Feeling Sad After Reiki? Here’s Why and How to Fix It

There are no harmful side effects when you go in for a Reiki treatment. However, since you will be going through a rebalancing process, you may feel energized, tired, unpleasant physical sensations, and even emotional and sad.

If you’re feeling sad after Reiki, it’s a result of the healing process that is taking place. As your body releases any negative energy, it’s common for you to feel some symptoms, such as sadness, on its way out. To help with this, it’s best to observe and process these emotions as they arise.

If you feel sad or emotional after completing a Reiki session and want to know more about why this happens and what you can do about it, keep reading below to find out.

Why You Feel Sad After Reiki

While you are not going into a Reiki treatment to come out feeling drained, tired, and possibly sad, it is more common than you think and not something to worry about. Overall, it comes down to these two main reasons we have listed below.

Healing Is Not Linear

The alternative healing practice of Reiki is meant to address healing for the entire person, which helps heal your physical, psychological, mental, and spiritual parts of yourself. Through Reiki’s practice, healing is not a narrow term but broad and can define a way of life. One that promotes growth and transformation for the entire person may not always be a clean and easy process.

The Healing Process

The healing process is different and unique for every person who experiences it, so some people may inevitably feel energized, renewed, and happy after Reiki. In contrast, others may feel emotional, tired, or sad. All in all, people have different things within them that need to be healed.

The healing within each person will mimic what can be best described as a spiral, one that may feel like you are taking two steps forward and one step back. The healing slowly peels back the layers of the physical, spiritual, or mental problem until full recovery occurs.

This healing process typically occurs as the original problem or issue results from many different aspects of your life. As a result, many energy shifts within you have to occur to allow the healing.

The Emotional Effects

While this healing process is taking place, you are clearing yourself of all negative energy that causes you mental or physical pain. The best way to think about this process is to imagine you are giving your house a deep clean.

At first, it is a complete mess; piles of clothes built up on chairs, stacks of paper overflowing on every desk, and within each nook and cranny, there seems to be a ton of dust building up. So, in an attempt to clean and organize it all, you may begin to realize that you have only created more piles that have only spread throughout the room, and on top of it all, the dust has become unsettled and is rising to the surface.

While it may look like more of a mess, as time passes and you continue to clean and put things in their place, your home feels clear, light, and refreshed.

The same thing is then happening with your emotions, except the Reiki treatment is what is cleansing you. While it may feel like things have been brought to the surface and the beginning feels challenging or upsets you, it is because it is the only way to restore your emotional, mental and physical balance and clear out any problems.

The Purification Process

Reiki and the healing technique is essentially an energy purification process to heal any aspect of your mind, body, or spirit. As it takes place, life force energy is emitted from the practitioner through you in a non-invasive way that encourages the body’s natural cleansing process.

This encourages the body to begin to release any buildup of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual toxins that have become a part of your energy system. Through the body’s natural processes, the buildup of toxins may be past experiences in the physical form, such as injuries, illnesses, or body aches, or the mental state, such as traumatic events, is then encouraged to be released.

The Healing Crisis

This cleansing and purification experience, which is heightened following multiple Reiki treatments, can then lead to what is referred to as a healing crisis. Throughout this, it is possible that past symptoms can temporarily come up to the surface, making you feel as though the Reiki has only made things worse and not better.

However, potential symptoms such as sadness or feeling drained are just a part of moving through the healing process. Ultimately, this will lead you toward true healing as all of the toxins that were once within you are released.

What to Do if You Feel Sad After Reiki

While there is no way to prevent the feelings that may come about after a Reiki session, such as sadness, there are different ways that you can help yourself better handle it.

Talk to Your Reiki Practitioner

The best thing to do after any Reiki session is to talk to your Reiki practitioner if you have any immediate disturbing feelings. They will be able to reassure you on how you are feeling, guide you to a better place, and be best suited to explain the process you may be going through as you can inform them of any specific emotions or thoughts.

If the feelings occur during a session, you can also ask them during or after if there are ways to prevent this.

Even if the feelings pop up a few days following a session, do not be shy to contact your Reiki practitioner, as they will be more than willing to support you or guide you in the right direction to finding some.

Take Some Time for Yourself

When uncomfortable emotions begin to arise, and you may feel sad as dark or upsetting thoughts come to your mind, the best thing you can do is observe these thoughts and experience how they make you feel. However, it would be best if you did not let those thoughts consume you during this; instead, you choose to process them and then let them go.

It is best to let these thoughts pass through your consciousness as you would observe a car passing by you on the freeway, observe your thoughts passing by and let them go without getting too caught up in them.

Spend some time alone during these moments, and feel free to write out how you think, meditate, and appreciate the newfound understanding you now have. If you have severe emotional or physical symptoms, it would be best to visit your healthcare practitioner to ensure it is nothing serious.

Final Thoughts

While the process of Reiki has some fantastic benefits that can help with many aspects of healing, leaving you feeling refreshed and energized, you may also find that it can make you feel drained or sad afterward.

This is no cause to worry, though, as this is part of the healing process that you go through due to the Reiki treatment and is part of how true healing can then occur.