This past weekend I did something rather random, and sat a training for Jikiden Reiki. Jikiden Reiki is the traditional branch of Reiki "energy healing", rooted in Japan.

The practice give us a framework which anyone can use to promote health in their body, and I am here to share it with you.

First Takeaway: Our body is a detox machine.

Our bodies are detoxing constantly.

Think of all of the different mechanisms we use to expel toxins - sweating, urination, bowel movements, even the simple act of exhaling. All of these functions take in sustenance in the form of water, air, food, and eliminates the waste.

We have several organs that facilitate these mechanisms: our skin (the largest organ!), the liver, kidneys, lungs, digestive system, and our lymphatic system.

We do not need to do anything special to detox, we are hard wired to do it in every single cell. All we have to do is let it.

Second Takeaway: When our bodies can't eliminate toxins, they must go somewhere.

The body does its best to cleanse our blood from toxins.

However, in modern life, we are overexposed and bombarded from all sides- our air, our food, our water, medicine, plastics, the list goes on forever.

Sometimes, the level of toxins becomes too much for the body to clear at once time, and the next best choice option is to deposit them into solid parts of the body - into joints, muscles, and organs, where the body expects they will eventually be cleared out.

Third Takeaway: Disease manifests when our body fails to detox for a long period of time.

What happens if we are over exposed every single day?

Every day, our body may deposit some more toxins to our tissues to cleanse our bloodstream.

If we live a less nourishing life (poor diet, not enough sleep, not enough exercise or sun), our body may struggle to keep up with the load, and those deposits may get larger instead of getting cleared out later on.

And over time (sometimes decades later), those tissues get overloaded with matter which should have been eliminated, and they become diseased.

Last Takeaway: What the body does need in order to detox and how we can help.

What our body does need in order to perform its detox mechanisms is energy.

We can think about it in terms of this formula:

⬆️ Environmental toxins + ⬆️ Stress => ⬇️ Energy

The more we get exposed to, and the more stress we experience, the less energy we have to expend on other bodily functions, and the more waste we accumulate in our body over time.

Some Actionable Tips

• Regulate stress: this is easier said than done, but there are many modalities that may work for you, such as meditation, exercise, therapy, and time in nature. It is important to invest your effort here, as this is the one you have more control over.

• Minimize exposure to environmental toxins: This one is much harder to control, but thats ok. You can try things like eating cleaner food, drinking clean water, living in places with clean air, but in the end we can never avoid most of it. This places an emphasis on the importance of decreasing stress.

• Increase energy: get more sleep, sun, exercise, and try to eat nutritious whole foods, full of plant energy. If you feel so inclined, you can even try an energy healing session with a Reiki practitioner!

If we take care to do some of the above, the formula tips more in our favor, and we have the landscape to keep our bodies healthy for as long as possible:

⬇️ Environmental toxins + ⬇️ Stress => ⬆️ Energy