On a winter’s day long ago, I was sitting in my car parked outside my caravan, enjoying the trapped heat and reading my book.

Without warning the passenger door opened and suddenly a one-time colleague was occupying the seat beside me.

Many things were going through my startled head, and there were three beats of silence. I knew Sean was a bit odd, and social etiquette wasn’t his strong point. The first words were mine.

“Close the door then, you’re letting all the heat out!”

“Ah, the fresh air is good,” Sean argued.

“I have period pains, I need the heat, shut the damn door or go away!”

Sean shut the door.

“I’ve found that a bag of hot salt on the belly really helps with mine,” he says.

“You’ve found?”

“Yes. You get a cast-iron pan, heat the salt slowly, pour it into a bag and put it on your belly.”

“A heavy pan, lifting it, and weight on my belly? No thanks, you can keep your remedies for your period pains.”

Sean’s sister, Tracy, was a close friend of mine. I checked with her after this intrusive and bizarre conversation, and no, Sean was not a hermaphrodite, nor had he ever been a she.

“He’s a poet,” was her obtuse explanation. Eventually, I took that to mean he had an associative imagination and was trying to understand what period pains are like. Well here is what mine were like:

My period was 24 hours of excruciating pain, vomiting, and bent-double excursions (often in a freezing wet gale) to the toilet block for diarrhoea. And tears. Wailing and moaning tears.

I took Paracetamol, made hot water bottles, and eventually moaned myself into a trance if I was lucky. After 24 hours, the pain would start backing off in waves, with brief spells of respite. I would sink into the relief, and I’d be gone…for about three seconds.

Where did I go? Did I leave my body, or my consciousness? I don’t know, but thought, time, and most importantly, pain did not exist.

Then the pain claimed me again. Repeat. Until I managed to stay ‘gone’ long enough to fall asleep.

I couldn’t stand to be touched. Even someone sitting on the bed where I lay was agony. To this day, even if it’s in a movie, I wince when someone sits on a hospital patient’s bed.

Yeah, they’ve just been cut open and you’re bouncing on their bed?

On our remote peninsula, work was only to be had during the tourist season, so I worked from 9.00 a.m. till 2.00 a.m., dog-walking and dish-washing. I didn’t have a day off, except the first day of my period. It wasn’t a day off in the normal sense of the word. I dreaded it.

I suffered the agony every month, and then I heard of Reiki

Reiki promised healing, and instant relief from pain. A Reiki teacher was coming to the area to teach a course, but I didn’t have the time off to attend, and money was tight anyway, — keeping my car on the road was my priority.

My neighbour Addy did do the Reiki course and regaled me with her tales about it.

Broken finger? Reiki was applied and knitted the bone so fast that it had to be rebroken and set straight! The caution was to hover your hands over the affected area from a distance, not lay them on directly.

There is unlimited energy in the Universe, so so much of it. Reiki taps into it. We can all channel Reiki through our hands, and being initiated means we can concentrate that Universal energy safely.

A year passed, and Addy had done the Reiki II, where you learn to give Reiki with your thoughts and to send it long distance. One day we were playing back-gammon in my kitchen when my period symptoms began. They come on fast. We finished the game and she went home.

My pains stopped. No vomiting, nothing. I had a pain-free period for the first time in my life. It was Addy, who unbeknownst to me had gone home and sent me Reiki. Wow. It really worked!

Addy did the Reiki III course, which meant she was now a teacher, and could ‘attune’ beginners. When she was going away to Galway for three months and asked me to mind her cats, she offered to pay me. I said no, let’s just do an exchange.

“How ’bout I teach you Reiki, when I get back?”, she said, and I delightedly agreed.

Lo, it was so.

Addy taught me how and I gave myself a full Reiki every day, for 28 days.

My monthly agonies became a burden of the past. I was very, very grateful. Age 15 to 35 they had ruled my life. Now I was free.

Not quite. It took three bouts of feeling darkly low, lack-lustre, and critical of everyone and everything for me to realise that this new-to-me depression was tied to my coming on my period.

Of course, I had friends who suffered from PMT (Pre-Menstrual Tension) and had heard their stories, knew to tiptoe around them, but never having suffered PMT myself I didn’t really get it. Until I got it.

“Jaysus, give me the physical pain over the emotional pain any day!”

was my plea. Funny enough, that worked. The next month, I duly did get period pains — the whole familiar kit and kaboodle — but after that I got neither PMT nor pains ever again.

When I got my first COVID vaccine, I was already post-menopausal for over a decade, but I did very briefly get some symptoms of coming on to my period — the hormones smell, the nausea, the upset stomach, and mild cramps. I filled in a survey from my Health Authority, detailing my reactions to the vaccine, and through a Norwegian study, I learned that they were common. It is something to do with immune response, inflammation, and the womb being a source of both.

My more dramatic story about Reiki involves a dog that ran off a cliff

My sister had just got married in France, and my dearest brother, my parents, and an old family Finnish friend Beeta, hired a car and did some sightseeing in Burgundy.

We were staying in Vezelay, a typical French town on a hill with a church at the very top of it.

On Sunday, we drove to see another famous church, but it was closed and we had to make do with walking around it, up to the low parapet wall at the back. It hung over the steep winding road below and afforded a breath-taking view of valleys and hills.

I barely registered the other tourists, a man, a woman, and their black Labrador.

We got back in the car and went on. Beeta, as usual, was straight on the phone to her daughter in Finland. The two of them talked for hours, two or three times a day. I wondered if perhaps they never hung up, just kept the line open permanently.

Suddenly, the car came to an abrupt halt.

Beeta carried on her conversation in the same measured tone of voice. “Now we’ve stopped. A dog just fell out of the sky and is lying in the road in front of us. It must be dead.”

It took me a beat or two for it all to sink in.

“Jesus!” swore my brother, “if you hadn’t stopped, that would have landed on us, and killed us all!”

I was out the door in a flash. I laid my hands over the dog at shoulder and hip. My brother joined me.

“You can give it Reiki, too,” I said, “ imagine an aura of light around you, to protect you, and do what I am doing with my hands. You can channel the free energy zipping about in the Universe.”

He gave me a bemused look but unquestioningly complied.

After a few minutes, the dead-seeming dog got up and dragged itself to the edge of the road. We followed and continued our healing. Then a breathless sweaty man ran around the bend.

“Oh my god! Salomé! She just ran, straight over the edge!”

He was weeping with relief that she was alive.

“My wife is on the phone, trying to find a vet that is open on a Sunday.”

Coincidentally this German-Latvian couple were also staying in Vezelay, not far from our hotel. They passed the restaurant where we were having dinner, spotted us and thus we got an update from them later that evening.

The X-ray had showed no broken bones, just a broken tooth. Miraculous!

I explained about Reiki to them, we exchanged addresses, and a year later I got a letter from Klaus, with a photo of Salomé frolicking happily in their garden. He thanked me again and said she was completely well, with only the occasional bad dream after her accident, —and a healthy nervousness of heights.

She’d had a litter of pups, and was a great mother.

I wonder if she told her pups about the day she pulled a RoadRunner?

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There is unlimited energy in the Universe, so so much of it. Reiki taps into it. We can all channel Reiki through our hands, and being initiated means we can concentrate that Universal Energy.

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