Wonderful Stories
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Wonderful Reiki Stories Wonderful Stories Edited by Barbara McDaniel and Susan Mitchell These stories first appeared in Reiki Magazine International. Used by permission of Reiki Magazine and the authors. www.reikimagazine.com This collection copyright Reiki Healing Arts, 2018 0 Wonderful Reiki Stories Contents Introduction 2 Longing to Ease the Pain 3 How conviction and a simple proposal led to medical research Peaceful Mom, Happy Baby 7 Reiki relieves the anxiety that often comes with new motherhood—and helps your baby settle Treating the Child 9 A drugless way to calm the overactive child Dark to Daylight 11 One man’s journey with severe depression, relieved by Reiki Can I Help? 14 Every one of us can use Reiki in our daily lives to help people Healing the Healer 17 A little girl’s miraculous recovery brings healing to her physician Field Hands 18 Treating “others” can include plants, pets, and farm animals Reiki in Recital 21 Helping a piano student tickle the ivories After All These Years 22 Twenty-one days of treating chronic headaches led to finding the source of the dis-ease Miracle in Seattle 25 Healing the mind, spirit, and physical trauma from cerebral hemorrhage 1 Wonderful Reiki Stories Introduction What is Reiki, anyway? The best answer is to give you an experience. If we were sitting in a room together, we might say, “Let me show you. May I put my hands on your shoulders for a minute?” Then one of us would place our hands, palm down, on your upper back and simply rest them there for a little while. But right this minute, we’re not within arm’s reach, so the next best response is to tell you Reiki stories. The stories collected here cover a range of Reiki experiences—receiving treatment from others, learning Reiki and treating friends and family, self-treatment, and experiences with distant treatment. In the wonderful, indirect language of story, these tales illustrate the depth and breadth of how Reiki works to heal the body, heart, mind, and spirit. These stories first appeared in Reiki Magazine International and all are used with the kind permission of the authors. You’ll find more articles and stories in the Articles section of our web site, www.reikihealingarts.com. You can access even more experiences in the back issues of Reiki Magazine, www.reikimagazine.com. Feel free to share this collection with your friends and families, and send them to our website for their own copies. It’s a pleasure to share our love of Reiki with you. May all beings everywhere benefit from healing touch through the telling of these stories. Barbara McDaniel and Susan Mitchell Reiki Healing Arts, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho www.reikihealingarts.com 208-665-5862 2 Wonderful Reiki Stories Longing to Ease the Pain by Barbara McDaniel How conviction and a simple proposal led to medical research They met at the Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in 1993. Lisa Fontanella was passionate about Reiki. Dr. Karin Olson was committed to research. Together they study Reiki’s effect on cancer and pain. Lisa Fontanella had already learned “One day her doctor asked, ‘What are Reiki in 1992 when her sister was you doing?’ She said, ‘Well, I do diagnosed with a recurrence of breast meditation and Lisa does Reiki.'’’ cancer. "I ran into an old friend at a picnic," Lisa recalls, "who told me I looked like hell and that I should try “The doctor wanted to know, ‘What's Reiki." She got a treatment, took a class, Reiki?’" and began to treat herself and her sister, Evidence Patty. Lisa was convinced that Reiki could "Patty was on the cancer drug, help the patients at the Cross, but as she tamoxofen," Lisa says. "Tamoxofen goes tried to explain Reiki to the doctor and right to the bone—like his staff, she realized that calcium does—and he would need more than attacks cancer cells “She only got relief her personal testimony to very specifically. But from that pain when I take Reiki seriously. Was because it's a foreign there scientific evidence to substance, the drug did Reiki.” back her up? also causes muscle spasms, called flare-ups. She only got Lisa began her investigation, looking relief from that pain when I did Reiki." for the research that would support her conviction. She found studies on The head of the Cross Institute’s Therapeutic Touch, on various types of Oncology Department took notice. energy healing, on prayer . but nothing “Patty's breast cancer had spread to the on Reiki. bone,” says Lisa. “She was always forgetting her cane, so she was pretty "I was sitting at the Cross