To say our cats are spoiled is a bit of an understatement. Although we have six, circumstances allow both myself and my partner to work from home, and this means that our feline babies get nearly 24/7 attention from us. For example, Baxter, one of the kittens we adopted last fall who is now a year old, knows that he can climb on the back of my desk chair, touch my shoulder, and I’ll lift him down into my lap. He’ll get petted and talked to, and lots of attention. Plus, he gets reiki.

When he snuggles into my lap, I feel my left hand start to tingle. Usually I’m using this hand to support his hindquarters to make sure he doesn’t fall (or start to fall and accidentally claw me). With my palm flat against his side, the reiki energy starts to flow and he purrs. Boy does he purr. With his eyes closed and rubbing his face against my chin, he purrs and he purrs. After usually five or ten minutes of this, the reiki stops, and he hops down to go about his kitty business.

Other cats seem to use reiki in this manner. When Nermal, one of our elder cats who is on medication now for some health issues, hops into my lap, immediately the reiki starts to pull. So strong sometimes that my hands hurt. I always tell him it’s okay, he can go slowly and take as much as he needs, as long as he needs it for, and generally, my hands stop hurting as the flow of energy moderates.

To me, I see reiki when used in this manner as an extension of my love. I can pet their fur, feed them treats, talk to them, but cats being the independent creatures they are, sometimes don’t care for hugs or extensive cuddling. So when they do get attention, they get reiki like an extra big hug, or warm blanket of love surrounding them. And, of course, they can take this reiki with them.

In fact, as I’m typing this blog entry, Delta, our youngest cat adopted at the same time as Baxter, has crawled into my lap. She’s quite the little snuggler, and she is purring her little kitten heart out. And you guessed it, the reiki began to flow almost as soon as she settled against me.

For animals that either due to their personality or because of their species, who don’t seem to receive, or need, a lot of interaction from their owners, reiki can be a way to send “Yes, I care. You’re a part of our family” to them without interfering with their natural movements. Just because my cats tend to come to my lap to request their reiki, it doesn’t mean that I couldn’t send to them across the room, or even if they were in a different part of the house.

It’s the hug that warms from the inside. That’s how reiki is most often used in our household.

It’s no secret to those who know me that I really, really, really don’t like thunderstorms. Okay, I’ll take that back. I like the soft rumbly-thunder kinds of storms, with the gentle rain where you know it’s a nice, cozy night, and not one to hover by the weather radio. The storm we had last night though…that one was a doozy.

My dislike of storms stems from many reasons, not the least of which is that I watched my house get holes punched in the siding, and vicious green and purple bruises on my forearms from egg-shaped hail. I had to park about a quarter of a block away from the storm shelter, and I put my arms over my head and ran. I hate to think what would have happened had I been hit in the head. My car was dented too, but as that was a Ford Aspire, that I daresay was aspiring to be a car, well…it happens.

However, I also saw the fire station in the small town where I grew up literally blown apart by a strong downburst. The bricks hit my grandma’s house half a block away. After witnessing that, suffice to say, I am humbled and scared out of my wits when storms get severe.

Last night the winds were a good half an hour ahead of the storm. And my house (okay it’s a trailer) was shaking. Like I could watch my computer monitor vibrate on my desk, shaking. Since by the time the winds got bad, it was too late to run to the storm shelter, I sat there and gave myself reiki.

And boy did the reiki flow. My hands tingled, almost to the point of hurting, from the strong flow of reiki as I envisioned a bubble around my house of protective blue light. “I’m all right. We’re safe. We’re going to be all right. We’re safe.” Or some variation of that became my mantra for the twenty-or-so scary minutes.

And I took deep breaths. Every time the house rattled, every time I felt my heart pounding, or I jumped at a crack of lightning, I took deep breaths. The calming breaths and the reiki helped me get through a very scary time.

I’m finding myself turning to reiki more and more as our storm season heats up. The truth is, living in a mobile home, and spending most of my time in my office, which is the NW corner (and all our storms come out of the north and west), my space is usually the part of the house that gets “hit” first. Add to that my beloved lilac bushes, which sound like the great clawing hands of beasts as they whip against the side of my trailer, and well, when you’re not that fond of storms to begin with, it can sound like an episode of Storm Stories rather quickly.

Since reiki is a method of stress-reduction and relaxation, using it to keep calm and collected during difficult times is a natural fit. It’s the first thing I think of once I have the radar refreshing on my computer. And it’s something on which I’ve come to rely. Any tense, or worrysome, situation benefits from reiki. And I hope by sending reiki to myself in the universe, perhaps it’ll make Mother Nature look a little more kindly on me. Maybe.