I Got Distance Reiki From a Practitioner on the Other Side of the Country
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It was 3:20 on a Friday afternoon in New Jersey, and I was about to let a stranger in California manipulate my energy fields. Or at least that’s how Frances Naude, founder of Four Noble Holistic Healing, explained long-distance reiki the night before I underwent my own session. Sitting in her Los Angeles apartment, Naude said she would first splay out a few crystals, and then run her hands over the formation as if it were a shrunken-down, shinier version of my body.
“It makes zero sense to our brain, but it’s phenomenal how reiki works so effectively through space and time,” Naude told me, to which I nodded along with a degree of skepticism. We'll see.
Prior to meeting Naude, I thought reiki was a kind of New Age massage. As I learned, physical touch is rarely involved with reiki, a type of energy healing developed in Japan in the early 20th century. "Reiki is a high vibrational energy force that is transmitted through a practitioner, who must be trained and attuned to that energy. When that energy moves from the universe, through the practitioner, into the recipient, their body is best set up into natural healing," according to Naude.
Naude says the goal is to activate a healing process. During a reiki session, Naude explains, the "physical vibration" in a person's body heats up or slows down based on how the practitioner shifts energy. In doing so, reiki supposedly moves the body out of "fight or flight" and into "rest and restore" mode, and, according to Naude, sets the body up for continued healing on its own.
While there is no scientific evidence that reiki actually leads to healing, Naude's clients use the practice for a host of ailments: Physical issues like insomnia, indigestion, and headaches, and mental blockages. "If they don’t specify anything, I let their body speak and tell me how it wants to be aligned,” she says.
Typically, reiki practitioners run their hands between one and three inches above a client's body, and focus on balancing the seven main chakras, each of which is said to govern different sectors. "Our chakras are energy centers. When our chakras are out of alignment we can feel confused, stagnant, and unmotivated," Naude says. "We feel like we can't take the next step. Reiki can help to align those chakras so we're grounded. Like, 'I know what the next step is and how to move.'"
According to Naude, it’s completely possible to experience reiki's beneficial effects without being in the same physical space as the practitioner. After switching to distance reiki due to the pandemic, Naude says she may never return to in-person sessions, because she claims the results are still effective, if not more so. "The person is so relaxed and open to receiving," Naude says.
But to believe in long-distance reiki is to make a logical leap, out of the conventional ways of thinking—especially hard for first-timers and skeptics. In a brief aside, Naude broke down the mechanics of long-distance reiki. “The way that we experience space and time is not how space and time exist. We live in a linear timeline: We transcend space and time with reiki. It’s energy,” she said. Her go-to metaphor is about love. “You can love someone oceans away. You can feel that person’s energy even if they’re not in front of you.”
Had I let myself think about Naude's explanation too much, too hard, I would have gotten stuck at a mental blackboard writing out all the facts I knew about space and time. Instead, I took the advice Naude gives doubters: “Just try it once. Nine times out of ten you'll learn something.”
So, I did.
Ahead of our session, I identified problems I wanted Naude to address—namely, anxiety and a lack of motivation exacerbated by a year of quarantine. While I didn’t expect the session to banish what seemed to be perpetual problems, I’m also not one to turn down potential options.
To prepare for the session, Naude recommended I find a quiet, comfortable place to sink into for half an hour. That Friday, I told my family I would be retreating into the astral realm, and would appreciate their lowering the volume for half an hour. I laid back on my bed, my head resting on the pillow. My room was in full spa mode: A diffuser blowing citrus-tinged oils, a silk sleep mask over my eyes. I pressed play on the half-hour song on YouTube Naude had provided, entitled, "Deep Healing Music for The Body & Soul,” and waited for the deep healing to begin.
And then, for a while: Nothing. None of the tingles, twitches, sudden memories, visions, tears, heat, cold spells, or emotional swells that Naude told me to expect. I didn’t feel anything other than relaxed—which given my hectic schedule, was still a welcome feeling.
