Last weekend I attended John Dye, ND Mind Body workshop. He is the chair of the Mind/Body Medicine Department at Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine. One of the most important aspects discussed during the workshop was affect tolerance. Thought the term was new to me, I had already been using a technique that addresses it when giving Reiki to my clients.
Affect tolerance is the capacity a person has to self soothe in the presence of stimulus that triggers negative emotions and cognitions (conscious and unconscious). For any Mind-Body treatments including just interviewing the client about past or current emotional history, it is a requisite that one must establish the client affect tolerance. The reason for this is very simple, we want to avoid taking the client into a mind-body territory that they don’t have the capability to handle. It has been my experience that doing so requires expert training and experience to be able to bring back the client to a stable emotional affect once their tolerance level has been breached. It is for this reason that one of the first things that I established for a client that is new to my Reiki practice is what is termed a “safe harbor”.
A safe harbor is a positive mental-emotional construct based on what the client perceives as a nourishing, calming and relaxing scene that they have either experienced or imagined. The use of a safe harbor became necessary in my practice when clients would recall emotionally charged memories during a Reiki session. At those times the practitioner has to be cautious on how deep and for what length will the client be allowed to remain with those memories. My guidance in this regard is that unless the client has agreed before hand to explore a particular memory, I would immediately bring them to their safe harbor. The main issue about this is that many times the patients are not aware of traumatic past memories, because forgetting is their mechanism of protection.
It is my opinion that past emotional trauma does surfaces with Reiki because there is connection between the memories stored in the physical body at a cellular level and the Energetic bodies. As Reiki intensifies the connection between the Energetic Bodies and the Physical Body, the memories are triggered and trauma is re-experienced. This is what makes Reiki a healing technique, because once the trauma is brought back with the association of the physical body dysfunction, the energy contained by the memory is released and no longer affects the physical body. The impacts of the traumatic memory recall depend on the magnitude and extend of the association of that memory with other cellular memories. Cellular memories form an intricate network of associations. It is the disarming of negative cellular memories networks what promotes healing because it makes more energy available that is used for repair and maintenance of the physical body, and opens channels and improves flow of energy to areas of the body that were stagnant.
The importance of this is that negative cellular memories networks reduce the affect tolerance of people. When these cellular memories form extensive networks, the person suffers from mental and emotional imbalances. The collapse of such extensive networks must be done with care and requires the energetic compartmentalization of the networks to limit the instabilities triggered by the memory activation and release.
