The Calm That Has to Survive the School Run
September 2026 · 5 min read · By Vanessa Chugani
Almost every week someone gets off the table, sits up slowly, looks at me with that particular softness in their face, and then says something like: "I have to go pick up the kids in twenty minutes." And I can see it, the small flinch, the recalculation, the quiet worry that the whole thing is about to unravel before they even reach the car park.
It is a real thing to worry about. The contrast is sharp. You have just spent an hour in genuine stillness, your nervous system finally doing something other than brace. And now you have a school gate, a small person with a grievance about lunchtime, and possibly a supermarket run between here and dinner. I am not going to pretend that transition is nothing.
But I also want to be honest about what I have seen, which is that the calm does not have to disappear the moment the outside world shows up again. It does require a little intention, though. And that is something I should probably say out loud more often than I do.
What actually happens in those first ten minutes
After a session, your nervous system has genuinely shifted. Not permanently, not magically, but in the way that a person who has been allowed to stop gripping something will naturally hold their hands more loosely for a while. That is real, and it does not instantly reverse.
What can reverse it, quickly, is the mental gear-change that happens when we start running ahead of ourselves. You are still on the table, and your mind is already making the list: park on the left side, remember the permission slip, ask about the reading book. That forward lurch is the thing that collapses the stillness, not the school run itself.
So the first thing I tell people is simple: stay five minutes longer than you think you need to. Sit on the edge of the table. Drink the water. Let your eyes focus on something ordinary in the room, the grain of the wood, the light on the floor. Do not scroll. That five minutes is not wasted time; it is the thing that lets the rest of it travel with you.
The expectation that is worth dropping
A lot of people arrive hoping that a session will produce a state they can then maintain throughout the rest of the week by willpower alone. And when it fades, as it will, they conclude either that something went wrong or that Reiki does not work for them.
Neither is true. What fades is the peak of it. What tends to stay, especially after several sessions, is something quieter and more structural: a slightly lower baseline, sleep that comes more easily that night, the same difficult situation feeling a few degrees more manageable. People often describe it as finding more space between the feeling and the reaction. That is worth having, and it is not the same as maintaining a floaty Tuesday afternoon across the whole rest of the week.
A single session can offer real relief. What I find, and what a 2025 review of eleven trials found too, is that the effects on quality of life were more consistent with longer courses of sessions, particularly eight or more. I am not saying that to sell a package. I am saying it because it matches what I see, and because people who know this going in tend to feel less disappointed when they do not feel serene by Thursday.
What I actually suggest for the drive home
Keep the radio off, if you can manage it. Even ten minutes of silence in the car after a session is genuinely useful. You do not have to do anything with it. You do not have to breathe in a particular way or hold a particular thought. Just let it be quiet.
If silence feels impossible or you have other people in the car immediately, that is fine too. The other thing that helps is not narrating the session to whoever picks up the phone. There will be a pull to explain it, to justify it, to make it make sense to someone else. That translation process is surprisingly tiring, and it tends to pull you out of your body and back into your head faster than almost anything else. Give it a day before you talk about it.
And if the school run is genuinely chaotic, if there is a meltdown in the car park or a forgotten bag or a small person who needs you immediately, that is not the session failing. That is just a Tuesday. The question is not whether you can stay perfectly calm through all of it. The question is whether you come back to yourself a little faster than you would have done otherwise. Most people find that they do.
On protecting something that is yours
One of the things I notice is that the women who come to see me are very practised at giving their full attention to everyone and everything around them. That is not a criticism; it is just accurate. The session itself is an hour that is genuinely theirs, and even the ten minutes after it belong to them.
I think it is worth naming that. Not as a grand statement, just as a fact: you are allowed to arrive back into your life at your own pace. The school gate will still be there. The permission slip will still be unsigned. Those ten minutes are not self-indulgence; they are the part where you actually absorb what just happened.
If you are curious about what a session here looks like, or whether it might suit where you are right now, the sessions page has all the details. And if you are already thinking about whether this is something you want to learn yourself, rather than just receive, the training page is worth a look too.