Reiki and my own Mental Health

I am a classic late diagnosed autistic woman with a similar story to many you may have heard. I have had multiple misdiagnoses through childhood and my 20s, like most autistic girls I was treated terribly by authority figures and was a shining beacon for people with bad intentions. After suffering prolonged psychology abuse at my high school I started showing symptoms of poor mental health, and despite having an incredible family and supportive upbringing, experienced a mental breakdown at 18.

School was a really dark time.

The UK at this point was suffering from years of austerity so when I accessed mental health services that were meant to protect and help me I encountered even worse treatment and this lead to me, as many do, trying to save myself.

I moved to London with £50 in my bank account and made it my mission to rebuild a life that I loved and wanted to live. It was a slow, sometimes painful process but through meeting people with similar experiences I began to build a support network of incredible people that rebuilt my world and I’m lucky enough to still call friends today.

Starting to rebuild my life.

It seems a common theme amongst us with similar complex trauma that modern mental health services and a job market not set up to foster mental wellbeing has lead to all of us to attempting to manage our conditions, with varying strategies and success.

I have continued to accessed medical services in varying degrees throughout my life and was lucky enough to meet a skilled psychologist specialising in complex trauma at 28. With her help I slowly began working through my childhood experiences but as anyone who’s grown up in unsafe situations knows your brain may now know you’re safe but your nervous system and body don’t.

My psychologist was incredibly progressive and amongst other things suggested I explore holistic therapies along side our sessions. Having a spiritual mother who taught me to look beyond just science also helped, being raised to be opened minded (with a healthy level of scepticism) was really beneficial as I started to explore healing methods that looked into treating ‘soul level’ pain alongside just our human brains.

My wonderful mum.

I was somewhat agnostic into my mid 20’s but was open to the spiritual world existing, I very much believed there was some sort of after life but I had yet to have any ‘proof’ and was slightly cynical as many people who believe life is hard for no reason are. 

But as I started exploring alternative healing I had experiences with things like hypnotherapy that were starting to challenge my views around us being ‘just a human body’ that lives once. I started paying more attention to theories I had previously been on the fence about, like energy healing and us having a bodily ‘energy field’ (commonly called our aura).

Starting to connect with my own spirituality through nature.

During the pandemic I had my first real contact with the spirit world that was, to me, undeniable ‘proof’, which I will write about in it’s own post, but this very much tipped my world upside down. It opened the rabbit hole of ‘well if this is actually real, what else is?’

And down that rabbit hole I went. We are exceptionally lucky to live in an age where communication is so easy and we have access to people with much more knowledge and experience than our own. I began contacting trusted community teachers about spiritual work and the more  I learned the more my world opened up.

It was this that lead to me to learning about reiki and its ability to help people with complex trauma alongside traditional medical care. I have said throughout my life that if there was anything I could do to ease the pain of people with similar experiences to me, I would do it, and reiki looked to be a way to do that also aligned with my budding spirituality. 

I ended up training with and being attuned by someone who I would count as one of my biggest spiritual inspirations, Sibylla Azarica. During our training we practicing giving ourselves reiki and giving it to others.

As with all things I entered with a healthy dose of scepticism, I’m not quite as ‘energetically sensitive’ yet as many practitioners so didn’t know if I’d experience anything on my first go. The attunements were such a powerful experience. Sibbie guided us in astral work and this was one of my first experiences having control of my ‘astral body’ outside dream work. When it came to ‘switching on’ our reiki I felt very obvious, noticeable tingling and pins and needles in my palms. It was so obvious I actually laughed and was quite taken a back, but excited to try it on myself.

Everyones experience of receiving reiki is different, but for a person like me who experiences severe generalised anxiety and panic attacks, it was profound. The best way I can describe it was overwhelming calm and security. My nervous system finally feeling this it was safe. I’m not ashamed to say I had a little cry after our first lesson, the relief my body that’s so used to being in fight or flight felt was life changing.

I am a big believer of never recommending or offering anything I haven’t tried myself first and found genuinely beneficial, and this is absolutely the case for reiki. Unfortunately we live in an age where new age spirituality has somewhat muddied the market when it comes to self care, and older indigenous spiritual traditions that cared for people for generations are seen with similar scepticism because of it. Spiritual practices and work are absolutely different for each individual and so results will always vary depending on your own personal connection to that part of you, but I hope I can offer this treatment, with it’s long history of profound results, with people like myself who it can be genuinely life changing.

Because of this my practice will always be trauma informed and sensitive of mental health diagnoses and difficulties, if you have concerns or want to discuss these before a session I will gladly discuss it privately via e-mail, I will never judge anyones personal situation or views and am always open to discussion and learning. I hope to continue learning ways I can make my services more accessible and beneficial to a group of people who are often overlooked and under supported in todays society, a group I, myself, am part of.