So when something began happening to my right leg, I was surprised. My right leg got suddenly, undeniably hot. When the sensation in my leg subsided, I waited for the next flare-up. My stomach was next. It churned, but not in a seasick way—more in a "falling in love" way. I imagined a soda stream under the lining of my skin, fizzy but pleasant. Certain areas—like my hands and legs—also became comfortably warm.
Alongside the sensations rose doubt. Was I feeling this, or was I imagining feeling this? According to Naude, reiki detractors attribute the practice's purported benefits to the placebo effect, or imagining something to be true. But in the spirit of growth, I surrendered to the feeling. As I did, memories and dream-like images rose up, replacing my intrusive thoughts.
When the YouTube song ended abruptly with an advertisement for a bank, I sat up and exited the meditative state faster than you can say meditative state. What just happened? Did anything happen?
I got my answer half an hour later, when I received an email from Naude containing a 40-minute audio recording of the session, accompanied by a photograph of the crystal arrangement and four oracle cards she pulled for me from the Work Your Light Oracle deck. Naude spoke throughout the half-hour reiki session. While listening, I heard what she was doing while I was laying in my bed, wondering if the sensations were real.
At the start of the audio recording, Naude—in a soothing voice—identified the specific healing crystals that were “calling out” to her for my reading, like blue kyanite, which fosters communication, and aventurine, helpful for jumping into the next adventure. I heard the crystals clinking as she arranged them in the loose shape of a body. Then, she was ready to begin the session. “Moving through space and time, connecting fully,” she said, before “locking in” to my energy.
Listening to the recording was like seeing through the other side of the mirror, and finding there's a world bordering our own. Naude, unlike all reiki practitioners, incorporates channeling during the session, and calls herself a "conduit" for the spiritual realm. During the recording, she delivered messages and deciphered images supposedly from my "spiritual team," or the disembodied beings supposedly watching over me (and possibly you, for that matter—she says we all have our own crew). Among other tidbits, my spirit guides said I needed to ease back on the sarcasm and inject "gentle kindness" into my internal dialogue.
While that is admittedly general advice, there were some revelations that made me gasp for their specificity. When the reiki session started, Naude immediately corrected her pronunciation of my often mispronounced name, and later said my "team" guided her. Inexplicably, Naude also named the presence of a specific figure on “the other side” who I had been thinking of constantly (chills).
While providing in-depth interpretations of messages and images from my spirit guides—like a whale's tail, a sphinx, a flying bumblebee, and a rose garden—Naude said she cleared out my seven chakras. She especially focused on "resetting" my throat chakra, which governs communication. "You're making space to hear your intuition more," she said. Overall, the theme of the recording was calming my inner "thrashing," as she called anxiety and insecurity, and preparing me for an upcoming period of transformation (it is, after all, my Saturn Return).
Naude told me I'd end the session with my chakras open, and feeling more balanced. But the real test of distance reiki, I figured, was what happened after the session. As it turned out, I coasted through that weekend on a wave of positivity and motivation. I completed tasks that I'd avoided for weeks; started a new passion project that stemmed directly from my intuition; and didn't feel the usual Sunday dread. But the real change wasn't what I got done: It was how I felt. I was refreshed, relaxed, and comfortable with the idea of not doing anything at all. Since the change was subtle, though, it took me days to connect my new mood with the reiki session.
I can't say definitively whether distance reiki was responsible for my cheerier-than-usual weekend—but I'm inclined to think it was. After the session, I opened Naude’s email seamlessly, taking for granted that it's possible to send a photograph and a recording across the country, in an instant. Yet the concept of email is likely one that would have shocked my ancestors. In fact, those stamp-buying, card-sending people may have discounted the internet as a possibility entirely.
Is the receiving the energy of long-distance reiki so far off from receiving an email? Maybe not. Perhaps in a few centuries, we'll know the science behind it. For now, I'll just enjoy the good vibes.
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