Keep touching or you’ll lose the ‘connection’?
In some lineages, students are taught that they always need to keep at least one hand resting on the body at all times because, if they do not, they will ‘lose their connection’ with the client, and then have to go through a ritual again in order to regain that lost connection.
But is this really necessary?
Do we have to have to touch the body every second, like a sort of Reiki tag-team, for fear of disconnecting, and is the Reiki ‘connection’ so fragile?
What’s the difference between hands-on and hands-off?
I believe that there is no difference between a Reiki treatment carried out when hands are resting on the body, and treatments where hands hover over the body.
Reiki is generally carried out as a ‘hands-on’ therapy and I think that this is a good idea: there is something very special and healing about human touch, with or without the addition of Reiki, and that closeness or connection that comes through making physical contact with another person is an important part of the Reiki experience.
Of course there are times – and hand positions – where it is better for the sake of propriety and respect to keep your hands off the body, particularly when working intuitively, when hands can end up wanting to go goodness-knows-where, and it’s not always wise to always put your hands down where they want to come to rest!
Basically Reiki is a hands-on practice
Viewing Reiki as a hands-on practice, though, does not mean that we have to keep our hands on the body at all times. We can mix-and-match, resting on the body sometimes and hovering over the body at other times during the course of a treatment, and we can do both at the same time: resting one hand on the body while allowing the other hand to hover.
If we are always keeping a hand on the body for fear of losing our ‘connection’, I wonder what we think that connection is all about.
Distant healing is a standard part of Reiki practice, where you can send the energy to the other side of the planet if we like, just by focusing our attention on the recipient. If we can do that then why would we believe that, at the same time, we can’t send Reiki to a person on a treatment couch in front of us – just inches away from us – unless we’ve made physical contact with them?
It makes no sense at all. 1,000 miles away and sending Reiki’s no problem… six inches away and we lose our connection if we’re not touching the body.
How can that be?
How are we connected?
So what is our Reiki ‘connection’ to the recipient?
I believe our ‘connection’ to them is based on our state of mind: by focusing our attention on the recipient we connect to them.
If we think about the Buddhist origins of Reiki and the concept of oneness, there is no ‘us’ and there is no ‘them’ anyway: this is illusion! We are already ‘connected’ to them because in reality we were never separated from them.
We are them.
So, in practice, by being with a client in the same room for the purposes of giving and receiving Reiki, we merge with them, we begin to become one with them. It is our intention that underlies our connection and the energy flows to where our attention is directed, whether our hands are on the body or not.
Over to you
Were you taught that you need to have at least one hand on your client at all times for fear of losing your connection? If so, what has happened in practice? Have you experimented with both-hands-on, one-hand-on and no-hands on?
What feedback have you received from clients where you didn’t follow the rules that you were given?
And what do you think about your ‘connection’ to your client? Do you think it depends on physical contact with them?
Post a message below to let me know what you think.
Here’s lots of advice about giving treatments
If you’d like some guidance about giving Reiki treatments, I have a whole load of advice and suggestions for you in the Reiki Evolution First Degree course manual.
This isn’t just available to Reiki Evolution students: anyone can work with our manuals.
You can order a professionally-printed copy, or you can download your manual right now.
Here are the links that you need:
Author: Taggart King
Hannah Shine is one of Taggart’s Reiki Evolution team of teachers, based in Essex/Hertfordshire. She is also a multi therapist, practising from her home at Hatfield Heath. Her Reiki courses are run from her beautiful summer house in her relaxing garden. Her therapies include homoeopathy, reflexology, Bowen technique, head massage, body massage, kinesiology, EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), Quantum Touch and many others. She runs monthly Reiki shares at her home. She has qualified as a Cognitive Hypnotherapist at the Quest Institute in London.
