By Bob Reynolds
“The relaxation and extreme clarity were so beneficial,” recalls Diana Marlowe about her Healing Touch and Reiki treatments. The calm and insight that her treatment has given her are a recurring for Diana. The anxiety one feels in the course of a bout with cancer sometimes makes it hard to make sound decisions. “There were so many things that were happening, so much fear, that I felt like I couldn’t think anymore,” Diana confided. “You can be led down the wrong path very easily, and you go willingly because you’re so scared.” The value of these therapies, in her mind, is that they help participants to center themselves so they can be more objective about—and in control of—their healing paths.
Diana was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001. After surgery she was declared to be cured, but that assessment turned out to be wrong. The cancer came back in 2005. A friend of Diana’s who had undergone Reiki treatments insisted that she try it. “In fact, he drove me to my first [LifeSpark] appointment,” she recalls. That first session was “not what I expected at all. [But my friend] was right—it really, really helped.”
At the time of her initial diagnosis Diana “was seeing doctor after doctor after doctor.” She underwent PET scans, MRIs, and other tests. “The extent of the breast cancer was horrendous,” she said. “That generated so much emotional stress. My LifeSpark sessions were the one appointment of the week when I could really relax and not have to worry about anything.”
Before her first session Diana was feeling “down” because her test hadn’t gone well that week. But something happened to her as she lay on the table. “I had this vision of all these paper airplanes,” she recalls. “Each of them had [the name of an emotional] care or worry written on it. I just kept throwing one after another over the edge of this cliff until I didn’t have any more. And that was incredibly moving to me because it told me that I could let go of this. I’ve got doctors who can take care of this—I can leave this at their door. My worrying about this isn’t going to make it any better.”
Not all of Diana’s sessions involved that kind of lucid dreaming. Some were simply very calming. Sometimes her practitioner would work on a particular symptom—especially sleeplessness. “I was on a hormone treatment,” Diana remembers, “and oh my God, I lost my sleep! That made me crazy. And so we would work on that.” She reports that the LifeSpark sessions would help her to sleep again for about four days, and then she would have difficulty sleeping again. But at the time those four-day stretches of normal sleep felt like a victory for her.
“Reiki gave me hope that I was going to feel better and that my body could heal,” Diana said. “After my third session, it came to me that I was going to be around for a while, that this wasn’t a hopeless situation.” Among the positive outcomes Diana has received from these sessions she lists faith. “Faith in the process,” she repeated. “And a greater trust in my own instincts around my health, the ability to question treatment options, if they didn’t sound or feel right, or sounded kind of spooky, that I needed more information about. … I learned that my instincts were very valid, and that I could say no.”
Diana was so grateful for her LifeSpark experience that after nine months of treatment she started taking classes in Healing Touch. She went on to become a Reiki master, and then a provider. About her training she says, “Learning about the human energy field was just amazing—and that a trained practitioner can run their hands over your body and tell you where you had prior injuries!” She was so eager to share her good experience that she brought her doctor a stack of LifeSpark flyers. Her doctor agreed that it was a great idea, and hung some up in her office.
Diana says that she was so much more at peace when she came home from her LifeSpark sessions that her family always noticed it. She laughed when she recounted, “They would just say things like, ‘You’re really calm tonight. You must have had a treatment.’ Her sessions were on Wednesdays, so her family knew she was going to be calmer than usual on those days.
Diana is now on chemo, and says that LifeSpark sessions are helping her keep her energy up. Asked if she would recommend LifeSpark to others with cancer, she says absolutely. “Reiki and Healing Touch helped me get my sleep back, really eased the pain, and gave me extreme mental clarity. It helped all those swirling worries and thoughts stop so I could really look at what was happening. That was huge. You can’t really make good decisions when you’re panicking.”
“One thing I really liked about the LifeSpark treatments,” Diana said, “is that I was lucid when I had insights.” Elaborating on her waking dream about the paper airplanes, Diana recalled, “It was such a clear vision—I can still see them as they floated over the hills and valleys, and over the horizon.”
