Energy Healing or Reiki Which Is It? Or Is It both?

I've been in a dilemma for a while now. What do I call my healing practice? Reiki? Energy Healing? Both Reiki and Energy Healing?

I've been a Reiki practitioner for more than 10 years now. After injuring myself in massage school, classmates convinced me to try Reiki. I took a class, got the attunements, which open up the chakras (energy centers of the body) and started seeing results after practicing on myself and animals. I went on to Reiki II and Reiki Master, even used Reiki on my Mom who had cancer.

Practicing on animals was my biggest personal reward.  Animals don't come with skepticism.  They live in the moment.  Animals either like Reiki or don't and always let the practitioner know when they've had enough. 

What is most rewarding about working on animals is the look they get on their faces when they receive and are enjoying the treatment.  It's pure bliss!  The calmness that spreads throughout the room is palpable. 

People who are caretakers to their animals need Reiki too. Anxious animal caretakers are often like anxious parents of human children, worried about every ailment their beloved pet was diagnosed with. I first offered a treatment to a woman of a yellow lab that was diagnosed with kidney failure. After my first treatment on her dog, and she saw how calm her dog looked, I asked, "do you want to feel what she's feeling?"

After my Mom passed away, I started getting interested in Jewish Mysticism. As I learned to meditate, I opened up more, became more sensitive to everything, especially energetically -- people, animals, food, my environment -- everything. It was kind of scary.

I felt a much stronger energy flowing through me unlike anything I had felt before. So I started thinking to myself -- this isn't Reiki, this is something more powerful. I tried to redefine what I do. Hands on Healing? Power Reiki? I tried to sort out in my own mind that Reiki is. Perhaps Reiki is but one channel on the dial of the Universe's Energy? The attunements opened me up. However, my meditation practices opened me up to other channels. Almost like cable TV to the Universe -- with a whole host of other selections to choose from or for me to be a channel to.

Do I do Reiki? Energy Healing? Both. I say the answer is yes.