What Changes by the Second Session

I notice the second session before I notice much else. It isn't anything a client says. It's how quickly she lies down, and where her shoulders have already settled by the time I sit beside the table.

What a first session usually looks like

The first session, almost everyone is careful. A woman will often sit on the edge of the table rather than lie straight back. She'll ask where to put her arms, or whether talking is allowed. Her shoulders sit up near her ears and stay there for the first few minutes. Her breath is high, in the chest, the kind that doesn't reach much further down than the collarbone. None of this is a problem. It's what a body does in a room it hasn't been in before, with a person it doesn't know yet, being asked to lie still and let someone else be near her while she does nothing.

By the second session

The second session is different in ways that are easy to miss if you aren't looking for them. She gets onto the table faster, sometimes before I've finished setting the pillow. She doesn't ask where to put her arms. Her shoulders are already lower when I come to sit down, not dramatically, just enough that I can see the difference from last time. Some women go quiet almost straight away, where the first session they wanted to talk for a few minutes before we started. It's rarely a big change. It's a woman who has decided, somewhere below the part of her that talks, that this room and this hour aren't going to ask anything more of her than they did before.

The breath changes before I do anything

This is the part I notice most. By the second session, a woman's breath has often already dropped by the time I put my hands on her, sometimes before I've touched her at all. It moves down from the chest into the stomach. The exhale gets longer than the inhale, which is usually the first sign that a nervous system has decided it's safe enough to stop bracing. I haven't done anything yet when this happens. She has. Her body remembered the last hour before her mind had the chance to think about it.

I try not to make too much of it

I'm careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a bigger claim than it is. I'm not measuring anything, and I'm not saying this happens the same way or on the same timeline for every woman. What I'm describing is something I notice, session to session, in a body I've now sat next to twice. It tells me she's more familiar with the room and less on guard than she was the first time. That's all it tells me. What she does with that, and what happens for her afterwards, is hers.

It's part of why I think of a Reiki session as something that tends to build, rather than something that either works in one sitting or doesn't. A first session is often someone testing whether this is for her at all. If you're trying to work out whether now is the moment, this piece on when people tend to come might be a useful place to start.

None of this is a promise about what a second or third session will do. I can't tell you in advance what changes for you, and I wouldn't want to. What I can tell you is what I see from where I sit: a woman who arrived at her first session bracing for something, and who arrives at her second already partway to putting it down.