It was 3:20pm on a Friday afternoon in New Jersey, and I was trying to shift my energy field to a stranger in California. At least that’s how Francis Naudet, founder of Four Nobles Holistic Healing, explained long-distance Reiki to me the night before my session. Sitting in his Laguna Beach home, Naude first unrolls some crystals, then plans to run his hands over the formations, as if they were shrunken, shiny versions of my body. That’s what he said.
“It makes no sense to our brains at all, but it’s amazing how Reiki works so effectively across time and space,” Naude told me, and I nodded with some skepticism. Let’s take a look.
Before I met Naude, I thought Reiki was a type of new age massage. As I learned, Reiki, a type of energy healing developed in Japan in the early 20th century, involves very little physical contact. “Reiki is a high vibrational energy that travels through the practitioner, and the practitioner must be trained and attuned to that energy. As that energy travels from the universe through the practitioner to the recipient, it moves through the person’s body. is optimally prepared for natural healing,”’ says Naude.
Naude practicing Reiki face-to-face.
Naude says the goal is to jump-start the healing process. Naude explains that during a Reiki session, the “physical vibrations” in a person’s body heat up or slow down, depending on how the practitioner moves the energy. In doing so, Reiki supposedly moves the body from a “fight or flight” state to a “rest and recovery” mode, Naude says, preparing the body to continually heal itself.
Although there is no scientific evidence that Reiki actually leads to healing, Naude’s clients use Reiki for a variety of ailments, including physical problems such as insomnia, indigestion, and headaches, as well as mental blocks. I am. “If they don’t specify anything, I let their body speak and tell me how it wants to adjust,” she says.
Reiki practitioners typically move their hands 1 to 3 inches above the client’s body and focus on balancing the seven major chakras, each said to govern a different area. “Our chakras are energy centers, and when they are out of alignment, we can feel confused, stagnant, and unmotivated,” Naude says. “We feel like we can’t take the next step. Reiki helps align those chakras and ground us. ‘I don’t know what the next step is, I don’t know how to move. It’s like, ‘I’m doing it.’
According to Naude, it is entirely possible to experience the beneficial effects of Reiki without it Being in the same physical space as the practitioner. Ms. Naude had always offered remote Reiki, but she switched to offering it. exclusive Distance Reiki due to the pandemic. Now, she says she may never go back to in-person sessions because of the results, and what she claims are even better. “The person is very relaxed and open to acceptance,” Naude says.
But believing in long-distance Reiki means making a logical leap from traditional thinking, which can be difficult, especially for first-timers and skeptics. As a quick side note, Naude destroyed the mechanics of long distance Reiki. “The way we experience space and time is not how space and time exist. We live within a linear timeline. We transcend time and space with Reiki. . It’s energy,” she said. The metaphors she often uses are about love. She said, “You can love someone across the ocean. Even if you’re not right in front of them, you can feel their energy.”
If I had thought about Naude’s explanation too much and thought it too hard, I would have been stuck on a mental blackboard writing out all the facts I know about space and time. Instead, I followed the advice Naude gives to doubters: 9 times out of 10 you will learn something. ”
So I did.
Prior to the session, I identified the issues I wanted Naude to address: anxiety and lack of motivation, exacerbated by a year of isolation. I didn’t expect this session to solve my seemingly eternal problems, but… Also Someone who doesn’t turn down potential options.
To prepare for the session, Naude encouraged me to find a quiet, comfortable place to sink in for 30 minutes. That Friday, I told my family that I was going on an astral retreat and would appreciate it if they could turn down the volume for about 30 minutes. I lay down on the bed and put my head on the pillow. My room was in full spa mode. I infused a citrus-scented oil with a diffuser and applied a silk sleep mask to my eyes. I pressed play on Naude’s 30-minute song on her YouTube called “Deep Healing Music for The Body & Soul” and waited for deep healing to begin.
And for a while there was nothing. There were none of the tingling, spasms, sudden memories, hallucinations, tears, heat, cold, or heightened emotions that Naude told me to expect. I felt nothing but relaxed, but considering my hectic schedule, it was still a welcome feeling.
