Confessions of a Serial Healer

The Awakening I Wasn’t Ready For

Before I became a healer, I used to think Reiki was gentle. I imagined soft hands, calming music, a stream of energy flowing through like warm sunlight. And it can be that. But for me – especially at the beginning – it was anything but gentle.

Let’s rewind a little.

A Brief History of Reiki

Reiki is a Japanese energy healing technique developed by Mikao Usui in the early 20th century. The word itself means universal life force energy (Rei means ‘universal’, Ki means ‘life energy’). It’s based on the idea that energy flows through all of us, and when that flow is blocked, it can manifest as illness, fatigue, or emotional imbalance. Reiki practitioners are attuned to this energy and act as channels to help it flow where it’s needed – not from their own reserves, but from Source itself.

It’s simple in principle… but incredibly profound in practice.

Reiki can bring relaxation, emotional clarity, deep healing, and alignment on levels we can’t always explain. It works beyond words – often where words have failed.

But no one told me how it would feel to see someone’s pain. Or how loud the messages would be.

The Awakening I Wasn’t Expecting

I received my Reiki attunement in Glastonbury – the sacred heart of so many awakenings, myself included. The moment I was attuned, something clicked. Or maybe… unlocked. It was as if the doors to my intuitive senses were thrown wide open, all at once.

Something strange was happening during our practice with each other, and of course I was questioning what I was seeing, sensing, and hearing – not fully trusting my intuition. Have I watched too many films? Or maybe my imagination is going so wild? Have I heard too many stories and read too many books?

Regardless of how I was trying to pivot it, deep down I knew what I was experiencing was true, but my mind could not comprehend and could not process such an overload, how can all of this be exposed and accessed? It was resisting it with all its rational force – and boy, my mind is powerful.

I could feel people’s pain like it was my own. Right in my body, in very specific places.I could see their traumas like flashes of memory – not vague impressions, but specific moments from the worst days of their lives. The moments they want to forget and wish they never happened, but here they were shown to me in my third eye screen.I could hear voices, cries, whispers – not in a spooky movie kind of way, but as part of the energy field itself to complete the visual picture.I just knew things about them I had no logical way of knowing.

All my clairs were going full swing and getting synchronised downloads. Clairsentience. Clairvoyance. Claircognizance. Clairaudience – although this one was not as pronounced as the other ones, in a lot of cases it just felt like I was going under water or had very loud ringing in my ears while the sounds and voices were trying to get through.Seeing and hearing traumatic scenarios unfold, sensing what they sensed in my body, as well as their emotions and thoughts – all hitting me within a couple of minutes. You still need to complete the session with healing, and then the hard part of communicating back what came through for you. All intense. All… overwhelming.

And it terrified me.

I remember walking out of my early sessions feeling like I had been hit by a bulldozer. Yes, there was an element of excitement and gratitude that I was unlocking all those new worlds, but it would last for a few minutes and then will be taken over by the overwhelm. Not because the session went badly, but because I had no idea how to process what I saw, heard, or felt. There was no instruction manual for this version of Reiki.

At the time, I was still in the corporate world – spreadsheets, presentation decks, complex tech systems, endless meetings and calls by day, spirituality outside the office walls. Part of me was grateful for the “normality” of the 9-6 – I could disconnect, pretend I wasn’t a channel for someone’s unspoken pain. But another part of me felt like I was betraying my path, and the people I was meant to serve. I had one foot in each world, and both were starting to crumble.

I wasn’t scared of Reiki.I was scared of myself.

The Turning Point: A Dream Within a Dream

I have gloriously manifested my own redundancy from the corporate world and went to an Ayahuasca retreat, I remember with the initial application for it I set an intention ‘Transition out of the corporate world into spirituality’, and the organisers told me that the moment you set your intention is when the medicine starts working and setting things in motion, and I shouldn’t be surprised when things start shifting and realigning. I wasn’t even sure what that intention and its wording meant and what’s the nitty gritty of it, but I knew it was what I needed, what my Higher Self was guiding me to bring forward as my intention. I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to just hop off the career ladder I had been building for almost two decades. I completed the application process, now getting ready for my trip and waiting for the retreat to happen. Several weeks before my ayahuasca retreat I was made redundant. The story of how my ayahuasca happened is probably a whole other story of pain, manifestation, magic and alignment, but let’s get back to why and how it helped me with my Reiki and healing practice.

The first ceremony was painful and completely shattered me, I was seriously contemplating leaving the retreat, but I stayed. I asked for the second ceremony ayahuasca to be more gentle and clearer, so that I could put the puzzle pieces together, and the medicine listened. In that altered state of consciousness and in that sacred space held by the facilitators, I was shown – viscerally – what I had been doing. I saw a lot of moving pictures, snippets of different lives – my own, my friends’, my clients’ and people I didn't even know. I was reliving their traumas as if I were in them, as a helpless observer. Paralysed. Trapped. Watching terrible things happen, completely unable to move or speak or intervene. You know that feeling in your dreams when you want to scream, you open your mouth but your scream is silent? And when you want to run to help you are completely numb and helpless? As if you are stuck in a transparent glass container with full isolation from the rest of the world but you can see and hear everything, but no one can see or hear you. Yeah, that feeling and sensation – for several hours while the medicine was working, unapologetic, rough and terrifying. And you can’t get out, you can’t sleep or disconnect, you still see, hear and feel everything, whether your eyes are closed or open. At least when you are sleeping, it is all gone when you wake up. Here, it all goes on and on and on, doesn’t matter what you’re doing. For hours. The only way for you to get through is to fully surrender, trust what’s coming through and allow for things to be shown to you. I was feeling everything they felt in their darkest moments. It was horrific. Hey, ayahuasca, I thought we had a deal for you to be more gentle this time?!

But every vision will be shifting after a while.

At the end of the vision, I was finally able to move. To be there. To become the loving figure they didn’t have at that time. I didn’t need to stop what had already happened – I just needed to hold space, bring presence, bring light. I could bring them love, support and understanding, I could embrace them and tell them that things will be fine over time, that they will get through this and heal. I could still be a witness – but a safe one. A clear channel. An anchor. A lighthouse, not a sponge absorbing everything.

It taught me how to stay with the energy, without drowning in it. How to let healing move through me, not into me. How to become the vessel I was always meant to be.

That understanding, however, will come to me 11 days after the retreat. For 11 days I will be shattered, questioning how am I supposed to be living with all this.

What I Know Now

Reiki is one of the most beautiful and profound healing modalities I’ve ever known. It continues to teach me, stretch me, hold me. It is the foundation of everything I do today, for others and for myself.

Now, I see more clearly than ever – not just what others carry, but how to hold it with grace. I trust the energy. I trust the Universe, the divine, the angels, the spirit and the spirit guides. I trust my gifts and my vessel container. I trust the timing. I trust the people who are meant to find me, will be guided towards me.

And I trust that we are not here to fix – we are here to remember, to reconnect, to heal. Together.

So here’s my confession:

I was afraid of Reiki – not because of what it was, but because of what it awakened in me, the pain that it was resurfacing. All the visions I was seeing, were resonating with my own life and things that I have been through, all the terrible things that ever happened to me got transmuted into a strong powerful reference point to deliver the healing, to be able to personally relate to their stories, their pain, fear, anxiety, emotions and trauma.And yet, through that fear, I found my greatest power.Not in “doing” healing – but in becoming the space for it to happen.

With love & light

Theana

Healer & Energy Alchemist | Eternal Seeker

www.moon-haven.com