My Little Reiki Bastard

My latest piece published on the Reiki Animal Source web newsletter. Check it out!

I call my cream-colored stray cat, Oliver, my Little Bastard. As soon as I’m about to drift off to sleep at night, without fail, he wakes me up. On purpose. He walks across my printer, turning it on and off and on again, creating little mechanical cartridge noises. If I stay in bed, he goes next to the charger cord on my cell phone, chewing it and knocking it to the floor. If that doesn’t work, he finds my to-do list, or a magazine I left out, or a piece of important mail, and systematically shreds pieces from it until I jump out of bed and chase him from my room. He seems to get some sick pleasure out of waking me out of sleep at night. Reiki has cured none of this.

Aside from perpetually figuring out a way to slip by and escape outdoors when I leave the house (particularly on days I’m in a rush) my Little Bastard has no major ailments. His back leg used to creak on occasion when he walked. He takes a lot of heat in his hips when I give him Reiki, but now the creaking is gone.

I was Reiki attuned last May, during my final semester of college. While floating by on my student loans, a $150 attunement seemed like a manageable expense. I was fascinated by the idea of energy healing, but also very skeptical. My self-treatments dwindled many times. Disbelief and doubt from my family and others leaked into me. It’s easy to make excuses like “Oh, I’ll do it tomorrow,” or “I don’t have time just now for a Reiki treatment,” or even, “This can’t be really real.” At times, the very thing that I was using Reiki to treat—my tendency to deny myself any me-time—got in the way of treatments.

One thing kept me going, however: my Little Bastard.

The day I came home Reiki attuned, Oliver was all over me. I gave him his first treatment that night and he’s come back for it ever since. He’s a hands-on Reiki cat. He tackles me as soon as I crawl into bed. He crawls onto my chest, situating his paws between my collarbones. He rests his chin on his paws and closes his eyes. The weight of his warm, slender body seems to melt into me, and I relax, too. Usually, my hot hands last about ten minutes, and then he leaps off my belly to more of his usual antics.

This uncharacteristically bastard-free time is something I look forward to daily.
It is a rare night when Oliver does not demand Reiki. Those few peaceful moments between me and my cat are definitely fleeting. But they’re consistent. And now that I am convinced that Reiki does have a place in my personal practice, I have my Little Bastard to thank for it.

About the Author: Jessie Tierney was Level II attuned at Equilibrium Energy + Education in Chicago, IL. She graduated Columbia College Chicago with a Fiction Writing degree in May of 2008. She's 23 and lives in Aurora with her Little Bastard and two golden retrievers, Bisou and Cody. Check out her website for her photography and writing.