06/17/2021
Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, is a fan of Reiki!! 🙌✋✨❤🤚
Interesting article from the Telegraph! It seems the Duchess of Sussex loves Reiki too!!! 💫🙏🏻✨
‘Baby reiki could be the new baby yoga
As the Duchess of Sussex performs the healing technique on Archie, Rosa Silverman questions the benefits
Thought your baby yoga sessions made you a cool mum? Those Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star downward dogs are all looking a bit five years ago, with news that the Duchess of Sussex is performing reiki, an ancient healing technique, on herself, her two-year-old son Archie, and even their dogs, “to help them feel more balanced and relaxed”.
Reiki, a complementary therapy said to aid relaxation and healing through energy-channelling massage, has been gaining attention in recent years. The practice involves a therapist or reiki master placing their hands over various points of the body called chakras, to change and balance energy fields in and around the body.
According to the UK Reiki Federation, the therapist can “channel energy” into the patient by means of light touch, activating the body’s natural healing processes to “restore physical and emotional wellbeing”, though it is “widely accepted that reiki healing can be given and received equally effectively hands-off or via distant healing”. Indeed, it’s been described as a no-touch massage.
As a mother of young children, I can fully appreciate why you might want to hand over a decent sum of money for someone not to touch you. But can it really be beneficial for children?
“Reiki promotes relaxation, which in turn boosts our natural healing abilities,” says Kathy Yvanovich, a south London-based reiki master teacher. “It strengthens and balances our connection to the natural environment. It sometimes clears the mind so you have time and space to not think.” For children, she says reiki can “help them study or concentrate, it can make them more focused and self-accepting. It can make them breathe more deeply”.
Even, like Archie, at two years old? “Oh, yeah, it’s like a big warm hug from a person you really love… You know what it’s like when you first go into the sea and it’s that all-enveloping wonderfulness? It’s that. Then ramp that feeling up.
Therapeutic: Meghan is a reiki fan, using it on Archie and even the couple’s dogs
“It’s not like that for everybody. Some people will cry, and that’s a chemical release. Some people laugh. I remember in the first couple of years, I’d laugh my head off when I was on the [reiki] bench because that’s what I needed, a good laugh, and the practitioner laughed along with me. Other times, it’s just a great comfort and puts me to sleep.”
Would it make my child sleep? I’m willing to give anything a go. A course of baby yoga seven years ago somehow failed to set him on the right track. “Yes,” says Yvanovich. “I used to give reiki to my grandson. I was rubbing his back when he was in bed and he fell asleep.”
Some new mothers swear by it, while practitioners extol its benefits for all ages. “There’s one guy who said to me it’s better than class A drugs,” says Yvanovich. “That’s when I learned he was on methadone.”
The Japanese word reiki translates as “universal life force energy” and though the practice was developed in the early 20th century, Eastern medicine has used this method for millennia. It’s developed a growing following in the West in recent decades and, along with yoga and acupuncture, has been increasingly studied for its potential health benefits.
Though there is no scientific evidence that it can prevent or cure health problems, many say it cuts stress and increases wellbeing. Today, Cancer Research UK lists reiki as a complementary therapy: “Some people with cancer say they feel better after using therapies such as reiki. Studies show this is often because a therapist spends time with the person, and touches them. After the rush and stress of hospitals and treatment, it can be very relaxing when someone gives you attention for an hour or more, in a calm setting.”
It adds the caveat, however, that reiki cannot treat cancer.
Meghan’s own use of reiki appears to be geared towards healing “genetic pain and suffering”, something she is also using a form of tapping, known as Emotional Freedom Technique, to heal.
Gwyneth Paltrow, who was photographed leaving a reiki studio after announcing that she and Chris Martin were “uncoupling”, has also recently said that energy healing helped her to process the trauma of the emergency caesarean section she’d had when her daughter, Apple, was born. Reiki can be good for dealing with past trauma or pain, says Yvanovich, who trades as The Mind, Body and Soul Coach.
“It can release old emotions,” she insists. “And what I like about reiki is it goes beyond so many of the other things I’ve encountered to help people heal themselves. It reaches the original cause of whatever is giving them pain in their present state.
“Let’s say something happened when they were four and they’ve carried it around their whole life and it’s resulted in pain or a limp – it has lodged in their outer auras and then becomes lodged in their physical body. Reiki will go to that original cause and deal with the emotions at that time, so it gets rid of the source.”
I’m intrigued by Meghan’s dogs, too, and what possible use they could have for complementary therapies. “Some animals – not all – like reiki,” says Yvanovich.
What kind of negative energy might an animal have?
“They’re very sensitive. They might absorb it from the environment. Or they might be sick themselves.”
You can reiki a plant, a house, or even water, she says.
What would it do to a plant? “Whatever the plant needs, it gets.”
For Meghan to be able to perform reiki on herself, she will have to have been “attuned” to it, says Yvanovich. “You do it through a sacred ceremony. She will have had an attunement from a reiki master teacher.”
Meghan is thought to be expecting her second child any day. Yvanovich says that when she gives reiki to a pregnant woman, she asks the foetus for permission first. We don’t know whether Meghan has done this, but Yvanovich says she knows if the foetus objects because her hands would just bounce off the mother.
She encounters scepticism all the time. Even her own partner was a reiki sceptic, until she performed it on him.
But in some ways it may be perfect for pandemic times: Yvanovich can do sessions to clients over Zoom as well as in person. “Distance is no object.”
Nor, it seems, is time. “I can send reiki to a person’s house at 10pm on Thursday when they’re about to go to bed,” she says. “I can do that now. I can also send reiki backwards in time, to an event that has bothered them.”
She welcomes a possible Meghan effect and hopes the duchess may do for reiki what Madonna did for yoga. “If Meghan makes reiki fashionable, it will be so good,” Yvanovich says. “The planet needs healing right now, and we always start with ourselves.”
From the Telegraph 27/5/21
