The bonkers new facial is hands-free!
A cynical SOPHIA MONEY-COUTTS tries the latest in woo-woo wellbeing
STILL as a stick, I lie on a treatment bed in a small room at 1 Harley Street. Despite being situated in the world’s most famous medical destination, the room doesn’t feel remotely clinical. It feels like a vicar’s parlour.
The walls are painted moss-green, there are two green armchairs either side of a fireplace and charcoal drawings of dogs hang on the walls. The smell of burned incense lingers. It’s cosy. Instantly relaxing.
What’s slightly less relaxing are the noises coming from a woman standing beside me, waving her hands over my face. ‘Whooooosh,’ she says, the hands flicking over my cheeks as if she’s batting off flies. She sounds like a witch doctor: ‘Whoooosh, whooooosh.’
The room is called The Calmery and, no, I’m not engaging in voodoo.
What I’m having done is a reiki facial, carried out by a pretty, delicate lady called Sushma Sagar, who’s a reiki master (not a witch doctor).
Now, I love a good facial. I’ve got to a certain age (33, but can you keep that between us?) where the wrinkles on my forehead and at the corners of my eyes have become regular tenants, as opposed to occasional visitors.
But this is a facial with a difference — Sushma’s hands never touch my face.
No rubbing, no massaging, no plumping, no hideously painful blackhead extractions on my nose. No creams of any sort, in fact.
Instead, Sushma’s facial is based on the ancient principles of reiki (pronounced ray-kee), a Japanese form of healing first developed by a Buddhist monk in the early-20th century.
This monk, and subsequent reiki practitioners, believe that an invisible life energy runs through us all.
In an ideal world, this energy is high and we feel happy and energetic — quite literally ‘full of life’. But, if we let this unseen energy dip too low, or it gets blocked somewhere in our bodies, then we feel sluggish, sad, sick.
Until a year ago, Sushma had a highpowered job working for fashion brands including Banana Republic and Kate Spade. But a broken heart in 2002 brought her into contact with a reiki healer, who suggested she take a course in it herself.
Last year, Sushma decided to go into reiki healing fulltime and now, as a trained practitioner and teacher, she claims to be able to connect with this energy in other people (and herself) and work on any problem areas in the body or face.
She developed the 45minute reiki facial, having observed that her clients tended to come to her with emotional problems and leave with rejuvenated, glowing faces.
Sounds pretty hippy, right? A bottle of rosé tends to be my preferred method of relaxation but, in this age of wellness, I reckon it’s got to be worth trying A something more New Age. ND so here I am, lying fully-clothed on Sushma’s treatment bed, while her hands move around my head as if Mystic Meg is working her crystal ball. ‘Oooh,’ she says, suddenly. ‘What?’ I ask, nervously. I’m feeling stressed at the time of my visit. My first book is out in two days’ time. I’m not sleeping. The adrenalin coursing through my veins means that I’ve lost my appetite. I’m feeling sensitive, touchy, snappy. Can Sushma tell all this with her hands?
‘We’ve started working already, that’s all,’ she says.
Apparently, I have some ‘blocked energy’ around my forehead, but Sushma says this is normal: ‘Most people are very much in their heads and it’s just mental chatter.’ What does it feel like, I wonder? Can she see anything shooting out from my face? Bolts of light? Colours? My aura?
‘It’s like the force of a magnet,’ she says, her hands still moving around my head.
When her hands are inches from my cheeks and ears, the heat emanating from her palms is intense, like having a radiator held to me. That’s the invisible energy, she says. ‘It can be a number of sensations: cold, pins and needles. Intense heat is very common.’
She instructs me to take deep breaths in and out. I close my eyes. She starts making the whooshing noises . . . and I fall asleep.
While I’m out (I subsequently learn), Sushma is using her hands to ‘tune in’ to my energy field. Her hands roam around my head, finding blockages and clearing them.
She may briefly hover over a particular spot, but then she’ll wave her hands energetically to dispel that blockage.
That’s where the ‘whooshing’ comes in — the bad energy is whooshed away, apparently.
‘The aim of the activity,’ she explains afterwards, ‘is to create a lovely, clean, flowing, energy field, so you can feel your best emotionally, expedite any physical healing that needs to happen and feel more connected to the universe and everything in it.’ In other words, it’s like giving your head a spring clean. Out with the old, bad energy and in with the new.
Afterwards you’re left feeling emotionally lighter, which, hopefully, will show in your face. Your worry lines will ease. You’ll glow as if you’ve just slept for 12 hours. You’ll look 18 again. (Well, maybe the last one is overly optimistic — but you get the point.)
I feel like I’m asleep for only seconds, but it’s half-an-hour later that I feel a sharp pain down my left thigh. My arms and hands feel heavy and woozy. Sushma is still waving her hands around my head. H I ask about the pain in my leg. ERE’S the intriguing part — reiki masters are not doctors. They can’t diagnose kidney stones or depression with their bare hands. But they say they can tell if there’s a blockage somewhere and, while I was asleep, Sushma decided there was a problem with my second chakra.
It gets a bit mad here, but bear with me. According to believers, chakras are our energy centres and we have seven of them in our body — from the crown of our head to the bottom of our spine.
Sushma said it was my second chakra (around the hip area) she was worried about. I tell her I’ve recently been diagnosed with a cyst on my left ovary and am due to have keyhole surgery to remove it. The shooting pain in my leg would have been energy moving in that area, she says.
‘I became aware of imbalances in your hip after working on the upper chakra for about ten minutes,’ says Sushma. ‘Once your mind had calmed down, the rest of the body could start to speak up.’
Hmmm. It sounds crazy — but I hadn’t mentioned anything about that area of my body prior to this.
Sushma works for a further five minutes on my hip area, simply holding one hand on my stomach, the other under my back to direct ‘healing’ energy there. The heat generated is intense. She wouldn’t necessarily do this for every facial client, she says, but if there’s an area that needs work elsewhere in the body, then she might spend time on it.
After the treatment, I leave and try to establish whether I look or feel different. I scrutinise my face in a restaurant mirror. My forehead grooves remain, and I think it looks much like it did before — although later, at a family dinner, my siblings say I’m looking ‘rested’.
Do I feel calmer? Possibly. But it’s hard to tell whether that’s restored energy or the three glasses of wine I drink that evening.
If you want dramatic changes and a forehead as smooth as a bowl of custard, this may not be the facial for you. But if you’re up for trying something new, and a little different, it’s definitely interesting.
It’s batty, but I was genuinely fascinated that Sushma picked up on my hip area without me saying anything. Plus, it was a lovely little lie-down in a peaceful room in Harley Street.
Well worth it for the 40 winks alone, frankly.
REIKI facial, €135 for 50 minutes, thecalmery.com