So I was surprised when something started happening to my right leg. My right foot suddenly felt definitely hot. When the sensation in my legs subsided, I waited for the next recurrence. Next was my stomach. It was rocking, but it felt more like falling in love than seasickness. I imagined a flow of soda under my skin, fizzing but soothing. Certain areas such as hands and feet were also comfortably warm.
Along with the sensations came doubts.Was I feeling this or imagine Are you feeling this? Naude says Reiki’s critics attribute the practice’s claimed benefits to the placebo effect, or imagining something to be true. But in the spirit of growth, I surrendered to that feeling. As I did so, memories and dream-like images came up and replaced the intrusive thoughts.
Crystals used in my Reiki session
Use: protection and purification
Purpose: Grounding and cleansing
Target: Awakening of past lives
Purpose: Progress and motivation
Purpose: Connect with your spiritual team
Use: Magnify the effects of other crystals
When a YouTube song abruptly ended with a bank ad, I sat up and snapped out of a meditative state faster than you could say. what just happened? did anything happen?
30 minutes later I received an email from Naude containing a 40 minute audio recording of the session, along with a photo of the crystal placement and the 4 oracle cards she drew for me from the Work Your Light Oracle deck. . . Mr. Naude spoke through a 30-minute Reiki session. While lying in her bed, she listened to what she was doing and wondered if that feeling of her was real.
At the beginning of the audio recording, Ms. Naude, in a calming voice, identified specific healing crystals that were “calling” for my reading, such as blue kyanite, which facilitates communication, and aventurine, which helps me jump into my next adventure. Did. . As she placed the crystals into a loose body shape, she heard them clink. Then she is ready to start the session. “Before you “lock in” my energy, she said, “I connect completely across time and space.”
Listening to this recording, it was like looking through a mirror and realizing that there was a world adjacent to our own. Unlike other Reiki practitioners, Naude incorporates channeling during his sessions, calling himself a “conduit” to the spiritual realm. During the recording, she delivered messages and decoded images that presumably came from my “spiritual team,” the disembodied beings who were supposedly watching over me (and, for that matter, probably you). (According to her, we all have our own teams.) My spirit guides told me that I needed to moderate my sarcasm and inject “gentle kindness” into my inner dialogue.
Crystal placement and cards drawn by Naude.
While doing so While certainly general advice, there were some revelations that were breathtaking in their specificity. As the Reiki session begins, Naude immediately She corrected me in the pronunciation of my name, which I often mispronounce, and later told me that my “team” had coached her. Inexplicably, Mr. Naude also specific The person on the “other side” I’ve been thinking about (chills).
Naude said she purified my seven chakras while thoroughly interpreting messages and images from my spirit guides, including a whale’s tail, a sphinx, a flying bumblebee, and a rose garden. She particularly focused on “resetting” the throat chakra, which controls communication. “She’s creating space to listen to her intuition more,” she said. Overall, the theme of the recording was to calm my inner “throbbing”, which she called anxiety and anxiety, and to prepare for the coming period of change (which is, after all, my Saturn Return). .
Naude said you will leave the session with your chakras open and more balanced.But I thought the real test of distance Reiki was what happened rear session. In the end, I got through the weekend on a wave of positivity and motivation. I completed a task I had been avoiding for weeks. I started a new passion project that came directly from my intuition. I didn’t feel the usual Sunday dread. But the real change wasn’t what I did, it was how I felt. The idea of doing nothing was refreshing, relaxing, and comforting. However, the change was so subtle that it took several days for me to associate my new mood with my Reiki session.
I can’t say for sure whether remote Reiki was the reason for my more cheerful weekend than usual, but I suspect it was. After the session, I took for granted that I could smoothly open Naude’s email and instantly send photos and recordings across the country. But the concept of email is one that probably would have shocked my ancestors. In fact, the people who buy stamps and send cards may have completely ignored the possibilities of the Internet.
Is receiving long-distance Reiki energy that different from receiving an email? Maybe not. Perhaps in a few centuries we’ll understand the science behind it. For now, I’ll enjoy the good atmosphere.
Elena Nicolaou is a former culture editor at Oprah Daily.
