Seaching for enlightenment and healing hands

I went searching for enlightenment and found the falafel guy. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

One of the many treasures I picked up on my path to spiritual wisdom (“Are we there yet?”) was the Reiki Master Sofia Singher. My first session with her was transforming.

At the time, Sofia lived in a small house in Narrowsburg. Her face was a beacon of light, round and open with smooth pink cheeks and clear eyes. Her salt and pepper hair was cropped close like Gertrude Stein’s. I felt instantly safe in her presence.

Sofia explained the treatment she was about to give. I was to lie down on her Reiki table, under a blanket. The room was dim. The house was set in among the trees so that if you had been able to see through the walls, you would have felt embraced by nature.

A Reiki massage, I came to discover, involves little or no direct touching. It was nothing like the deep muscle massage I usually enjoyed. Instead of opening my tense muscles, Sofia reached into my soul and unleashed a torrent of emotion. Halfway through the hour-long session, I found myself sobbing in a release of grief and sadness that felt both ancient and immediate. At the time, shortly after 9/11, my mother had just died, so I was primed for the flow by recent experience.

As spontaneously as it had erupted, the sobbing subsided. After, I felt a deep sense of peace and love. It was a cleansing of the soul.

I had only a few more sessions with Sofia before she moved to California. What she left me with—the Reiki energy—stayed with me. Over the years I found myself tapping it for myself and my family. Although I was not officially “attuned” or certified as a Reiki practitioner, I called upon the energy regularly to calm emotion or relieve aches.

Not long after my Reiki treatments with Sofia, I attended a Shiat-su workshop at Kripalu, the yoga retreat in the Berkshires. I was looking forward to some “real massage”— the kind that moves muscles.

When I entered the room, most people already had partners, which meant all the strong young men were taken. I was instructed to partner with a squat older woman. I resigned myself to a less stimulating experience.

For the first half of the session, I was the designated masseuse. When I finished, the woman looked up at me and asked where I practiced. “I don’t,” I said, “I’m just learning.” “Oh,” she said, regarding me with reverence, “you should. You have healing hands!”

I grew fond of repeating that story, and drawing out the last sounds. “Ohhhh, you have heeealing haaands!” The last thing I envisioned for myself was doing massage therapy. I save my healing hands for writing.

But the woman’s words stayed with me. I was becoming more curious about the prospect of healing with energy.

Passing through Chicago last spring, I stopped to see a family friend who had been hospitalized for months with a rare kind of paralysis and was now recuperating at home. Her right hand, however, was still locked into a fist.

As she spoke, I felt drawn to her side. I began to hold my hands over her, to corral the energy I felt. At times, the waves were so strong I felt close to losing my balance. As I held my hands inches from her stiff fist, she began exclaiming. “The heat!” she cried. “What is happening?”

I asked if she was okay, and she encouraged me to go on. After a few minutes I stopped, and she held up her middle finger in a gesture of triumphant glee.

She was able to move her hand for the first time in a year.

When I decided to pursue my training and become certified, I attended a training session at Minerva Educational Center in Honesdale. Dr. Betty DeMaye-Caruth led a group of trainees through a guided meditation. During the meditation, it was suggested that we might discover our “Reiki guide,” in the form of a person or image, to accompany us on our path to enlightenment.

At first, I did not see a guide at all. But soon, a face appeared. It was the beatific face of the falafel guy who stands on my street corner in the city and smiles at me every morning.

The path to enlightenment is long and you never know who will join you along the way.

[The River Muse by Cass Collins is a semiweekly feature that generally appears on the editorial pages. It will resume its normal location in two weeks.]