Either way, Angie had learned that the best way to deal with it was to be calm and gentle and hope that as the client relaxed, their anxieties would float away.
But not, it appeared, in this case. The client, Mandy, who had been recommended by a friend of a friend and about whom Angie knew next to nothing, suddenly opened her eyes and sat bolt upright. If Angie had been any closer to her there would have been a clashing of skulls, maybe even putting a tooth or two in jeopardy. As it was, Angie had been turning up the volume on her CD player to cover the hum of the traffic outside and had been well out of harm’s way when Mandy had risen from her bed like something out of Beetlejuice.
‘I’m not sure this is for me,’ said Mandy, her words crisply cropped. ‘I think I’d better just call it a day.’
She swung her legs off the side of the treatment bed and started reaching for the ground with her toes. Angie leapt into action. Bookings were pretty thin just at the moment and she couldn’t afford to miss any and still pay the rent. She had already had to steal from the groceries pot to pay the gas bill. She could have lived with a less-than-warm flat – she had survived far worse, after all – but a chill in the air did not create the right ambience for the clients and so her gas bill was always high.
‘Please don’t worry, Mandy,’ Angie said now in her gentlest voice, pressing the client’s name in an attempt to create an intimacy of sorts that their relationship didn’t merit. ‘Everyone gets a little anxious before their first treatment. I see it all the time. It’s perfectly understandable, but honestly, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. Reiki is a totally natural process. As I explained, I won’t even have to touch you if you’d rather I didn’t. It’s more a case of the transfer of energy. And that’s the beauty of it. When I use the energy that runs through my body to realign the blocked energy in yours, then you will feel the benefit straight away.’
Of course, this wasn’t always true. More than once, Angie had been accused of being a charlatan, a fake and a fraudster by clients who, despite her best endeavours, seemed unable to take any benefit from her treatment. Angie didn’t mind – she knew that you can’t please all of the people all of the time – but she hoped that the dissatisfied few kept their opinions to themselves and didn’t do anything to undermine her business. At this stage, she had no idea which kind of client Mandy would turn out to be. So, all she could do was try and reassure her and then hope for the best.
‘All I ask,’ she continued, her voice as calm as she could make it, ‘is that for the next few moments you place your trust in me and if, after we’ve started, you feel in any way uncomfortable, then you can just let me know and I will bring the treatment to an end. Now, what is there to worry about in that?’
Mandy’s face suggested that she could see a very large amount to worry about, but she bit her lip, nodding with a minute gesture and lowered herself back on to the bed. She looked even less relaxed than she had done before, and a muscle had now begun to twitch in her neck as well. Angie would start work there and release that first, she decided, and she lowered her breathing and began to prepare.
She took the kantha quilt that she had brought back with her from India and laid it gently across the woman’s body. Mandy flinched at the first touch and opened her eyes again, but this time she let them flutter closed almost straight away. Then Angie struck her Tibetan singing bowl with its felted wooden mallet and the clear ringing chime filled the room. The sound never failed to calm Angie. It reminded her of the ashram in Goa that she had discovered during her year out and that she still hoped to get back to one day. When the bowl’s pleasing tone reverberated around her head, she felt safe and warm. She could almost imagine the Arabian Sea lapping at her toes, hear the bright-feathered parakeets calling to one another in the swaying trees. What she needed to do now was to transfer the sensation of well-being that it instilled in her to Mandy, who was currently a bag of nerves on the bed before her.
As she hovered her hands over Mandy, her eyes closed and her head clearing, she focused her attention on shifting the negativity that was blocking her client’s chakras. It wasn’t hard. Even with sceptical clients Angie found that if she could only get them to submit to her, she could reach a place somewhere deep inside them. Whether they chose to acknowledge this was a different matter entirely. Sometimes a client would deny feeling anything at all, but Angie knew that that was only because they were not allowing themselves to accept the treatment. They would get down from the bed, shaking their head and complaining that they weren’t in any way transformed, but it was amazing how many of them rang to make a second and third appointment.