My week post second attunement provided further evidence that it really took with me in a way that the first didn’t.  The weirdness I experienced with food in the first week mostly abated, while the physical signs I had expected then showed up in the second week.

Disappointingly, I indeed seem to have lost my taste for my evening glass of red wine.  I haven’t lost the desire to enjoy a glass, but when I pour one, I don’t drink it.  I’m hoping I’m just going through an adjustment phase, like I did with food.

I ate and slept mostly normally, but all week, I was tiiiiiiiired.  I barely made it through my step workout at the gym on Tuesday, like my energy meter was in the red and I was running on fumes.  I decided to give my body a break after that.  On Friday morning, I woke up 10 minutes before my alarm and noticed that I felt GREAT. Not just normal again but completely refreshed.

I continued to practice Reiki in short bursts, a few minutes at a time.  I have yet to sit down and give myself a focused self-treatment session, which would be around 40 minutes in length.  This is partly due to the difficulty inherent in creating new habits.  But I’m afraid there’s something else at work.

I find myself slipping into old thought patterns.  When I first decided on this new path, I felt the passion that drives action and creates the confidence and optimism necessary to pursue a goal, e.g. “I’m going to build a business, and it’s going to happen naturally and smoothly, and I will attract clients to my business with ease…”  Right now, it’s “Damn, it’s 10:30pm and I haven’t practiced Reiki yet today, and how on earth am I going to pull this off…?”

There’s nothing to be done with this but to acknowledge it, release it, move through it.  I am working through some really old and really ingrained beliefs, or more precisely, fears.  I absolutely intend to continue working with the energy, and as I practice on myself, the benefit is twofold (at least): I will be developing my skill, and I will also be facilitating my own healing on every level, which includes the aforementioned deep-seated fears.

Yesterday, I attended my second Reiki share group and my first since being attuned.  It was my first time practicing on people and definitely my longest amount of time spent channeling the energy.  There were six of us on two tables, so each person took a 30-minute turn receiving Reiki from two practitioners.

On each recipient, I began with a scan of their body, listening with my hands, so to speak, and not “hearing” anything.  I didn’t feel guided to place my hands in any particular spot, so I just went through some of the standard hand positions.  I noticed that I constantly felt like I was in the “wrong” spot or wasn’t positioning my hands “right”.  I use quotes because there’s no such thing.  The intention is the most important aspect of being a conduit for the energy, and the energy itself does the rest.

I was third on the table and something interesting happened when I was the recipient.  About two-thirds of the way through my session, I noticed that one of the two practitioners at my table, a Reiki Master/Teacher who just recently attuned her first group of Level I students, was going through the exact same sequence of hand positions that I had used, arbitrarily, on her.  After the session, I asked if she was aware she’d done that, and she was not.  I felt I had received validation (from whom/what? my guides? I have no idea) that the hand positions I had chosen were perfectly fine and I need not concern myself that I am not yet receiving guidance/intuition about how to conduct a session.

After we’d all taken a turn, we gathered to share our experiences, and I said I feel like I’ve just been pushed out of the nest.  Everyone assured me that I will gain intuition and confidence with practice, practice, practice.  And so it seems I have a new opportunity to get out of my own way.  First I had to relax into the flow of the energy and allow myself to be aware of it; now I am to allow my intuition to develop as it will.