I’m off to Sedona tomorrow to take a Reiki Master/Teacher class. It’s not a big deal anymore. It seems like everybody and their brother is trained in Reiki, at least out here in Colorado. I first took Reiki training almost twenty years ago when I moved to Colorado to help my little son with his asthma. He had been a sickly baby, constantly struggling with ear infections and respiratory problems, and taking one antibiotic after another in an effort to finally get him on a path of health.

Around his first birthday he managed to have a couple of weeks of good health and then his sister brought home Chicken Pox from nursery school. My son, of course, as the second one in the family to get it, ended up with a much worse case than his sister. That seemed to have encouraged his immune system to backslide again, and we ended up with weekly, sometimes more frequent visits to the doctor.

Fortunately, as I look back now, I had an old fashioned pediatrician for Geoff. Dr. Whitten had founded the neonatal department at our local hospital and knew his stuff. By the time I came along with my kids he was near retirement. He came to visit us in our apartment when my son was a baby. “I like to know how my patients live,” he told me, simply. “I don’t make house calls anymore, but if you ever need to, you can bring the baby to my house after hours.” Once or twice I would be frantic enough to take him.

Dr. Whitten was an interesting man. He was rather dull to most of the adults I knew who took their kids to him, but kids seemed to like him. He would patiently explain to me what he thought was wrong with my child and why he thought that. He would also explain why he prescribed the drugs he did, and what they were for. I didn’t realize I paid so much attention to what he said, and that I remembered it, until I had to deal with other doctors farther down the road.

One day when I was particularly frantic about how sick my son seemed, the doctor surprised me by what he said. “Some children take a while to decide if they want to be here,” he said. “Their immune systems don’t really seem to ‘get it’ until they are about two or older.” It was the beginning of an opening in my thinking about who we might be as human beings, eternal spirits coming in for a visit in a body.

So when we moved to Colorado and Geoff developed full-blown scary asthma, I really wanted to do something to help him besides feed him more drugs. I’ve often thought his immune system had been compromised by all those antibiotics and just hit overload under totally new flora and fauna at a mile high, in a dry climate. Reiki turned out to be something I could do for both of us in the middle of the night as he wheezed and coughed, wheezed and coughed, while I thought about calling the doctor or taking him to the emergency room. I often wished we had still had Dr. Whitten to help.

With Reiki I could lay my hands on my son, or I could lie on the floor and rest, sending him the healing energy. It often seemed to make a noticeable difference in an otherwise frantic night. My son is 22 now, with no measureable trace of asthma left, though sometimes if he gets a bad respiratory infection, he coughs that deep barking sound that still chills me to hear.

He used to complain after he hit his teen years, that I had stunted his growth with all those steroids the doctor prescribed. “Those drugs were terrible for me,” he said. “I didn’t need them. I didn’t have asthma. I was fine.” I think sometimes he likes to feed on my guilt. I didn’t like all those drugs, either.

He is 6’ 2” or maybe 6’ 3” now, and close to 200 pounds. His complaint makes me smile every once in a while when he still finds occasion to remind me. He’s not quite as big as his own father, or as my father was, but he is no little man. I know some children “grow out of” their asthma according to medical science, but I am certain my kid is the way he is because of the Reiki.

I am hopping on a plane tomorrow and going to finally take the class that will train me to teach others what I already know. I don’t know whether I really want to teach Reiki, but something has been nagging at me to finish the training as I pick it up again and use it more often in my daily life. You can use Reiki to clear space, for protection, for mental and emotional clarity, to find lost objects, and a hundred other things besides “healing.” It gives me something concrete to do when I feel uncertain.

In the ensuing twenty years since I took my first Reiki class I’ve learned all kinds of things. I seem to have an insatiable appetite for energy work, spiritual healing, working with crystals and stones, even prayer and meditation. For me the healing state, both as a practitioner and a client, opens doorways in my inner world that ultimately enrich who I am in this reality, and my ability to see and connect in to the greater reality that I first heard named by Gregg Braden many years ago, “The Mind of God.”

I’ll be flying home again on Sunday. Who knows where I’ll go from there?