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Reiki, Meditation, Disability and Me
Written by
Keziah Gibbons
Published on
November 22, 2024
I am Keziah Gibbons, a meditation professional, Reiki teacher, and qualified trainer of neuro-linguistic programming. I am autistic and live with mobility loss, chronic illness, and fatigue, I am also a parent to a child with additional needs. I have strong values of respect, compassion, and responsibility, and use my own meditation practice to keep my centred as I navigate life.
I first discovered Reiki in my late teens, but I didn’t come back to it until I was 30, and really needed it. I had been undergoing chemotherapy for Hepatitis C. It was a trial treatment that never made it onto the market, and it was tough going. For the first time in my life I found myself so weak that I couldn’t support my own bodyweight, needed a mobility scooter to get around and couldn’t lift my 2-year-old child. My body was in shock. I would gain much more experience with disability later, but that is a different story for another time…
What is Reiki?
Reiki is a simple, natural and safe method of spiritual healing and self-improvement, it is a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that also promotes healing. In Reiki, everything in the universe consists of energy including the human body and deviations of this energy may lead to diseases. Reiki points out a structure filled with spiritual wisdom waiting to be woken up in human as well as universal energy. In Reiki application, practitioners try to balance the energy flow in individual by sending the energy received from the universe It is based on the idea that an unseen “life force energy” flows through us and is what causes us to be alive. If one’s “life force energy” is low, then we are more likely to get sick or feel stress, and if it is high, we are more capable of being happy and healthy. Reiki treats the whole person including body, emotions, mind and spirit creating many beneficial effects that include relaxation and feelings of peace, security and wellbeing.
Reiki and me
Because I had tried Reiki before, it came easily to me that this was what I needed. I want to be very clear here: Reiki is never a replacement for appropriate treatment, but it can be incredibly supportive alongside whatever else you need, and this was my experience. This is borne out by the research that shows that Reiki has benefits including pain relief, improved sleep and correlating decreased fatigue, and decreased stress. But I didn’t know about the research at the time. I knew about my subjective experience – an experience that started with me crawling up the stairs to the Reiki practitioner’s treatment room on the first visit, and had me bounding up them five months later. During my chemo, I struggled to concentrate enough to practice for myself, but as soon as I was able, I took Reiki classes to Master level. What I noticed most was a sense of agency. There was still much that I couldn’t control in my life, but I could practice Reiki and feel better in the moment, and in the long term.
Becoming a Reiki Master
Because the effect on me had been so profound, Reiki, and, as a natural addition, meditation, became what I did. As well as training to Reiki Master I also became a qualified trainer in neuro-linguistic programming. I started leading meditation groups and teaching Reiki and NLP, and in the autumn of 2016 put my first meditation on the internet. Millions have now listened to and benefited from my work. It’s a career that brings me great joy, that is restorative, creative, and exciting for me, and that has a demonstrable impact on people’s lives, as shown by the messages of gratitude that I receive. It is profoundly humbling to hear from people who are living through illness, life crises, and all sorts of challenges and changes, who use some of their precious time each day to meditate with me and who tell me that they gain some sense of relief, meaning, and connection from the practice.
Covid and Lockdown
And then there was the Covid pandemic. I believe that this is something we are still processing, collectively and individually. But for me two things happened during that time. One is that my work became available to more people, and the other is that my relationship with my own disability changed forever.
When we went into lockdown in 2020, through sheer dumb luck, I was one of the most fortunate people in the world. I lived rurally in a place where I could go for walks every day and meet nobody. And I was already working mostly online, so I didn’t lose my job. With all the information I have available to me now, I realise that working online from home in the way that I do was my way of creating accommodations for myself, but I wouldn’t have framed it that way back then. What I did notice was that many people were looking for peace and connection amidst all the uncertainty, and so my Reiki Healing Circle and other livestreams and workshops were always well attended, and always well appreciated. As a natural introvert (and a subsequently diagnosed autistic), the closeness of my immediate family and the depth of this online community was enough for me and I did not experience the sense of isolation that was sadly the case for so many.
