From The Wildflowers

My First Reiki Experience: Golden Waves, Letting Go & Sunflowers

Yesterday, I tried Reiki for the first time. I’d been curious about it for a while, particularly as I’ve been exploring different approaches to wellbeing, mindfulness and reconnecting with yourself. I didn’t go into the session expecting anything dramatic to happen. I wanted to experience it for myself, stay open-minded and see how I felt.

One of the things I really liked was simply having permission to stop. There was nowhere I needed to be, nothing I needed to fix and nothing I needed to achieve. I could lie there, close my eyes and focus entirely on what I was feeling in that moment. For someone whose brain normally has approximately seventeen tabs open at once, that alone felt pretty bloody lovely.

As I relaxed more deeply, I started seeing what looked like golden waves and different symbols behind my closed eyes. I wasn’t trying to create an image or decide what I should be seeing; I just noticed what appeared and allowed it to come and go. The gold was particularly striking and seemed to move in waves rather than remaining still.

During the session, I decided to focus my intention on letting go. I thought about any blockages, heaviness or negative energy I might have been holding onto and mentally gave myself permission to release it. As I did, I became very aware of sensations in my hands and feet. It genuinely felt to me as though something was travelling through my body and leaving through those points.

Whether someone interprets that sensation as energy moving, the nervous system responding to deep relaxation, the power of focused intention, or something else entirely is going to depend on their own beliefs. I actually think that’s part of what makes experiences like this so interesting. I don’t feel the need to force one explanation onto it. I know what I experienced, and I can remain curious about what that experience meant to me.

Afterwards, the woman who performed the Reiki told me that throughout my session she had repeatedly been seeing sunflowers and strength.

That immediately caught my attention because sunflowers already have a very personal meaning for me and for Nova Rising Soul. She didn’t know that beforehand. It was only after she told me what she had seen that I explained that sunflowers are part of my logo and the symbolism behind Nova.

There’s a beautiful idea connected with sunflowers that has always resonated with me: they look towards the sun for light, but when it’s dark, they turn towards each other.

For me, that represents so much of what Nova is about. We all have times when we’re able to find our own light, but there are also times when everything feels dark and we need other people. We need connection, understanding, support and somewhere safe to turn. Sometimes we are the person looking for the light, and sometimes we get to be part of that light for somebody else.

So for her to independently tell me she had been seeing sunflowers, during a session where I had been focusing so strongly on releasing what I no longer wanted to carry, felt incredibly personal. And then there was the other word she kept getting: strength.

That combination stayed with me.

I don’t need to decide whether it was spiritual synchronicity, intuition, coincidence or something else entirely. I think there can be value in allowing ourselves to experience something without immediately needing to put it into a box. What mattered to me was that I walked into that room with my own intentions, she experienced imagery she knew nothing about, and afterwards those two things came together in a way that meant something to me.

I think that’s also why I’m enjoying exploring practices like Reiki. For me, wellbeing isn’t about finding one magical thing that suddenly fixes everything. It’s about building a collection of things that help us understand ourselves better, slow down, process what we’re carrying and create moments where we can genuinely reconnect with ourselves.

Reiki may resonate deeply with one person and not at all with another, and that’s absolutely okay. I don’t believe we need to accept every spiritual or holistic practice unquestioningly, nor do we need to dismiss something simply because we can’t neatly explain every part of the experience. We can be curious. We can explore. We can experience something for ourselves and decide what value, if any, it holds for us.

For me, my first Reiki session was calming, fascinating and surprisingly emotional in a very gentle way. I walked away feeling lighter, but also curious about what I’d experienced — the golden waves and symbols, the sensations through my hands and feet, and the unexpected connection to sunflowers and strength.

Maybe that’s what I’m taking away from the experience most of all.

Sometimes strength is holding on. Sometimes strength is knowing when to let something go. And sometimes, when you can’t quite find the light for yourself, you turn towards each other.

Nova Rising Soul x