Her Ghosts

Should we sacrifice our ethics for a chance at better health? I’ve been devoutly religious since 2023 but chose to try Reiki despite its risks.

Reiki feels like the safest, celebrity-approved method for paying for the forced introduction to the divine, and the client’s innocence (aim: a clear bill of emotional health; chronic disease maintenance) seems to serve well enough as husk/saber with regard to the practice’s inflammatory background. It’s hidden, or maybe not quite that. Takes a few idle minutes of sand-scratching to surface its multiplex of avenues side-dooring Christianity’s firm policies around health and asking for help. Christianity’s sanctioned patrons which worshippers have prior permissions to pray to for intervention are obviously and already well-known — namely, they have identities and historical monickers, resting their extended Earthly existence primarily on God’s joyful permissions towards stewardship of mankind. Entities walking amongst us and it’s pre-approved tourism… when the rules are maintained, we all have reason to rejoice. The New Age and its burnt blue radiative contrast burns a slim hole announcing upheaval through Reiki’s non-discriminatory literature on (as I placed emphasis earlier) asking for help. This admittedly makes it attractive and I found my current discombobulation-of-crisis self admiring its jumbled instructions (read: a Reiki practitioner’s relationship with their practice ultimately informs their usage of non-corporeal instruments for cases) with concern to Reiki’s upcycled, anthropocentric and curious smoothie of religious doctrines. Reiki justifies any mention of mindfulness through earnest observances of the universe’s impartiality, its welcoming hug, the interconnectedness of faiths made mobile with something opaque like acceptance. And I’lI vouch for my healer’s frankness on this note, and the deep and obvious care with which they observe client and special psychic / fleshly need. It’s obvious when truth takes some stature in a room occupied by two strangers, obvious, still, when a patient notices their practitioner’s own sufferance towards the unbodied third in the room. I’ve left this source unmentioned on purpose out of the basest of fears.

Reiki’s versatile treatment of dogmas and respective distancing from anything too intimately divergent with medicine was what attracted me to scheduling. My first appointment. I had no advance knowledge of sources of power, only knew I’d seen it listed next to fancy massage therapies on website menus and that Jax — red-faced and hulking and handsome with karmic troubles — sought it out, televised, and seemed to find some spiritual mercy in its practice. I was further convinced that a practice lacking tools couldn’t hurt, after all, certain that my reasoning for trying it stemmed from something good enough like innocence. Results varied, and Reiki’s adjacent healing procedures, searchable online, and for this essay’s purposes, its growth on ever-prescient Reddit, is what I’ll clumsily focus on for the rest of this essay. 

While I take pains assuming the best intentions for these clients by assigning them my own simple reasoning for trying it, I’d be careless not to mention a further third: spiritual inquiry. There’s some convincing affiliation with demonology, which is something I won’t mention further in this account for the sake of preserving my small audience’s beliefs that I’m a practicing Christian, having re-found my faith in 2023 after two devastations. Reiki’s receiver places calls to the outside, and firmly admits to the gentle eschewing of our more accepted and celebrated earthbound entities. Reiki’s wide net of generous belief negates need for prayer, and replaces ritual with the simple act of opening our hearts.

Regarding Reiki — and other practices concealed in the iffy, decentered lighting of non-medical / non-invasive curalology — I’d like to place a flawed hypothesis forward for review involving shopping methodology… What’s been around longest and still shelved near storefront? What’s added estimatable value to lives (documented, one quick Google later…) for centuries? What hasn’t killed a client? What marries medicine with faith? What affordable therapies are available to the common customer lacking direction and connections? Reiki. For the extenuating circumstances of poor current health, and the misdirection of my weeks-long rage at feeling duped by my own ignorance, I’d like to offer forth a simple definition… Reiki, the stressy, millennial street-drug and fast-tracked learning course towards something unexpected, something not entirely safe for full explanation, a religious exercise in which client / practicer / patient examines intimately the precious yoking of soul and limbic system.

I’ll have to summon a stern stomach for marketable research with a metaphysical bent in order to define my own relationship with practice. I feel it also valuable to note that my research has been limited to personal accounts, brief articles I found severely lacking in: 1. depth regarding post-treatment, 2. extended side effects, and 3. factual reportage taken from practitioners themselves. We’re owed interviews from others, at best.

I rely on common sense to make meaning around the nontransitive outlook the healing industry relies upon for comprehension and want to ask advance forgiveness for my math monster below.

healers ≠ MDs, while MDs = healers, until healing ~ preventative care.

I. Let’s start from the middle.

I signed the spiritual contract and laid down on the massage bed. My healer began with my feet and ended with my head. Let’s skip forwards to smalltalk, I’ll report on symptoms at a later date. Must convince you of a few items before you’ve earned that kind of trust.

