One of the most important things I have learned with healing is to be patient and to trust that the energies I have received or given, will take time to unfold. Today, we expect instant results, an instant pain-free life, and instant change, but that is not how healing works. Your inner-self has its own awareness and knows how to use the energy you have received to benefit you in the best way.

I began to learn this lesson quite early on in my Reiki life. I needed some practice of hands-on healing and an elderly neighbour had bad arthritis and was in a lot of pain. She asked me if I could give her some healing so I agreed. I didn’t charge for it as she was giving me practice time. I thought I was there to help with her physical issues, but as it turned out her soul had other ideas.

I worked with her once a week for nearly a year, and during that time, as we built trust and as it usually happens with Reiki, she shared her history. Since she was a child she had experienced sexual and emotional abuse and eventually married a man who had also abused her and her children. She was a very tiny, thin woman who couldn’t say Boo to a goose and she had felt completely powerless in her marriage, unable to deal with her husband and his behaviour.

After a year, I could no longer work with her due to external changes in my life and she went to a local healer for a few weeks. Her arthritis seemed to be no better but other changes were happening internally.

I met her again a year later and she told me what had been going on in her life. I had heard that she had had issues with her husband and their grandchild. She had discovered that he had started to abuse her only grandchild and she could not stand back and watch him destroy another generation of children. So she reported him to the police and then was a witness against him in court. She kicked him out of the family home and he spent two years in prison.

I was amazed. This tiny, bird-like woman had enough power to stand up to a man who had abused her for years and had made her life, and the life of her children, an absolute misery.

I met her again a couple of years later, and she told me how she was getting on. Her husband had completed his sentence, but she had never abandoned him. Throughout his ordeal, she had continued to support him, but in a strong, healthy way. She was able to be firm and clear but never lost her compassion for him, seeing him as another wounded soul. 

I have no idea what happened with her arthritis but her life was healthier and happier because she had changed internally, letting go of the belief that it was her fault that she had been sexually abused as a child. Because she had let go of that belief she did not have to sit back and watch her children being abused and she didn’t have to put up with being abused herself. That combination of energy, talking and emotional release helped her to heal.

The healing didn’t turn out as we consciously expected it to though, and it certainly didn’t happen over-night. It took a few years for the process to clear the abuse energy from her system, so that she could see the truth and have the strength to make different choices.

For me, the arthritis was a symptom of the emotions and damage she had been carrying since childhood, and although in the beginning, when I didn’t quite understand how healing worked, I thought I was a failure for not ‘curing’ her. It was only when everything had changed for her that I began to understand the nature of healing. Thankfully, when I was working with her, I was also training as a psychodynamic counsellor, specialising in Sexual abuse and Domestic violence. So I was able to ‘hear’ her story in the first place.

This experience taught me a number of lessons.

1. I have no control over what another person truly needs when it comes to healing.
2. It takes time! Nothing is achieved overnight. There are layers of emotions, and these are linked to beliefs we formed as a result of our experiences and these all take time to shift and heal. So even though the person receiving the healing might also be expecting instant change, it doesn’t work that way. Everything takes time.
3. Healing is often not what we expect. We might ‘think’ that we are healing something specific, but the Soul of the person receiving healing knows exactly what needs to change and that might be the complete opposite of what you thought needed healing. Trust is most important here.
4. What seems like ‘failure’ to you, might be exactly what your client needs. This takes us to a whole other level of healing. While I was training as a counsellor, one of the things we were taught was that often it is our failure as therapists that helps the client the most. Why? Because it exposes feelings related to past disappointments, feelings that can be faced and released. If we are always the person the client needs us to be, consciously, then how can they know their deepest feelings? For healers, this is difficult to accept. We become healers to heal because we care. Our last desire is to let someone down. But often we do, and that’s OK, when we do it with awareness. There is often a higher purpose for that. (I’ll write more about failure and disappointment in another post.)
5.  We are not responsible for another person’s choices nor are we in control of their path. How their Soul uses the energy we channel to them is entirely up to them. They will use it, or not, in whatever way is appropriate for them.
6. Boundaries are extremely important. This has been a difficult lesson for me, as I experienced much sexual abuse in my youth. Boundaries in a therapeutic space are what keep you safe. If you have an arrangement, stick to it, unless something major happens. If you charge for your work, make it clear and don’t be afraid to ask for payment. Your time and experience are important. But that doesn’t mean you should charge out of people’s reach!
7. Know your own limitations. You are human and will learn a lot through working with other people. You too are healing, and your client’s issues often match your own! Work on what comes up for you. “Your client can go only as far as you have gone”. If you haven’t healed aspects of your own life then your client can’t go beyond that either. However, the joy of being a healer, is that you too receive the energy as it passes through you, so you can move forward too. But you need your own healing in order to shift.
8. Let go, and trust in the over-arching awareness of the Source and your own Soul and guides. Have faith especially that your client’s soul knows exactly what she needs and just be the channel and listener. Letting go is possibly the hardest one to learn, but it is an absolute requirement. Not everyone will accept your healing, not everyone will understand it and often, when they haven’t had an overnight shift, after all, they came to you to be healed, then they will leave you to find another miracle -worker. Let it go. You did your best.

Hopefully, by now you understand a little more about the nature of healing. I will post a few more of my experiences, especially when I began to receive the Gaia Method, so that you can know that whatever you are doing is perfectly OK. So long as your intention is to do your best and with the Soul’s awareness of what is necessary, then all will be well…even though it is not what you thought, and sometimes hoped, it would be.

I will take these points and expand on them in following posts. I hope they are of some help to you in your own journey.