My mother asked me to try Reiki on her. It was the most later-in-life request: practical, tentative, and faintly ceremonial—like someone wanting a new kind of casserole at a church potluck. I had earned my Usui Reiki Master certificate a few weeks earlier and, like many newly certified healers, was equal parts earnest and insecure. I had practised on strangers in a yoga studio with soft music and neutral pillows; I had visualized energy fields with the same devotion some people reserve for fantasy football. But doing Reiki on my mother felt less like spiritual work and more like preparing for an exam in an ancestral language..
Explaining Reiki to my parents was challenging. My father folded his hands in his lap like a man folding laundry—quiet, habitual, and unimpressed. He pronounced ‘Reiki’ like a brand name trucker accessory: ‘Wreck-e.’ My mother blinked politely as if I had just said ‘bridge’ and ‘brunch’ in the same breath. My parents like facts, receipts, and tidy endings. Touch, feelings, and the murky business of interior life—these are things to be rationed. So when I pulled into their driveway after a community fundraiser and heard, with the calm of someone ordering tea, ‘I want you to try that Reiki on me,’ I panicked.
’I can’t do Reiki on you,’ I blurted. ‘I don’t have my massage table.’
’That’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll lie on my bed.’
’But I don’t have my sage candle,’ I said, a desperate grab for ritual accessories that would buy me confidence.
Their bedroom is robin-egg blue and arranged like a Victorian exhibit, complete with lace and a lamp that glows yellow. My mother cleared a path through decorative pillows and lay down, with the steady, unshowy surrender of someone who has learned to get comfortable with small experiments in later life. A shaft of late afternoon sun pooled on the duvet. I thought of the pragmatic ways she managed uncomfortable things: handing me a book about my period; stepping in to end my first love after the snowstorm that left me hospitalized; awkwardly trying to comfort me when another boyfriend left for the military. Tenderness, in her world, is scheduled, and doled-out efficiently but economically.
I rubbed my hands like a magician warming his palms, feeling silly and solemn. ‘Twenty minutes,’ I told her, glancing at the clock and giving my fledgling competence a deadline.
I settled into the practice: slow, deliberate breaths; a steady image of warm light; my hands resting with intention, channeling gentle, unwavering energy. I placed my fingers in a V on the crown of her head. Her spine eased into the mattress with the unhurried relief of a ship finding harbor. For a few blessed minutes, we were temporarily unmoored from our usual style of interaction, and there was a hush that felt like mercy. I watched the tiny flutter of her eyelashes, the slow, generous rise and fall of her chest, and imagined I was a conduit for something uncomplicated and kind.
Then the breach: his voice, up the stairs, carrying like a kettle being knocked on the counter.
‘Helloooooo…?’
Please, Dad, I thought. Go alphabetize the spices. Go polish the breadbox. Go retreat to the bathroom, where he usually reads the paper and rehearses greetings like a radio announcer.
He called again, louder: ‘HELLOOOO!’
I squeezed my eyes shut. When he called a third time I lost my composure. ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! We’re up here doing Wreck-e!’
The house inhaled. Three floors, two cats, and a suspiciously moral radiator heard me. I felt foolish—an amateur exorcist raising the roof. Then, blessedly, silence.
My mother blinked and smiled as one does after receiving a gift you didn’t know you needed.
‘When you put your hands on my forehead,’ she said slowly, ‘my thoughts…they scattered.’ She paused, testing the truth of her pronouncement. ‘When you put your hands on my belly, your palms felt hot—almost too hot.’ She sat up, delighted, like someone who found a ten dollar bill in the pocket of an old coat. ‘And when you held my ankle, a wave of energy went to my knee and down my shin and out my big toe.’
Small things can make a difference. I wanted to clap, to hum a victory tune, to do the celebratory dance of a daughter whose teenage years had been shaped by practical kindness and clipped consolations. But I didn’t want to embarrass her. I watched as cheeks softened.
‘I felt peace,’ she said, with the plain authority of someone reporting weather. ‘Like, like something letting go.’
In the days that followed, the house resumed its usual choreography. My father cleared his throat and returned to the bathroom to rehearse his salutations. My mother called her mahjong friend and described the ankle thing with the exactitude of a person who had been given a new tool and wanted to know the warranty. ‘It went right out my big toe,’ she said, and the repetition made me laugh—an audible, grateful sound, not a raucous victory cry, but something kinder.
People who market alternative therapies promise tidy narratives: symptoms, method, cure. Real life is not tidy. The tiny triumph in our robin-egg room was not proof of cosmic electricity or some viral spiritual trend. It was the quieter anomaly: a mother who, later in life, entertained something strange enough to report it as a bodily fact; a father whose bluster framed the scene like a comic aside; a daughter who found that, for once, belief didn’t feel performative. My mother, in her blunt, practical way, had offered quiet approval.
I kept a Matchbox joke in my head—Reiki, not Wreck-e—because the mispronunciation made the story portable and funny. But the deeper souvenir was the sentence she gave me: ‘I felt peace.’ I tucked that sentence into my coat like contraband and walked home happier. The house was louder with ordinary life—clanking dishes, low radio, the neighbor’s dog practising operatic yips—but something in that soundscape had shifted, softening at the edges.
Later, when I visited again, we would sometimes do Reiki, and my mother would fold her hands in a way that suggested she’d been taught a new posture for the heart. She wasn’t chanting or changing her routine, she’d simply pause, breathe, and remark on how her knee felt a little less tight. And my father? He kept calling out ‘Hello’, but now there was a story attached to the shout.
If the miracle here was modest, it was no less real: two people discovering that being believed can loosen stubborn things. The next time my father mispronounced ‘Reiki’, I didn’t correct him. I smiled and let the sound fill the staircase, while in my pocket, my mother’s sentence felt like a small charm.
Lisa Mae DeMasi has published essays on the writing life, relationships, and horses in Brevity Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, WOW! Women on Writing!, and Horse Network. A former content writer for tech giants in Boston, she now lives in midcoastal Maine, splitting her time between recording the day’s catch at a fishermen’s co-op and caring for rescued horses at a farm sanctuary.
Illustration via Unsplash