II. Let’s start from the bed-corner, off-topic from narrative.

The would-be self-healer is placed through rounds of intramural activity “designed” towards Enlightenment, a concept the Buddhists fear and Americans equate with high-brow memeology —something bought or maybe Venmoed — a concept that’s gotten dirty with overuse and the youthful mistake of equating Transcendence with particularly sad ukulele high notes. The warbling effects of assuming we’re spiritually aware enough to announce it on social media acts as informal litigation for our arrangement of lifestyle-promoting internet ads that we’ve bookmarked and charged crystals against in hopes of answering our own lonely call-and-echo for sedation. Vibration, “vibes”, what we’re actually referencing are childhood emotional states we’re told by the self-styled coaches on IG reels we’ve lost access to. They’re requirement for the happiness we’re mistaking for detachment. Monks do it, why can’t she? we ask hopefully, already sharpening our emoji chain game for greater impact in the group chat that revolves around the disaster of unregulated self-help procedures: inspo and ‘Great Man’ quotes and viral recipes in hopes of conquering our diet of mind and body so thoroughly were remade into entirely new matter.

Look, she glows by way of thorough starvation, and this concept of self-doing / undoing is attractive packaging for the addict or anorexic in us.

Reiki’s presence on Reddit remarks on culture’s attitudes surrounding alternative healing practices and how younger generations (I include millennials and Gen Z’s in this dialogue, specifically) devote singular consideration to the sacrosanct values of 21st century healing. Our money’s invested in methods inferencing a wider, and at times, metaphysical knowledge of bodily procedure, and on paper and online this serves as good-enough verbal contract for the expungement of indeterminate illness. For reference, I mean, here, the brain / body disconnect, a force that’s engaged generations of our blood ancestry, shaped spinal cords and deftly arranged the precious entanglement of cellular divide, happening for so long we’re one another’s primal glue, desperate inversions of those we never met but match actions with against the biographical mirror of gene distribution. Disorder’s injustice is simple: something strewn, an unevenly laid rationing of odd bends and misfirings ignored by nature’s sharp trust in assimilation at all costs; maybe she’s too proud to admit defeat even in the most abominable cases of disease. 

Unlike standard prescriptions, say, a round of anti-virals, in Reiki, the acceptance of its medicine is entirely optional, and for the large majority, unregulated. From my research and reading, healers vary in their coaching approaches. With mine, there was very little at all.

III. Let’s start from my justification.

I was the one to seek out that second appointment on Saturday the 13th, and the lack of follow-through and post-appointment support felt dangerous, like a flirt, one of those exceptional instances when lack of surveillance breeds the compulsion for further mercy killings of previous selves, representatives of decades when my previous abuses towards the body were met with healthful mirror flush, average vitals, the unchecked, bratty surprise of someone used to getting away with things.

IV. Let’s start from a little background retrieval I hate bringing up.

My barely-there-above-average intelligence reveals itself through the previous anecdotes I’ve stopped mentioning, the series of years I gained close to 70 lbs. from untreated Hypothyroidism and the easy eating of depression via the dumb, blue void of afternoon sky and solitude, gestures towards an independence born through resistance, the stupid hope of approaching a state of consciousness that threw away the need for the closer entirely. Not needing people felt like I’d sprung the final trap towards social freedom, and stopping that need required a readjustment of expectation.

Photos of myself are mostly wiped from the internet now and gathering speed towards five and eight years back, and I’ll happen on one occasionally and suck my teeth in pain. I am unrecognizable due to poorer health and trauma response and a few years of painful coaching towards the necessary exorcism of that unsteady persona.

V. Let’s start towards the beginning again towards this end.

I found myself desperate to find the reason for the rash and fatigue. One session and some research had me delighting in the flexible and highly negotiable chronology of its sessions: take one or several, minimal background information needed to get started besides reason for visit, and, are you wearing any watches?

My healer claimed she broke them.

Procedures: benign, barely touched; dark room and uncertain scent; a few questions whose invasiveness wound gently elements of talk therapy and my own guru’s personal anecdotes. The questions came oddly. Manipulated air. I liked being touched without knowing it. My healer spoke of curing blood and uncovering the psychic imprint of pine tree stamped in heart muscle. Spirituality, the rough embrace of science fiction. A spiritual hot dog for the ages, maybe, and one I ate with a $69 relish. 

I scheduled my second appointment while in pain. Bed in the afternoon variety of flashbacks backed against something chilly like remote memory and the broken imagery of suggestion for why I was who I was because of it. I looked forward to more. I craved it like a vape habit.