First off – energy healing is not a replacement for therapy.

Energy healing is not a replacement for medicine. I don’t care which kind you use – herbal or allopathic, if you are using something to treat pain or illness, keep using it.

Energy healing is complimentary. If anyone comes to you saying “you can go to years of therapy or book a session with me” – run, don’t walk, in the opposite direction.

There are a lot of people who promise miracles to vulnerable people who are desperate for relief.

You have nothing to feel guilty about wanting relief from whatever you’re dealing with. Life can be hard; extremely hard when you’re dealing with chronic conditions, long-standing emotional issues and blocks that no amount of effort can seemingly overcome.

I don’t believe anything is truly impossible to heal or transmute. But – the people who promise miraculous results usually haven’t had those results themselves, or they have failed to do the integration work necessary to understand why miraculous results are inconsistent.

Energy work and magick can absolutely support you in whatever you are doing and whatever changes you are trying to make in your life. The more work you have done and are in the process of doing, the more effective these methods are.

Miracles can’t be guaranteed, but when you get sudden results that are far and beyond what you expected, it is built on everything you put into it up to that point.

The best thing for your healing is to let go of all expectations and go into healing sessions with practitioners you trust and allow the process to play out as it will. The point is not to be completely passive but to allow your will to flow like water without resistance. A pebble may seem unchanged as a stream washes over it but give it many years and the water will wear it down. So it goes with problems in your life.

It’s counterintuitive, but patience makes the process quicker. And I know – when you’ve been at something for years “patience” is a curse word, but you need patience for however long the process takes and through however many adjustments are necessary. You don’t know when breakthroughs will come. The most important thing is to remain committed to the work and to find those who genuinely support you through your personal process.

Everyone is different. What will help you might not help me. What liberated one person might not liberate you. Such is the nature of the great work. I promise you, you are capable of seeing it through, and you will so long as you develop self-trust, you keep good people around you and you learn how to hear and heed your inner knowing. It is not easy but it is the most rewarding thing you can possibly do in this life and embracing that makes every bump along the way worthwhile.

And remember – people like me are able to help you, and our work can go a long way, but in the end it is the work you do on your own behalf that gets you where you want to be and everyone who steps in to offer aid is only helping. They aren’t the source of the most important changes in your life – you are.

What Do Healing Sessions Actually Do?

When I do work for a client, whether they are in front of me, on a live call or I’m doing distance energy work without them present, I tap into their field with their permission and I go in with the intention that the work serve their highest good.

While I will receive messages and see images and sometimes pick up sensations or see things in their field, my job is not to dig deep into their field and try to do what I think is best for them or make them see things I think they need to see. There is a sacred trust that goes into this, and more than that, a healer that doesn’t know boundaries risks their own energetic health and sanity.

There is always the risk in any energetic exchange that I will pick up something from the client that pulls me down or that I would have a hard time cleansing or processing. When this work is done properly with a cleansed space and protection, the risk of this is small. If I were to go into a session playing hero or thinking I know best before I’ve even tapped in, the risk to me and the other person would be much higher.

This is why I don’t recommend healers that talk in terms of *them* being the cause or source of the healing. It’s not that they are entirely wrong – it’s that the language and the attitude speaks to ego, and ego needs to be left at the door when doing work that is meant to help people. The session is not about me. It’s not about what I can do for you or how great I am that I can clear this or that for you and have you feeling amazing.

I’m there to do a job, and that job is best done with me remaining as neutral as possible and listening to what the recipient’s energetic body and higher self is communicating to me. Occasionally their ancestors or spirits they work with will show up to provide clarity or give me messages to pass along but I only make the invitation; I don’t try to force those outcomes. That’s not my place.

A healer, psychic, or magician is not meant to play hero. I don’t mean they won’t put themselves on the line for clients or for friends when the work requires it and they feel led – I’m saying they won’t come into it with the intention of making themselves your savior. That is not a healer’s job. That is the mark of someone who themselves needs a great deal of healing and will bring their unresolved issues into the work they do with you.

The biggest difference between a healer that will help you and a healer that won’t is that a healer that helps knows their place and they know who they are. They offer empathy with boundaries and they don’t get so attached to certain outcomes that they try to force them whether you are prepared for them or not.

Healing is not all sunshine and roses – sometimes things bubble up after a session that need to be faced and processed. Forcing a kind of healing someone isn’t ready for isn’t going to help them. Someone coming from ego won’t realize that. You need to develop wisdom when doing this work. Mistakes happen, but if you are a healer you need to own up to mistakes and make amends and correct your errors before it can become a pattern. We all go through growing pains but “do no harm” should be at the forefront of work like this. If there are risks to something you think will help, the recipient should know that before you do it.

Energetic Safety

Reiki in itself isn’t going to harm anyone. If someone goes beyond that to directly tamper with someone’s energetic system in ways they aren’t supposed to, that can do harm – Reiki itself is as safe as safe gets within the realm of energy work.

Other forms of healing have their benefits, drawbacks, and pitfalls. Discernment, communication and intuition are necessary at all points to ensure the recipient benefits from it as much as possible.

In terms of the end results – I have had clients report to me that their pain suddenly lessened. There was an instance where a client was scheduled for surgery and I didn’t know this. When I worked on their energetic field, I ended up purging something in the area that was going to be operated on. Their pain greatly subsided going into the surgery itself. That was early into my career as an energy healer and it certainly bolstered my confidence a great deal.

I can’t promise that every time. That is what their body and their field was ready to do. They were already primed to let go and transmute what was causing the worst of the pain and my work was a catalyst that helped it happen. Healing is always a co-creative act. It’s never just me or the client that gets the results – it’s the unique combination of what I bring and what they bring into the session that causes change.

Sometimes clients don’t feel anything during or after a healing. I encourage everyone to keep a journal for at least 30 days following a session. Many times the changes are subtle. Sometimes a trigger heals and you don’t realize it until something that would have shaken you doesn’t. Sometimes you spontaneously start getting up earlier without setting your alarm. Sometimes you lose your taste for junkfood. Sometimes you cut ties with a person you didn’t like but that you’d been tolerating. That can all be the result of the healing session.

With healing as in magick, it’s not about wild experiences and visions of other planes and casting out malicious entities or any of the other dramatic things people associate with this kind of work. Many times healing is quiet, subtle and gradual. In fact that’s how it is most of the time in my experience. We don’t do this for the novelty and the stories we can tell; we do it for the sense of calm and safety that lets our unconscious and our nervous systems do the work they cannot do when we are hypervigilant, ungrounded, and dissociated.

Most healing happens when we’re resting and the primary purpose of methods like Reiki is to help you get that deep rest. The more centered, grounded and relaxed you are, the better your own body and energetic field can repair itself and release what has been weighing you down.

So don’t panic if you don’t get life changing results immediately after a healing session, and don’t panic if you haven’t had dramatic shifts within a month afterward. Big changes are built on small ones. If you can see things in your life moving in the right direction without you having to force it, that means you’re doing something right. Every step adds up. Journeys of a thousand miles always begin with a single step. Epiphanies come when you’re ready for them. Major changes happen when you’re ready for them or when they can’t be held back.

Find people you trust as healers, as therapists and as friends and keep showing up. It’s not a sexy answer – it won’t solve all your problems overnight, but it will get you where you want to be over the long run and that commitment to your own well-being will give you a beautiful life.