The room hummed with energy as we swept our hands above our heads on each inhale, joining our palms together before lowering them to our hearts’ centers with an exhaled Om. We raised and lowered, raised and lowered, falling out of sync to create one continuous Ommm.

We had been instructed to keep our eyes closed, but I occasionally opened mine to catch glimpses of the Reiki teacher performing “attunements” on the three students in the center of the circle we’d formed in her living room. She moved quickly, brushing bundles of fresh rosemary and mint from her garden across their shoulders, pressing rose water to their temples.

I first met the teacher—a small woman with enormous blue eyes and a German accent evocative of Heidi Klum’s—entirely by chance, while walking my dog in Ojai. Within hours of our brief conversation, I had signed up for her holotropic breathwork class, where I went into full-blown tetany (a sign of either stuck energy or rising CO2 levels, depending who you ask) and felt tears roll down my cheeks when she placed her hand on my chest and told me to release my “mother wound.” Suffice it to say, I was impressed. It wasn’t much longer before I had signed up for her Level 1 Reiki training on little more than a whim and the misguided confidence that surely I would be free as a bird by the time it rolled around in May. To have not only the space for the two-day workshop, but the thirty-two hours of driving it entailed.

Issue #245: When You Get the Message, Hang Up…

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