By Lisa Strandberg
For The Post-Crescent

Nothing beats a great massage. Working the kinks out of sore muscles can go far toward restoring your body and your mental state.

So can having your aura adjusted.

Energy work aims to do just that - to bring balance to body, mind and spirit through movement of a healer’s hands in an individual’s energy field. Used to address everything from stress to headaches to arthritis to fibromyalgia, Reiki (pronounced RAY-key) and healing touch, two forms of energy work, rely on a practitioner’s intention and intuition to channel universal energy just where a client needs it most, even if neither party knows exactly where that is.

Rosann Geiser, a registered nurse, nursing instructor and practitioner of healing touch, relates energy work to our use of electricity to power our homes: You don’t have to understand it fully to know that when you plug something in, the energy will flow as it should.

“What happens when I do the work is I connect with that vital life force energy and become a conduit of that energy for another person,” she said. “There’s an element of trust you have to have that it’s there.”

A massage for the spirit

Describing energy work is not easy, even for those who practice and teach it. Cynthia Graham, a Reiki practitioner and provider of massage and neuromuscular therapy at BodyWorks Massage and More in Appleton, said, “Reiki is a little like water. The harder you try to explain it, the faster it slips through your fingers.”

At its base, energy work involves three things, according to Geiser: the energy field that surrounds the human body, the energy centers or chakras and the energy channels or meridians. (The Chinese have used the latter in acupuncture for thousands of years.)

“You can’t really talk about one without the other. They’re all interrelated,” Geiser said.

Each treatment begins with a conversation. “We go through all the issues (our clients) have so we can address them. Nothing is put aside as unimportant,” said Debbie Hoeft, a cardiac rehabilitation nurse at Mercy Medical Center in Oshkosh who voluntarily operates a healing touch clinic at Affinity Health System’s Mary Kimball Anhaltzer Center for Integrative Medicine.

Often, that discussion covers an individual’s spirituality so that the practitioner can speak of universal energy in language meaningful to the client.

“Some people use God. That’s their basis. Some people call it the spirit. Some have an earth-based concept of that vital energy. It’s whatever it is for the person,” Geiser said.

From there, a client will lie fully clothed on a massage table while the practitioner lays her hands gently on the client’s body or holds them in the energy field a few inches above it to assess where energy resists flowing freely.

“Sometimes I’ll feel differences in temperature or things that are tingly. It might feel heavy or congested,” Geiser said. “I just notice what’s there.”

Then the practitioner, listening to intuition, opens herself to delivering energy where it’s needed, balancing chakras or clearing them of pent-up energy - a process that can have unexpected results.

“The crazy thing about healing touch is you can have a person who comes to you for one reason and something else happens,” Hoeft said. “They might come for a headache and say, ‘I don’t think I need to smoke anymore.’”

East meets West

As sister modalities, Reiki and healing touch have much in common. “In the healing touch I’ve had with practitioners, I walk away with exactly the same feeling as I do with Reiki,” Graham said. “They’re very, very close components of each other.”

But the two differ in their origins, philosophies and movements. Reiki arose in Japan in the early 20th century, the creation of Dr. Mikao Usui.

“Dr. Usui went on a search. He wanted to understand how Jesus could heal, how the Buddha could heal, how all the great healers of the past could heal,” Graham said.

“With Reiki, the founders and masters believe that you need to be attuned or sort of awakened to this (ability to heal),” Geiser said.

On the other hand, Janet Mentgen, an American nurse, developed and began teaching healing touch techniques in 1989.

“Because it comes from a nurse and out of a medical model, there’s more emphasis on using different techniques for different conditions,” said Geiser, who teaches such techniques to nursing students at UW-Oshkosh.

“In both, the practitioner needs to follow the energy and trust their intuition or extrasensory perception of what they need to be working on,” she added. “It isn’t about where you place your hands. It’s more about is the person a clear channel of that life force energy.”

Movement into the mainstream

Graham acknowledges that energy work remains largely unfamiliar to Western people.

“We still live on the fringes around here, but we’re getting more accepted,” she said.

Hoeft’s healing touch clinic, supported by Affinity Health System with free space and use of the Affinity name, stands as evidence of that.

“(Healing touch) is something new. It’s innovative. It doesn’t hurt. People are generally open to it,” she said.

Certain physical therapists and practitioners in the Affinity pain clinic often had referred patients to Hoeft for treatment. She also has treated her cardiac rehabilitation patients as they request it and as time allows.

“We’re still in the wings with this,” she said. “We’re taking it one step at a time.”

But Hoeft made a bold prediction: In time, insurance companies may cover the cost of energy work. The reason? Study after study has demonstrated its effectiveness in enhancing treatment of a variety of conditions.

“Reiki is such a wonderful complement to any other treatment someone is getting,” Graham said.

Given the passion that healing touch and Reiki practitioners feel for the work they do, it seems that much of the value of energy work lies in the connection it creates between the individuals involved in its practice.

“It brought me back to the type of nursing I like,” Hoeft said. “It is hands-on. It’s that one-on-one time that I miss so much.”

Tags: massage, reiki

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 12:52 am by Dr. Buttar's Blogmasterand is filed under massage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.