually all the groundwork is being laid for rapid and dramatic growth.

Or maybe it just takes a while to shift our current momentum.

Maybe it will only be once this happens that we can make more visible progress.

This is something that happened to me at the start of my Reiki journey.

My eyesight was dodgy, and I needed to wear glasses to drive legally, watch a film, watch the footy, and do all sorts of other things.

So the moment after learning Reiki, I went bonkers giving Reiki to my eyes.

I was determined to fix them ASAP, and I was confident Reiki would do the job.

But after a week of giving my eyes Reiki for at least an hour a day, I didn't notice any change.

This was dispiriting, and I gave up trying to fix them.

But I didn't stop giving myself Reiki. I just stopped focusing on my eyes.

So, for every day afterwards, I gave myself at least an hour of Reiki.

And after that, an interesting thing happened. Bit by bit, my eyesight began to improve.

Eventually, over the course of a year, it improved to the point that I regained 20/20 vision and was able to get my license reissued without any restrictions.

So it was an example of my eyes healing on their own timeline.

It was also an example of how things often heal when we take the pressure off.

When we stop straining for a result and simply let it happen on its own timeline.

And remember: just because you don't feel anything doesn't mean nothing is happening.

If you have a headache and take a Panadol, it will typically take at least 20 minutes for the pain to ease.

Your body takes time to process the medication.

It's not instantaneous.

And healing can be similar.

For instance, we get a Reiki healing session or we give ourselves some Reiki, and we want immediate results. But often we need to give the Reiki energy time to rebalance, realign, and heal our body.

I see this regularly enough after the first day of my Reiki courses.

Students typically feel a lot on this first day, but often it's only later that night that they realize just how much the Reiki energy is working on them.

That's when the energy really hits them.

And often it's like this with Reiki clients.

Sometimes they come to you full of stress.

Sometimes there is a whole host of imbalances.

Sometimes there are lots of things desensitizing their body.

So at first, they might not feel the Reiki energy so strongly.

I remember a guy who came to me after just retiring from 30 years of corporate work.

He had a vast buildup of stress in his system and didn't feel much during the first session.

But the following day, he did wake up feeling calmer and more serene than usual, so he booked in another session.

He felt a little more in this one and booked a third appointment.

And it was during that third session that he had his ‘wow’ experience.

It was then that he felt the full force of Reiki.

So sometimes it can be as if there's a layer of mud covering the body – mud that needs to be cleared away before the Reiki ‘sunshine’ can flow unimpeded into the body and be fully felt.

The takeaway from this is that just because you can't feel anything going on doesn't mean that nothing is happening.

Sometimes the healing energy is paving the way for a grander experience.

The key, therefore, is to be patient.

If you (or someone else) is working on you, there will be a transfer or flow of energy.

And this energy will be doing something.

It’s just that it isn't always immediately obvious what it's doing.

What's more, sometimes healing isn't taking place on a physical level.

If this is the case, you might not feel it as physically.

But that doesn't mean nothing's happening.

It just means that you might need to wait before you realize shifts have taken place.

These might be emotional, or they might be psychological.

They might even be (and I know I'm using a big word) ‘spiritual’.

But even though they aren't physical, they can still be shifts that make a tangible difference to the quality of your life.

They are shifts that will have a concrete impact.

It's just that during the healing session, you might not feel this impact physically.

Of course, almost always, you will feel some energy or something physical, but just how much you feel will vary according to what the healing energy is working on.

And sometimes we don't notice the shifts right away.

Sometimes it's only after a couple of months that we realize that we're feeling different, that we're acting differently.

We can deduce that shifts have taken place, but they happened in the background, unconsciously, out of sight.

Ultimately, to be able to verify whether a healing method is working, we do need some sort of concrete evidence. But we have to understand that this evidence isn't exclusively found in immediate physical sensations.

It can show up in many forms, and sometimes we need time to fully appreciate just how much has changed.

So, the best approach to healing ourselves and others is almost always to be patient.

Trust in the process. Trust in the healing energy. Trust that things will be healed at the right time.

And if we can step back, relax, and cease trying to control things, then we can enjoy the process.

We can enjoy the healing energy.

We can enjoy growing more balanced.

And if and when it's meant to be, we can also enjoy healing our issue without any stress.

(Article by Om Reiki Founder, Jeremy O'Carroll)

January 3-4 Daylesford Reiki Retreat

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To find out what you'll learn and why the retreat will be the perfect start to your year, visit the Reiki retreat homepage.