Why So Many Women Arrive in Their Late Forties

Most of the women who ring me for a first session are somewhere between forty five and fifty five. I did not plan a practice around that stretch of life. It is simply who keeps arriving, and after nearly twenty years of training and treating, I have some idea why.

The years that bring them in

By the late forties a lot has usually happened, or is happening all at once. Children have grown up or are close to it. A career has either settled into something solid or is being quietly questioned from the inside. Marriages get renegotiated, or end. Parents sometimes need looking after, occasionally at the same time as everything else. Underneath all of that, the body is changing too: sleep gets thinner, periods become unpredictable, moods move without much warning. A lot of women say some version of the same thing to me in different words: I do not recognise myself lately.

I want to be plain about that last part, because I think plainness is owed here. Reiki is not a treatment for menopause and I would never suggest otherwise. It does not manage hormones, it does not diagnose anything, and it is not a substitute for a doctor. If a woman describes symptoms that need medical attention, I say so directly and point her toward getting it. My part is much smaller than that, and I would rather she know the size of it before she books.

What a session is actually for

What I offer is an hour where nothing is expected of her. No one needing anything from her, no decisions to make, no phone. She lies down, I work quietly, and she rests in a way that most women in this stretch of life rarely get to arrange for themselves. That is the whole of it. Rest, and a room where she is not responsible for anyone else's day. You can read more about what a private session involves.

Plenty of women tell me they feel slightly foolish booking that hour, as if wanting quiet were an indulgence they need to justify to someone. I do not think it is. Usually something has been building for a long time before a woman finally asks for it, which is part of what I have written about separately in a piece on when people tend to come.

Small print, not romance

I would rather a student or a client arrive with an accurate picture than a romantic one. Reiki here does not involve crystals, and I do not claim to be moving a measurable energy or working from any science I could point to. What I can say is narrower and, I think, more useful: an hour of attention, given without an agenda, in a life stage where attention is usually flowing outward rather than in. The chakra system I teach as part of this work is useful vocabulary, not something older than it is, and I would rather say that plainly than let a bit of mystery do the selling.

The other door: training as a second act

There is a second group of women in this same age range, and I probably meet as many of them as I do the first. These are not people looking for a session. They want to train, often because they have finished the main stretch of raising children, or have stepped back from a career, and they are looking for something with real structure behind it rather than a weekend of vague inspiration.

I like teaching this group in particular. They ask harder questions than a twenty five year old usually does, and they are not interested in being sold a myth. Training runs from Level 1 through to Master Teacher, in small groups of no more than six and often one to one, in Canggu or live online, with dates arranged around the student rather than fixed to a calendar. Anyone weighing it up can see how the levels are laid out on the training page.

What I tell all of them

Whichever door a woman comes in by, I tell her roughly the same thing. Reiki will not fix anything on its own, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to make the offer sound bigger than it is. What I can offer is time, attention, and a room where nothing is asked of her for an hour. For a great many women arriving in their late forties and fifties, that turns out to be the harder thing to find.