How to Do Reiki on Yourself

By River Stormcaller

The storm came up the valley the way they always do here, quiet first, and I had my camera ready for the light it would bring before I ever felt the rain. I have spent ten years in Santa Fe chasing exactly that moment, the instant right before the ordinary becomes myth, and I can tell you the truth of it. I usually know a storm is coming before the sky shows me. The air changes. My hands get warm. For the longest time I had no name for any of that except instinct. Then a Reiki practitioner I met at a yoga retreat held her palm near mine and said, you are already doing it. That one sentence rearranged my whole week. What I had always called luck, or timing, or a photographer's gut, she called ki, the life energy that runs through everything. Then she showed me the hand positions I am about to share with you, and they have become the quietest tool in my bag. ## What Reiki Actually Is Reiki

is a Japanese practice of hands-on energy healing, formalized by Mikao Usui in the early 1900s. The word comes from rei, which means spirit or universal, and ki, which means life force. The idea underneath it is old and simple: energy moves through the body, and when it gets stuck or scattered, everything dims a little. Sleep, appetite, mood, the whole long list. Reiki is not a religion, and it is not a replacement for a doctor. You do not have to believe anything to try it, which is the part that won me over. I am a person who trusts what I can feel. I could not photograph ki, and I probably never will, and that turned out to be exactly the point. Reiki asks you to sense instead of to prove. \*You cannot frame ki, but you can learn to feel it.\* ## Why Self-Treatment Comes First The first thing every Reiki teacher told me sounded almost too simple to matter. Before you give Reiki to

anyone else, you give it to yourself. Every day. Reiki students learn a full self-treatment as part of their training, and practitioners keep doing it for the rest of their lives, the way a runner stretches or a singer runs scales. I understood the why the way a photographer understands it. You cannot hand someone a warm, steady image if your own hands are shaking. Standing inside a storm to photograph it works because I have learned to stand still inside myself first. Self-Reiki is that stillness, practiced with your own two hands instead of a lens. ## The Hand Positions You do not need a table, a mat, or a single piece of equipment. Sit or lie down, close your eyes if it helps, and rest your hands, palms down or gently cupped, on each of these spots for two or three minutes apiece. The full sequence takes about fifteen minutes. Start at the crown of your head, then move to your face

and eyes, then your throat, then the center of your chest over the heart, then the soft space below your ribs, the solar plexus, and last, your belly just below the navel. Some people finish with the feet to close the circuit. Let your hands stay as long as a spot feels busy, and move on when it quiets. Do not chase a sensation. This is the thing I wish someone had told me on day one. Some days your palms feel warm, some days there is a slow tingle, and some days there is nothing at all. The nothing days are not failures. Energy is quiet sometimes, the same way the desert is quiet right before a storm. ## What You Might Feel I was braced for something dramatic, a surge or a jolt, and what I actually got was closer to the moment before rain. A warmth that is not quite heat. A softening behind my eyes. Once, my hands went cool over my solar plexus and I almost laughed, because it felt like

the exact opposite of everything I had expected, and it was still exactly right. People report warmth, coolness, tingling, a sense of floating, tears, a sudden yawn, or nothing they can name. All of it counts. Reiki is not a test you pass. It is a conversation, and the first rule of conversation is that you do not have to perform. \*The feeling is not the point. The attention is.\* ## Making It a Daily Practice I do my self-treatment in the morning before the first cup of coffee, and again on the nights when my mind will not stop rewriting the day. Fifteen minutes is all it asks. I have burned longer than that scrolling through a phone with nothing to show for it. My dog, Willow, has opinions about the whole thing. She sits beside the mat and watches me with her head tilted, as if to say she knew all along that I was more than a camera. I think she did. Animals do not need a word for

energy to feel it. If you try nothing else this week, try this. Tonight, before bed, put one hand on your chest and one on your belly and just breathe there for three minutes. That is a seed of the whole practice. You can grow it from there. ## Closing Reflection I still chase storms with my camera, and I always will. The moment before the ordinary becomes myth is still my favorite place to stand. But now I have learned to be in that moment with my hands as well as my eyes, and I am starting to think they were always telling me the same story. You do not need a storm to feel it. You just need to sit down, place your hands, and pay attention. Everything else arrives on its own.