While working at a trade school in Florida, I first discovered reiki. A female student complained that she had a headache. A male student said that he could alleviate her symptoms naturally through reiki. He asked the female student to close her eyes. He rubbed two silver bracelets at his wrists and placed his hands at her temples. Everyone in the room sat in silence for about ten minutes. He asked the female student to open her eyes and explain what it felt like he was doing. She said, "waving your hands on the side of my head."

"How do you feel," he asked her.

"Actually, better," she said.

It wasn't until moving to Los Angeles three years later that I would have reiki performed on myself and experienced its cleansing power.

Reiki Energy Healing L.A. defines reiki as "a form of hands-on energy healing that brings back to balance the electro-magnetic energetic fields of our bodies when those fields have been altered by chronic negative emotions and/or negative challenges." …show more content…
For my one-week Creative Writing workshop in Malibu Hills, I asked Reiki Master Carlos Caridad (of Reiki Energy Healing L.A.) to help me perform a reiki bowl burning ceremony with my students.

I had ten students who were 17-20, who had never had reiki work. First, Carlos explained what reiki was and we walked to the sanctuary at the campsite. I had the students write negative things that happened to them or things that they wanted to let go of using orange marker on white butcher paper. Only they could see what they wrote. They balled up the papers and placed them in a silver bowl. Instead of using fire, I used water to pour over the paper. The orange bleed out and turned the paper white, which was a symbolic way of burning the paper. Then, Carlos started his energy work. Click on the video above to see the transformative power of