What I've Felt in Sessions That Changed How I Practice

I want to share something that's hard to talk about in clinical terms because it didn't happen in clinical terms. It happened in my hands.

Early in my reiki training, I was still thinking of nutrition and energy work as two separate tools. One was evidence-based and grounded in biochemistry. The other was intuitive and harder to explain. I kept them in different mental boxes. And then the boxes broke.

The session that connected everything

I was working with a woman who had been struggling with digestion for years. We'd been addressing it nutritionally and seeing some progress, but there was a stubborn plateau. The bloating would improve and then return. The pattern kept cycling.

During a reiki session, my hands were resting on her upper abdomen. And I could feel something I can only describe as a wall. Not a physical obstruction. A holding. A tension so deep and so old that her body had organized itself around it. Her breathing was shallow and restricted to her chest. Her belly wouldn't soften.

I didn't try to push through it. I just stayed. And after several minutes, something released. Her belly expanded. Her breathing changed. Her stomach started gurgling audibly, which is the sound of digestion waking up in real time.

She opened her eyes and said "I don't know what just happened but something shifted."

What happened, I believe, was that her nervous system let go of a pattern of guarding that had been restricting her digestion for years. No supplement was going to release that. No dietary change was going to reach it. But her body was ready, and when given the right conditions, it let go on its own. The gut holds more than food, and this was a moment that made that viscerally clear.

After that session, her digestive progress stopped cycling. The plateau broke. The physical interventions we'd been working on started working better. As if removing the energetic block allowed the nutritional support to finally reach where it needed to go.

Why I'm sharing this

Not to convince you of anything. Not to prove a mechanism. But because this experience, and others like it, fundamentally changed how I approach my work.

Before that, I practiced nutrition and reiki as parallel offerings. Now I understand them as parts of one practice. The nutrition addresses what the body needs. The energy work addresses what the body is holding. And you can't fully resolve one without attending to the other. This is when I stopped treating nutrition and reiki as separate.

What I feel that I can't explain

I want to be honest about this. In sessions, I feel things in my hands that I don't have scientific language for. Heat in areas where there's inflammation. Cold where there's depletion. A thickness or density where tension has been held for a long time. A kind of buzzing where the nervous system is running too fast.

I don't claim to know exactly what those sensations mean in every case. I don't diagnose from them. But I've learned to trust them as information, the same way I trust the information I get from a food journal or a symptom questionnaire. It's another channel of data. And when it aligns with what I'm seeing on the physical side, which it almost always does, it deepens my understanding of what's happening for that woman.

The thing that keeps showing up

The pattern I see more than any other is this: a woman who is nourishing her body well but whose body isn't receiving the nourishment. Not because of a digestive deficiency alone, but because there's an energetic pattern of resistance, of guarding, of not letting in.

And when that pattern softens, when the body finally opens to receive, the nutrition lands differently. The supplements work better. The food nourishes more deeply. The healing accelerates. This is what reiki actually looks like in practice - not something mystical, but something the body responds to in real time.

I've seen it too many times to ignore it. And it's why I'll never go back to treating the physical and energetic as separate things. Both layers matter.

What this means for you

You don't have to have a reiki session to benefit from this understanding. Just knowing that your body might be holding patterns that affect how it processes food, absorbs nutrients, and responds to care can shift how you approach your own healing.

If you've been doing everything right and something still isn't moving, consider that the block might not be physical. It might be something your body learned to hold a long time ago. And the way through might be gentler than you think.

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