Profiles on Practitioners -Reiki Healing Center - Myra Reichel
Ever wonder why
Media has such a good vibe? Perhaps it’s
due to the many talented and skilled healing practitioners who assist us toward
better health, balance, and deep relaxation.
Not only do they heal our aches and pains, and everything in between,
they also soothe our emotional wounds and nourish our spiritual needs as
well.
Myra Reichel is
one of those skilled individuals. Myra is
a practitioner of Karuna Reiki(R), Usui Reiki, and Magnified Healing(R) and is
a Master Teacher of all three. Myra
doesn’t consider herself a healer in the literal sense, but rather a
practitioner, and foremost, a teacher.
She also teaches Ethics for professionals and anyone else who is
interested. Reiki
(ray-kee) is a powerful relaxation and healing practice that reduces tension,
relieves stress, and promotes overall balance to
help you feel better and function better.
Reiki has been described as a spiritual practice, though it’s not
a religion. It’s also been associated
with energy medicine. Of all the various defini tions for ‘Reiki’,
Myra chooses to define ‘Rei’ as ‘spiritually guided’ ‘Kei’ as ‘life force
energy’.
Myra says
when she first moved to Media twenty-six years ago with her husband, a
psychologist, and four-year-old son, there was a budding climate of Eastern
practice starting to take root. At the
time, Myra was a hand weaver, making fabric for clothing, rugs, and tapestries
for walls. In 1990, she tore both
rotator cuffs and could no longer do the physical work of weaving and she enrolled
in Bryn Mawr College. While there, a
fellow student did a Reiki session on Myra.
It was her first experience with Reiki, but it certainly would not be
her last. While working on a
construction site with Habitat for Humanity, Myra’s twelve-pound puppy was
attacked by a stray dog. The vet told
Myra that her puppy, unable to stand on its infected leg, would need to have
the leg amputated. Myra called her
friend to do Reiki for the puppy and its entire body got hot. The next day, the puppy was walking. Myra immediately started looking for a Reiki
teacher and connecting with the many other like-minded practitioners in the
area. The International Association of
Reiki Practitioners http://www.IARP.org
is a reliable source if you are looking for a practitioner for yourself or your
pet.
Founded in 2006,
The Reiki Healing Center is a cozy and warm space located at 6 West Front
Street. She shares the space with fellow
Reiki Master Practitioner, Joan Nikelsky, and Acupressurist, Tina Marie
DaFermo. The Reiki Healing Center’s
central mission is to increase people's access to healing modalities by
offering healing sessions, classes and workshops, and to assist healing
practitioners in the establishment of sustainable holistic businesses. It’s also an active hub for Reiki
practitioners, offering monthly events like Reiki Shares, Healing Circles, and
Reiki Clinics for anyone who is interested in receiving a session. Media’s Second Saturday is a great
opportunity to learn more about Reiki and its many healing benefits. Explore http://www.reikihealingcenter.org/
for details about other offerings and Myra’s journey.
She says the kind of person attracted to Reiki is ‘a very,
very, caring person who might have experienced some horrendous medical
condition, or witnessed someone who has, or they are on a spiritual
path,.’ Many of her students
come from Delaware, New Jersey, and New York, as well as Pennsylvania and are
just regular people or are in nursing professions, working in hospice, or
bodyworkers, like massage therapists.
She says her students might want to use Reiki on
other people or on their family members, particularly on someone who is chronically
ill, or they simply want to help themselves. Myra believes it makes more economic sense
for someone who is chronically ill to learn how to do Reiki rather than pay
someone else; that way, they can do it for themselves 24/7 or whenever they
need it. There are three levels to the
training: Reiki I, II, and III. Within a
day, students can be ‘attuned’ at the first level and start doing Reiki for themselves
and others immediately. But, like a
muscle, it has to be practiced in order to strengthen its effectiveness.
So, how does this
energy work? Myra explains, “We are
bio-magnetic, electrical beings. We’re
full of electrical charge. You can feel
the static electricity when you run across the room, for example ... basically,
with Reiki, you’re engaging in an energy ritual that opens up the energy
field.” A Reiki Master is the only one
who can ‘attune’ you to do Reiki by adjusting your energy field so that you can
take in more energy. “In a sense, you’re
manually opening (the crown chakra) and in another sense you’re spiritually
aligning yourself to be one with the person.
