The following was written a year ago, in December 2017, and has been sitting in my drafts folder ever since. In the celebration of my spiritual and emotional progression in 2018, I think it’s important to post this. I have no lingering memory of the Reiki session recounted in my post, save for having done it and feeling better in the days to follow. It’s interesting how simple measures of the past can continue to reverberate in our present lives.

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“I don’t have the energy to write anything of elegance; please accept my apologies. My head feels empty. It’s a relief, and I plan to take full advantage of this mental silence by falling into a deep sleep five minutes from now. It occurs to me that this is how Dumbledore must feel, just after extracting memories and dropping them into the pensieve.

Tonight I visited a Reiki healer for a complimentary session, just to get to know her and find out more about the process. I’m going to work with her to balance my chakras. If you know me, you’ll know that half of my brain just went “Yay for hippie dippy woo woo!” and the other half went “Why not just set your money on fire, for all the good it’s going to do?” I’m putting the negativity to bed for the evening, though. I’m feeling far too calm and happy to let the fear take over tonight.

After meeting with the healer for a chat about my life and thoughts, I laid down on her table, closed my eyes, and started to concentrate on my breath. She observed my energy. Once, I started to laugh – I felt like I was being tickled, but not physically. It felt like it was inside, dancing across my liver. I was compelled to chuckle. Later, I started to sob uncontrollably. I remembered a friend, and couldn’t stop remembering him. I was surprised that this particular friend would be the only person I could think of, and grieve for.

After that part of the session was over, we talked, and she told me what she’d found. The laughter happened when she was taking a look at my Sacral chakra – tied to my inner child. The deep grief happened when she was examining my Heart chakra – tied, of course, to love. Every time I’ve lied and told people that I didn’t fall in love with him has only served to hurt me. It does no one good to hear my feelings, but I shouldn’t keep lying to myself, at least. It occurs to me now that there aren’t enough words in English for love, loving, falling in love, being in love. What is the word for falling in deeply in love with someone’s manner, expression, spirit? Not with the man, himself, but rather something older that lives within him, maybe? Is there a word for adoring someone like your long-lost brother, and knowing that coming to terms with that is only accepting that he has been ripped from you time and time again?

There are no words, and the only ones I can find sound insane and obsessive, when there’s really nothing further from the truth. If I were to write a fictional history, we were brothers in the trenches during WWI, and he died in No Man’s Land while I watched, helpless. He was my baby daughter, run down by a carriage in the streets of Rome. He was my older brother, murdered in the Cultural Revolution for knowing how to play Western music on his violin. I was his grandmother, cold and stiff in her bed one morning, eyes still glazed over with the shock of passing.”

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This was written in the wake of a particularly painful breakup, during a period when I was feeling so heartbroken that I had trouble getting out of bed every day. My entire life was off-balance, and in the midst of the turmoil, the emotional toll of other old relationships started getting dredged up to the surface. Two years before, I’d met a friend while taking a spiritual pilgrimage through Spain. Nothing about our meeting seemed to be of chance, and we connected immediately. It felt like I had grown a brother overnight, and it broke my heart to be separated at the end of the journey. The Reiki session brought those realizations up to the surface and evidently helped me deal with them, as I still keep in touch with my friend, but am no longer feeling bereaved regarding the physical distance between us.