The first time I noticed how energy was slipping away I was just giving a friend of mine a Reiki treatment. She had just beat breast cancer and had a clean bill of health, but still felt as if something had remained. She felt a slight pressure in her chest.

First, I performed her treatment routinely and then went back to focus on her chest area. She was right, there was some energy stuck. It did feel like sticky tar, which told me that it had already become stagnant and was not too far from causing discomfort. So I started working on removing the energy. To my surprise, as I was working on it, the energy had suddenly vanished. At first, I was stunned because I knew that the energy could not just have jumped out of the body, especially when it felt so stiff and thick. So I kept working around her chest area and then I ‘found’ the energy again. It had moved a bit to the side of her body. So I started working on it again – and again, it slipped away.

As I was working on her chest, I had not sensed any energy that would indicate inflammation or infection, so I knew the cancer had not returned. The rather mobile energy did make me curious though. So I asked my friend if she felt as if something was still there, and she said yes. My reply to her was that I did not sense anything malicious energetically. I further asked her, whether she was afraid to believe that the cancer truly was gone, and she said yes. Then I realized that the sticky and elusive energy was her fear of letting the emotional toll of the cancer go. I talked to her about my theory and she began to calm down, which also calmed the energy down enough for me to remove it. Once I was done, she felt as if a heaviness had been lifted off of her chest. This was two years ago, and the cancer has not returned.

The next significant encounter I had with elusive energy was with a client of mine. She had suffered a lot of loss in her family over the past 6 months and was just about to bury another cousin. She had pain in her lower back. Aside from other health issues, this pain was rather new. As I was working on her back, the energy started to slip out of my fingers and move away. From past experiences, I knew that this meant an emotional blockage rather than an actual health issue. So I talked to her about my theory of elusive energy, which helped her to open up about her emotional pain of losing so many family members so soon and her guilt for not feeling able to go and see her dead cousin before the burial. As she was talking, the energy started to flow out of her back. When she left after her session she said that she already felt 100% better. The pain in her lower back was completely gone.

With emotional blockages, the energy can be anywhere in the body. When a person is not ready to let go of emotional pain, they try to hold on to the energy. It may be very helpful to point that out to your client and ask if they know of anything they are not ready to let go of, or feel guilty about, or hurt, etc. They do not have to tell you (although many clients will probably find relief just to know that they have someone to talk to about their issue), but just knowing what it might be, can be very helpful in relieving the pain and releasing the energy blockage.

Elusive energy is an interesting phenomena, as it shows how much control we actually have over energy and our emotions. We can create energetic blockages without knowing it. We may feel stiffness or sudden onset of pain in different areas that just won’t go away. And if we don’t know anything about our own ability to create pain, we may be suffering for years. Yet once we are ready to let go, no matter if it is knowingly or unknowingly, the pain will gradually subside as the energy shifts and leaves our body. Now with Reiki, we have the advantage that we can help the energy leave if the client is ready to let it go.

First published at Reiki Rays.