We just look like we’re in this separate bodily form but our energies
actually intermingle. So if you are able
to pull the life force energy into yourself and you get next to somebody else
and have an intention that they’re also going to do this, then they can do it. It always surprises me, but it seems to
work.”
She says that there
are people who just freely send energy out through their body, “You can sometimes
feel it knock you over.” And then there
are other people who suck energy in, “They’ll come into your energy field and
you’ll feel tired after being with them because they’ve pulled your energy into
themselves.” When she’s doing Reiki and
feeling around someone’s energy field with her hands, she might feel hot spots,
cold spots, or tingly spots. “I might pick
up a word, some kind of thought form, someone’s name...it’s sort of like
quantum physics - there’s no past, no present, no future - it’s sort of all
happening simultaneously in your energy field.
So a thought that you had three days ago could still be hanging around
your energy field.”
She says that when you align your intentions
and open the channel, you may say, ‘My hands didn’t used to heat up like this’,
or ‘Oh, this is making me able to meditate.’, or ‘Somehow I’m calmer and more
at peace’, or you might describe some sacred image you’ve never seen. This is the kind of thing that can
happen. You know, because you’re at one
with the universal life force, because you’re opening the energy field.”
In a session, a client may feel warmth on their hands,
their stomachs may gurgle, or they might cry, laugh, or cough. “Usually the coughing is when I’m working on
their throat, which is the communication chakra. They might cough or we might cough for
them. When they don’t do it...we’ll do
it for them.” Clients might see colors,
or get some sort of message or image.
“I’ve had people be able to move areas of their body that they weren’t
able to move before, like trying to get out of bed when they haven’t tried to
get out of bed in two years, or they haven’t made a sound in three years and
now they’re starting to make sounds...and the only thing different is that
we’re doing Reiki.” She says that it
isn’t always obvious what’s happening.
For example, sometimes people say, “Well, it’s just giving me the
patience or the emotional support to go through the surgery or to be able to
live with this condition.”
The most
important intention for Myra and all the Reiki practitioners she teaches is to
send the energy for the person’s highest good. “We have no judgment - we’re not
looking for a particular outcome. The
outcome could be that the person dies peacefully. You know, everybody else will be looking for an
outcome that, for example, a dying person will live. But with Reiki you can’t do that. You are working for the person’s highest good,
whatever it is.”
She says in order
to do the job, Reiki practitioners have to do Reiki for themselves so that
their channel is open to pull the energy through. Reiki can be extremely powerful. It can shift the progression of a condition
and yield positive results, cause some conditions to stall or in some cases,
disappear; however, there’s no guarantee that it will make the condition
suddenly go away. Sometimes a client
really needs to ‘hold on’ to the condition for some other reason, or they
aren’t ready to give it up because there’s something else that has to happen,
like healing a deep emotional wound, for example. Myra stresses that no matter how much Reiki
you do, as a practitioner, “You have to keep ego out of it and accept whatever
the result is, which can be very, very hard. “Every time I’m doing Reiki and I
say, ‘Ahh...I’m so good,.’ it
stops. It turns right off. I have to re-focus. I have to ask for help. Usually, I ask for God’s help, or saints or
angels, or Allah or Buddha or whoever the person receiving might be open
to. It doesn’t have to be a sacred name,
it could just be the energy that surrounds me.”
Like a priest, a
calling Myra once thought was hers, she listens to the sick and the weary,
offering kindness and unconditional love, and refers to herself as ‘a
witness’. On Martin Luther King Day, at
Girard College, she and two other practitioners did ten minutes of Reiki on
forty people over a three hour span.
Those receiving had diabetes, heart conditions, chronic pain, and sickle
cell anemia. There were kids with
friends who’d been shot, or their house had burned down, “They come in, you
give them some respite, some relief - and it’s really up to them what
heals...they’ll pull in however much energy they need.” On other occasions recipients will get Reiki
simply for relaxation, like the many medical students she’s worked on who have
experienced profound changes, or seniors who receive free monthly services at
the Surrey Senior Center at the Media Fellowship House. There’s certainly enough energy to go around
- it’s a win-win for anyone who receives Reiki, including the
practitioner. As Myra puts it, “The more
energy the client pulls in, the happier we are because there’s extra for us and
we receive a healing also. So actually,
the client is healing us, in addition to us healing them.”
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