You Are Not Alone

A sense of isolation overwhelms everyone from time to time. These feelings usually subside on their own.

But not always.

Persistent feelings of isolation can lead to feeling excluded and alienated. Before you know it, you’re feeling hopeless, so withdrawn that it’s hard to seek help. You wonder if you are cycling into depression, and you don’t know where to turn.

When you’re feeling alone and isolated, Reiki practice can be a life raft. It helps you feel better, and gives you the clarity to recognize what other support is needed, and the motivation to get it.

Reiki treatment begins to heal isolation and hopelessness from the inside out. Whether you receive treatment from someone else, or from your own hands, Reiki treatment encourages your system to reorganize itself toward balanced well-being.

How are you sleeping?

This process of self-healing usually involves changes in sleep, which makes sense because research has found a strong correlation between depression and poor sleep.

Many people sleep more soundly after the first treatment. However, Reiki treatment is balancing to the individual, and we are all a bit different, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t sleep better the first night.

Be patient and arrange for several sessions scheduled close together. If you are self-treating, make a commitment to daily self-treatment. If you are already practice daily self-treatment, give yourself longer sessions for at least four days in a row, and stay with your enhanced schedule until you notice improvement in your mood, and that improvement stabilizes.

Are you moving?

You will soon start feeling better and noticing that your mind is clearer. When your mind is clearer, it’s easier to make better decisions for yourself, such as looking for opportunities to get your body moving. Investing in a gym membership may be premature (but you may soon feel up to using the one you have).

Look for small opportunities to move your body, even if it’s just getting up and walking around the room during commercials on your favorite TV show. Once you notice that moving your body improves your mood, you’ll be motivated to try strolling around the block after dinner, taking the stairs instead of the elevator when going just a flight or two (depending on your fitness), or a couple of gentle supported squats to get your blood moving mid-afternoon.

Studies show Reiki treatment can help improve mood

A study reported by Adina Goldman Shore  in the peer-reviewed journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine randomly assigned 46 people with depressive symptoms to either receive weekly Reiki treatments, or to be in the control group who received no Reiki treatment. After six weeks, those who received Reiki treatment had a significant improvement in their symptoms compared to those who had no Reiki treatment. Furthermore, this improvement held when the participants were retested a year later. This lasting benefit suggests that deep self-healing had occurred, and stabilized.

I was the Reiki master for a study at Yale in which people were offered Reiki treatment in the cardiac ICU within 72 hours after having a heart attack. The results were encouraging. Patients who received 20-minute Reiki treatment rated themselves improved in both positive states (happy, relaxed, calm) and negative states (stressed, angry, sad, frustrated, worried, scared, anxious). They also had improved heart rate variability (HRV), a scientific measure of greater resilience, which suggests their systems were healing.

Reach for Reiki to help with isolation and depression

When you are feeling low, there are so many things you can do to make a difference. Reaching for a Reiki treatment is a good place to start. If you are prone to feeling isolated, why not learn to practice Reiki self-treatment now?

As one student said at the end of his First degree class, “Now when I look in the mirror, I see that I am not alone.”

Please be responsible in your health care choices. Relying on your Reiki practice does not preclude getting the medical care you and your doctor deem necessary. When medications are needed, Reiki treatment will not interfere, and can help balance side effects.

Has Reiki helped you or someone you love feel more emotionally balanced and connected to life? Please share your story so others can be encouraged.

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The TALKING REIKI series is designed to improve your effectiveness and comfort when talking about Reiki. You can access the recordings online anytime you want, as many times as you want. Click here to  learn more.

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4 thoughts on “You Are Not Alone”

  1. Reiki self-treatment is my refuge. It feels like being inside a cocoon where it is safe to look at myself (and others) without criticism and where I can put things into perspective. I usually come out of self-treating with a deeper understanding of things, or knowing that I do not need to understand anything at all.

    Thanks for this post!:)

  2. This may be my favorite blog post on your site to date, Pamela, thank you. Of course, it’s probably because I can relate so strongly to most of it.

    For many years (decades) of my life, I was deeply depressed, even suicidal. I hid it well, isolating myself and feeling I didn’t deserve to connect with others, at least not in a way that revealed my true state. So I would connect, but only so deeply. And at times I would disappear, not returning calls or knocks on my door, because I couldn’t even do that much.

    About 15 years ago, when a friend offered me a Reiki treatment, I didn’t have a clue what Reiki was or what to expect. But the session affected me greatly.

    Looking back, I can see that it allowed me a deep connection with her (and beyond her) in a safe way that didn’t require me to “reveal all” verbally.

    And of course it also started me on a slow but steady healing journey that allowed me to gradually find my way into embracing life, on my terms, a journey that continues at its own pace to this day.

    The profound gratitude I have for inhabiting my life so fully now does not mean that I am grateful to have been “cured” or “fixed”. My current gratitude extends even to having experienced that severe depression and inner isolation.

    I can see that I was desperately trying my best to take care of myself at the time, even if my efforts were misguided. And the years of unbalance and even self-loathing informed me in ways that allow a deep understanding of the suffering and especially self-isolating natures of others, without judgment (how can I judge when I’ve been there, done that?).

    I have made many choices over the years since that first treatment that have helped in my healing (including learning to practice Reiki myself), all of which have woven together to strengthen and support that first glimmer of connectedness and the road to peace and well-being.

    These choices — in my eating, self-talk, other healing modalities, movement, care of my home, and finding the right supports outside myself — and Reiki treatment and practice work together, one enhancing the other in an endless loop. So it’s hard to know sometimes which comes first, the chicken or the Reiki egg.

    But the longer I practice, the more certain I am that it’s the egg. 🙂

    1. Thank you for taking the time to write, Alice. You have touched upon so many ways in which Reiki treatment can help people who are depressed, and help them to help themselves, and to let others help.

      I have found that the greatest advantages of Reiki treatment for people with depression are that they don’t have to talk, and they feel some relief from their isolation. In my experience, this relief starts most often with the very first treatment, and when it is not that soon, then always within the first few treatments.

      Not having to talk is often what helps people feel safe enough to give Reiki a try (if the practitioner feels safe), and feeling some positive response early on helps motivate them to continue.

  3. YOU ARE NOT ALONE –
    so nice – the flowers, the stars, animals – and human around us
    sharing the same needs – knowing together that all is in transition.
    Then doing your work – just for to day – in graditude – is a great help in my daily life – just walking around the TV – looking up thinking:

    “Why is the high sky so wide”?
    Schumann

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