Healing the Heart Chakra for Reiki Practitioners

As a Reiki practitioner, your Reiki will be at its strongest when your own heart is

healed and wide open. Reiki is a heart based energy healing modality and since the frequency of Reiki itself is unconditional love, we are well served to do the inner work needed for an open heart. So many of us have suffered intense losses in 2020 that is seems more important than ever to keep our own hearts open so that we can show up for the difficulties that our clients are facing.

Loss, grief, and anger abound. And yet, we have an amazing opportunity to show up and help others, especially if our own hearts are cleared of those things.

One of the best miracles of Reiki is that as healers, we are always called on to do more and more inner work and self-healing. Psychics call this “clearing the channel” and it’s an integral part of our life purpose as healers. I enjoy this side of the process immensely and have learned over the 20 years that I have been a Reiki teacher, to lean into the inner work – even to relish it. My Reiki practice has called on me to open to deeper and deeper layers of healing in my own heart and that pay offs have been enormous, both personally and professionally.

When we stop doing our own inner work, it’s only a matter of time until our Reiki practice dries up. The Reiki healer that is continually doing their own inner work is that one that has a line of clients out the door because we can really only go somewhere with our clients that we have already been inside ourselves.

But why the heart? Let’s talk about the heart chakra for a minute and see why it’s so critical to Reiki practitioners.

My friend Rhys Thomas is a crystal bowl healer, and he has a set of crystal bowls that play the frequency of a chakra, one note per chakra. When I attuned him to Reiki years ago, he got out his crystal bowls and played the crown and heart chakra bowl together, and we played around with the tones until we realized that this was the sound of Reiki. It is a perfect harmonious cord and a beautiful way to experience the sound of Reiki and what happens when we connect the heart and the crown together.

Reiki is the frequency of unconditional love, and the crown chakra holds the energy of unconditional, limitless divine energy, and the heart chakra holds the energy of love itself. If either of these chakras is blocked in the Reiki practitioner, then it jams up the amount of Reiki energy that you can flow through you.

Clearing the crown chakra is best done through spiritual practice, and that is a worthy conversation for another time, but for today, let’s focus on how to fully open our own heart chakras.

There are three things that block the heart chakra;

1. Unresolved grief
2. Lack of forgiveness
3. Lack of self-love

Our poor little hearts are so battered and beaten up as we go through life, by the time I have someone on my Reiki table, their heart has been broken a million times. I often feel like people are even born broken hearted since we drag in our karma from other lifetimes. Karma is, after all, unresolved and unprocessed trauma and emotional residue from previous life times.

Unresolved grief comes about when we suffer through losses that we don’t fully process. For the most part, our culture is terrible at helping people grieve. It takes time to fully grieve a significant loss, and we do seem to expect people to rush through this process.

We need time, compassion and a safe space to express our grief. For some, this can be a loss support group or a counselor. Maybe it’s journaling combined with a self Reiki practice. And honestly, the best cure for grief is to cry when you need to cry. Holding it in, stuffing it down and repressing grief blocks the heart chakra, so anything you can do to release, express and share your grief opens and eases the heart.

My father recently passed away and I too have been struggling to process the cascade of changes that his death brought to my family. When the grief overtakes me, I take time to breathe, I cry if I need to and if I have time, I write in my journal. Even five minutes of breathing and sending Reiki into my heart makes a huge difference. Grief comes in waves, taking us by surprise and then it has its way with us but if we breathe through it the wave will pass.

To release grief-

• Breathe! We learn as little kids to hold our breathe to stuff down our feelings. Breathing well and deeply opens us to the flow of emotions and opens the heart too.
• Give yourself permission to cry when you need to. Crying is the best cure for grief.
• Find a way to talk about how you feel – journal, share with a friend or counselor, or join a grief support group. There are some great ones online these days.
• Give your own heart some Reiki every day.

As we release grief, we unfreeze our blocked hearts and that will often call us to a need and desire to forgive. Forgiveness also one of the most powerful heart openers. When we don’t forgive, we hold onto the past, nursing grievances and shutting down the heart. Forgiveness is not about condoning unacceptable behaviors, but it is about fully working through and expressing the impact that behavior had on you. Forgiveness is about fully processing and releasing the past so our hearts can be open in the now.

Whereas grief is about releasing sadness, forgiveness is about discharging anger. When we express anger in a healthy way, our hearts naturally go into a state of forgiveness. This is not a one off experience, but rather a practice that can take a whole life time.

When you get triggered into anger, let yourself really feel it and then express it in a healthy way. This will rebalance your heart back into a state of forgives- until you get triggered again. When we express our anger, it’s important to remember that we should not target ourselves or others directly. Here are some good ways to do that.

• Bang the couch with a tennis racket or punch a pillow.
• Make sure you make some noise while you do this. Curse your head off, if that is your thing- otherwise try saying NO! over and over again.
• Take a boxing class, go for a run or do some power yoga. Exercise is a fantastic way to release anger when we do it with intention.
• Use your voice. Scream in your car, tone or chant or write it all out in your journal. Don’t scream at yourself or others directly. (It’s bad for your karma!)
• Give Reiki to yourself. Try one hand on your solar plexus and the other hand on your heart. Take deep breaths and bring the anger up from your toes, up your spine and out your mouth. Make some sound while you do this.
• If you have unexpressed rage, you might need the help of a healer to give you a safe space for your strong emotions. Work it out in therapy, with your Reiki practitioner or with a body worker.

And don’t forget, it is ourselves that we need to most forgive. Cut yourself some slack here, there is really no failures in life, there is only research.

The process of forgiveness open and heals our broken and battered hearts, and creates what we all need the most, a resilient heart. A resilient heart is not afraid to love again. We know that there are no guarantees and that we are bound to get hurt again, humans and life being what it is, but we still can choose to take a chance and open our hearts to love again.

Our last piece of heart opening work is the journey to self-love, which seems to come about naturally when we let ourself process our grief and forgive.

Self-love is all about easing up on ourselves and calming the mean voice of the inner critic. It’s about learning to support with tender loving kindness our raw and vulnerable inner places. For me, doing inner child work has been the most impactful at learning to love myself and it has been a lifelong practice.

Self-love is a huge topic and worthy of its own manifesto, of course, but here are a few steps to head in that direction.

• Affirmations and positive self-talk all help us learn to love and approve of ourselves more and more. Louise Hay was a master at this and her work is a great way to start to love yourself more.
• Do some inner child/inner critic work. Learn to love up on and talk kindly to your inner child and also to quiet the voice of your inner critic.
• Practice feeling loving kindness and compassion to yourself in your thoughts, word and deeds. Ask yourself- “What is the kindest thing I can do for myself in this moment?” And then do it.
• Do a self Reiki practice – Try sending Reiki to your inner child or hold a picture of yourself as a child and Reiki that. Or send Reiki into your heart while you are doing some loving affirmations. “I love and approve of myself, today and all days.”

When my heart is open to flowing through grief, and it softened by forgiving the past and I am full of loving kindness to myself, my Reiki is strong and I am able to show up for my students and clients with an open heart. Learning how to unblock your heart will help you open up to a stronger flow of Reiki and have more love in all areas of your life, including your Reiki practice. A full open heart will increase your ability to run Reiki through your system so that you can pass it along into the world in all the beautiful ways that you do.

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