The first time I understood: Reiki Healing for Chronic Pain

The first time I understood how energywork moves through us…

A story from the early days, and a bone that moved on its own.

I want to tell you about Barbara.

I was early in my Reiki journey, over fifteen years ago now…running a salon spa and offering intuitive readings and reiki healing for chronic pain and other energy work out of the aesthetics room a few hours a week. I was finding my footing. Still piecing together what I'd been taught from my mentor and what I was learning to trust in myself.

Barbara was already a client of the salon. She was curious about energy work in the way a lot of people are when they first encounter it, cautious, a little skeptical, genuinely open. She told me she was in a lot of chronic pain. She had a limp when she walked. That was all I knew going in. I didn't ask for more. I wanted to tune in and feel what I could feel, not lead with my assumptions.

When she settled onto the table and the session began, I noticed right away that something was different. The energy in the room shifted in a way I hadn't felt before. I was doing what I'd been trained to do, working through what I'd learned, staying present — when something happened that stopped me mid-motion.

My hands were hovering above her feet, not touching her. And I could see the energy crisscrossing, balancing, doing something I didn't have the language for yet. It was more of a felt sense than anything I could name. And then, a pop! Audible. Unmistakable.

Her right leg shifted. She sat up abruptly. I asked immediately if she was okay.

She took a breath. Then another. Yeah. I think so. There's no pain. But my bone just moved on its own.

I told her what I'd witnessed: yes, it moved. I saw it. We both heard it. She felt it.

She was shaken, genuinely shaken, and she said she was done. I said of course. I always want to honour where someone is, and it was clear this had crossed into territory she wasn't ready for. I asked her to take her time sitting up. Take her time standing.

When she stood, she went very still.

Then she started to cry.

This is the first time in my life both my feet feel even.

She told me she'd had over eleven surgeries on her hips and legs. That one leg had always been inches longer than the other — that her whole body had been in pain trying to accommodate around that imbalance. And she thought, standing there in my aesthetics room, that it had just corrected itself. Without me touching her.

I don't know how the fuck that happened when you didn't even touch me.

I followed up with her a few days later to make sure she was okay, and I suggested she see a medical professional if she felt that was necessary. She never came back.

I get it. I do.

Barbara is one of the reasons I'm still doing this work fifteen years later.

Its not because of the dramatic moment, the pop, the leg, the tears. But because of what came after. The way she left. The way I sat alone in that room and tried to take stock of what I was actually capable of. What this work was actually capable of.

I didn't have an ego about it. If anything, it humbled me into the ground. Because I didn't do anything. I held space. I followed what I felt. The energy did what it knew to do.

That's still how I understand this work. I'm not the healer. I'm the one who knows how to get out of the way.

Some people come into a session looking for relief and find something bigger than they were ready for. The work doesn't ask permission. It just responds to what's there.

I've thought about Barbara a lot over the years with a kind of reverence that keeps me in awe. That session taught me something no training could have: energy work doesn't care what you believe about it. It just does what it does.

And sometimes, what it does is terrifying and true at the same time.

If you want to experience what that feels like from the other side of the table, I offer Reiki sessions, and I go much deeper into the practice inside my membership community, Mystic Marrow.

— Natalie