In my work, I spend my days in logic and analysis. It’s how I’m wired, and it’s served me well. Naturally, when I struggled, I approached it the same way – therapy to understand the patterns, journaling to process the emotions, books to learn the mechanisms.
And it worked. Sort of. I understood everything. I could explain exactly why I felt the way I did. But there was still something I couldn’t reach.
Therapy had given me so much – insight, language, understanding. I could trace exactly how my thinking patterns formed, why certain situations triggered me, what I was really feeling beneath the surface emotions. But knowing all of this didn’t make the weight lift.
I tried Reiki out of curiosity, part hope that something non-cognitive might reach whatever I couldn’t think my way past. I wasn’t expecting much. But I was open to being surprised.
What surprised me wasn’t some dramatic revelation. It was simpler: the profound relief of not thinking. Of letting my analytical mind rest, simply allowing things to happen. And in that allowing, something shifts.
Sometimes it’s subtle – a sense of lightness, the mind slowing down. Sometimes it’s profound – clarity arriving without effort, things feeling more manageable. Not easier, but manageable.
That experience stayed with me. Eventually, it led me to train as a Reiki practitioner myself, not because I’d found all the answers, but because I’d found something valuable in not needing them. Now, when I’m working with busy professionals in my London practice or volunteering with NHS cancer patients, I want to offer that space to others, because sometimes the deepest shifts happen when we finally stop trying to understand everything.
Understanding matters. But so does simply being.