Losing my mobility and Autism
And in 2021 I lost my mobility. An old injury surfaced suddenly and with a vengeance, and the joyful hiker I was withered and died. Despite surgery and physio, the damage was extensive enough to cause ongoing pain and debilitation, and I now need mobility aids to get about and plenty of rest.
I also began to realise that I was struggling in other ways. In early 2023 I finally got professional confirmation of the autism that I’d been suspecting for a decade. Everything began to make sense. There was a great grief that it truly would never be in my nature to fit in – but the sense of relief was greater, as I began to see that there wasn’t something wrong with me, that I really wasn’t the naughty label that I was called growing up, and I wasn’t stupid or gullible or somehow deserving of unkindness – I just interacted with and processed the world differently, and struggled to understand what was required of me socially. Knowing I’m autistic has given me a gift of deep self compassion.
Compassion, of course, isn’t just something you give yourself. Compassion is an experience of shared being, shared feeling: co-passion. Experiencing the challenges that came with my mobility loss, acknowledging the experiences that had always been there as an autistic girl and then woman, and acknowledging the challenges of living with my other chronic illnesses and conditions as well: this experience of accepting my disabled identity helped me to strengthen a compassion for my fellow humans that had always been there. I discovered, as many other disabled people discover, a passion for accessibility.
Accessibility
As the lockdowns lifted and things opened up again, much of what had gone online went back to ‘irl’ (In Real Life). I began to receive anxious emails from people who had not been able to access facilitated training in Reiki, meditation and other such offerings in the past, and who were frightened of losing it now. People living with MS, with CFS, with anxiety, people who found it difficult to leave the house, and who wanted to continue to share meditation and experience the shared community that the online teaching had given them. I reassured them – I was staying online.
And I started to look into how to make my offerings more accessible. I encouraged people to contact me beforehand to discuss what they needed. A common accommodation is for people to be able to turn off their camera during Zoom meetings so they can join from bed on a high fatigue day, or to be able to leave and come back in again if they feel overwhelmed, or sit out the paired and group exercises if they don’t feel up to it.
I started to change the instructions I gave during practice so as not to make assumptions about whether people could sit up, what limbs they might have, or what their range of motion was. This is still quite radical in some parts of the meditation industry, where beliefs about ‘correct’ meditation posture, movements or hand gestures are commonplace, however much they miss the point.
I am still learning how to make my teaching as accessible as it can be for everyone, and pouring my heart and my energy into it. I suspect that it will be an ongoing process. And I’m still learning to make my work accessible for myself.
Working from home definitely helps. In recent months, I have taken a short sabbatical. The gruelling work of navigating welfare, medical and education systems, advocating for myself and a child with extra support needs has taken all I have. And there has been grief and acceptance work for me, that although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with me, I am disabled in an ableist society, I do have limitations, I live with pain and fatigue, and I may never work full time again.
Every time I announce that I am reducing my hours or taking time out, I am touched by an influx of emails affirming my right to tend to my needs, and thanking me for modelling this. I do believe that each individual’s actions contribute to the creation of norms in a society, and I am dedicated to a society where taking the time you need is a norm, one of many values that I work hard to convey in everything I do.
Guided by Keziah
The Guided by Keziah app is a meditation app with a safe community space, dozens of courses and hundreds of meditations, and each month there is a new, free, curated themed playlist or challenge. Reiki and Tarot are the most popular offerings on the app, but there is plenty of mindfulness, psychologically informed practice and even yoga on there, as well as pain management meditations and a new Spoonies course due to be released in May 2025. Because I have lived experience of the additional cost and reduced income of being disabled, I am offering all Purpl Discounts members 50% off subscriptions for life. Enjoy!
Disabled Discount code PURPL must be redeemed via the website and you can find me on my website Keziah Gibbons here and also on my Instagram.
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