one day—one mobile, and she was on the lowest doses of the many times—with my hand on of pain medication her doctor had ever Patty's back. I looked around that seen.” waiting room. There were so many people . it just broke my heart. I thought, 'No one should have to go 3 Wonderful Reiki Stories through this without Reiki!" Lisa a single Reiki treatment. The study was remembers. published in Cancer Prevention & Control in 1997.1 “So I went home," she continues, "and put together this little lame, page-and-a- Personal experience half proposal that cited Therapeutic Touch and any other similar practice I The research team faced panels of could think of. I made an appointment doctors and several ethics committees with the Director of Nursing and gave before their study was approved, and her this thing and said, ‘This is Reiki. they were careful to avoid any apparent You should do something.’” conflicts of interest. Consequently, throughout the design and Partnership implementation of the first study, Karin never experienced a Reiki treatment. The nurse introduced Lisa to Dr. Karin Olson, then the coordinator of Nursing A year and a half into their Research at the Cross Cancer Institute. collaboration, Karin came down with Their synergistic partnership has lasted pneumonia. At last, Lisa was allowed to over ten years and launched the first treat her. “I went over on a Tuesday and small study of Reiki's a Thursday. Karin went to effect on pain. “No one should have to the doctor on Friday, who asked, ‘What are you Dr. Olson is the go through this without doing? Your pneumonia is scientist; Lisa is the completely gone.’ That passionate Reiki Reiki.” proved it to her. Until that advocate and time, she was working on practitioner. “Karin is very linear,” blind faith. She knew nothing about comments Lisa. “She thinks in a very Reiki other than what I had told her. different way than I do. So I'll talk and Then to have Reiki get rid of double she'll ask questions. We complement pneumonia in two treatments—it was each other. It has to be that way in order one of the biggest gifts I could have given to do research in something like the her." medical world that's really black and white.” Second study “Reiki is purple, not black or white” she The second study, published in Journal continues. “That was the hardest part of Pain Study and Symptom Management, when we wrote the first proposal—trying compared cancer pain in two groups of to articulate Reiki in words that would patients: those receiving standard pain get medical support and funding for this medication plus rest and those receiving research.” standard pain medication plus Reiki. It also assessed quality of life for the With no medical research to rely on, twenty-four patients. Again, Karin was Karin, Lisa, and co-researcher John Hanson first designed a pilot study to measure Reiki’s effect on pain. Among twenty patients experiencing various 1 Go to reikihealingarts.com and click types of pain, eighty-five percent Articles, Using Reiki to Manage Pain for reported significant pain reduction after a summary. 4 Wonderful Reiki Stories the scientist and Lisa the Reiki out," Lisa explains. "Cancer and its practitioner. treatment takes so much out of the patient and the caregivers. We hope to Over seven days, study volunteers kept show how Reiki can support everyone in a pain diary at morning, noon, night, and this process." This time Lisa will be bedtime. “The results were better than I training the family members, not giving could have hoped for,” Lisa says. “For the treatments. the Reiki group, pain decreased dramatically, and their quality of life improved from day one to day seven. Results And these were people in severe pain who were on heavy medications.” Lisa had no idea that her "lame proposal" would have such a far-ranging effect. "I The study was hard on the researchers. look back and I still think “We worked with that ignorance is bliss," people who were at she laughs. "If I had the end stages of “My sister was healed thought this through— their lives,” Lisa I'm going to the leading explains. “We were when she died. She wasn't research hospital in supposed to study cured; she was healed.” North America, and I'm one hundred going to tell them, 'This people, but it was is what you need to do, difficult to find okay?’—I never would suitable volunteers. They had to be have done it. But you get an intuition cognizant, but so many were on and you go with it and everything falls morphine. The study took a year and a into place. Had I met anyone else but half longer than planned, and it took a Karin things might have been different.