08/26/2026
When you read these captions, you’ll understand why I’m belated in sharing this news…as it’s all felt soooo…surreal…uncertain…new…evolving.
This April, I took on an exciting (and slightly daunting!) new role, leading the Reiki Program with the Johns Hopkins/Sibley Hospital’s Cancer Survivorship Program.
When I interviewed for the job, I had little experience offering Reiki to cancer patients, survivors or caregivers (just a smidge from folks in my studio classes), and no hospital-based Reiki experience.
I did, however, have a LOT of practice using Reiki to help 100s of people facing all manner of personal and professional challenges find restoration, balance, calm and healing in an array of settings. I had a heart drawn to helping. A personal understanding of the profound physical and emotional healing that can come from practices like this that help us find our way back to self again, back to partnership, back to that inner calm and light we’ve lost touch with, but that always live within.
Amidst the onboarding process late last fall, I found myself reaching out to my boss personally for advice…
As my beloved husband received a cancer diagnosis.
The world stopped for a little while then. We shut down and shut the world out. Pretended to others that things were normal as we learned what was happening and what it meant, one excruciatingly long hour at a time.
It felt like an eternity. It seemed insane that the world was continuing to spin, people going about the most everyday things next to us as our own world upended.
When I look back now at how the greater story has unfolded, I still feel the sting and intensity, the life-or-death held breath of those moments. And I know now that WOW. We are SO. LUCKY.
It was a rare malignant tumor they found when something routine and unrelated went awry. It feels weird to say, but thank God things were screwy so we found out and could take action now.
It was treatable via surgery alone. No chemo. No radiation. The prognosis is excellent.
In January, Mike had surgery and during his eons-long-feeling 8-day hospital stay, I shared hands-on Reiki with him every day. For him. For me. For us. (CONTINUED IN COMMENTS)
