10 Solo Sensual Practices for Healthy Aging
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By the time Kay came to me complaining of brain fog from long COVID, she had already dropped out of graduate school. She survived the illness but continued to struggle with poor concentration, memory lapses, and fuzzy thinking—typical signs of brain fog and none of it conducive to writing papers and taking tests. Her doctor initially discounted Kay’s complaints before telling her that the symptoms would eventually go away. As a mom with two teenagers, she didn’t have the luxury of waiting.
Kay was my first client with long COVID but not my last, and I expect to see many more as people desperately seek relief from their lingering, debilitating conditions. I’m an energy medicine practitioner certified in reiki and healing touch. My clientele typically falls into two categories: believers in the effectiveness of energy medicine and skeptics frustrated when traditional medicine fails them. Kay found that the allopathic route offered no remedy and reached out.
“Do you think it will work?” she asked.
My response when working with a symptom or illness new to my practice is always, “I’ll give it a try.”
Researchers and doctors have been slow to recognize the reality of lasting impacts of COVID, and they’re still gaining understanding about brain fog, a relatively new non-medical term tied to cognitive impairment.
The mental confusion of post-COVID brain fog can last weeks or months and is one of the most common symptoms of long COVID. Doctors have yet to determine an effective way to reduce brain fog as well as treat the other long COVID symptoms like joint pain, fatigue, erratic heartbeat, and shortness of breath. Sufferers are glad their complaints are finally being validated, but like Kay, they’re impatient for relief.
[Read: “The Connection Between Yogic Breathing and COVID-19.”]
All ailments have an energetic pattern. Depending on the skill of the practitioner, those patterns may be felt, seen, heard, or intuited, or some combination of the four. Energy medicine recognizes certain patterns and provides techniques that can be highly effective in treating various ailments. A migraine, for instance, is commonly perceived as an energetic spike protruding from the head. It’s best approached by gently softening and reducing the spike with slow-moving hands. Meanwhile, concussions reveal an energetic cockeyed head out of alignment with the rest of the body and require a repositioning of the energy head back into its rightful place atop the spine.
[Read: “The Role of Reiki in a Healing Crisis.”]
Likewise, all bodies are unique, and history leaves a unique imprint upon them—emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually, and energetically. And so practitioners of energy medicine must be present to the particular energy of the client and can’t rely on assumptions. Focus needs to be on sensing the energy, not thinking about it. Thought can weaken the energetic connection. Solely relying on reason and logic can also lead to erroneous conclusions and an inappropriate treatment. This is especially true when working for the first time on an unfamiliar ailment or illness. Any sensory cues, from the recognizable to the unfamiliar, provide critical information about what technique to use.
The energy pattern I’ve discovered in my clients with brain fog is that of a sticky mesh—both inside their skull and a few inches outside—like that of a spider web. Detecting this pattern was crucial to how I proceeded to remove the fine threads. Some of those threads pulled off easily with my fingers grazing the scalp, my hands raking through the area around the head. Other threads required greater effort to remove the gluier strands from around the head and my fingers.
After the first session, Kay’s brain fog was reduced by about 60 percent and was gone entirely by the second. Subsequent clients with brain fog experienced similar results.
Now that long COVID is recognized as a real disability, efforts toward effective treatments are sure to follow. My experience suggests that energy medicine plays a vital role in the process of restoring immune and neurological systems and helping people get their lives back on track.
Do you or does someone you know suffer from long COVID? Discover how aromatherapy may help long-haulers recover their sense of smell.
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