I didn’t understand Reiki until my life fell apart

Twenty years ago, when I sat in my first Reiki 1 class, I was just a teenager.

My biggest worries then were painfully heavy periods and the heartbreak of my first serious breakup. I was devastated and, if I’m honest, unwilling to take responsibility for the toxic patterns I brought into that relationship: jealousy, distrust, picking fights. I truly believed Reiki might somehow save the relationship.

It didn’t.

But it did something far more important.

It lit something in me that felt ancient, familiar, and deeply aligned.

At that point in my life, I had already devoured angel stories and nearly every Chicken Soup for the Soul book I could find. Learning Reiki felt like the missing piece, like the cherry on top of a spiritual sundae I didn’t yet have language for.

For years, Reiki was something I used quietly and privately, mostly for myself. I turned to it whenever my body hurt, when emotions felt overwhelming, or when life felt louder than I knew how to manage.

Around my 20th birthday, I took Reiki 2. Distance healing felt mysterious and almost unbelievable. How could energy reach someone across the planet? But I wanted to learn because my mom lived in France, and one of my sisters was moving there too.

Even after the class, it didn’t fully click. I didn’t practice distance Reiki much…until years later, after the birth of my second son.

That season cracked me open.

For his first year of life, I struggled deeply with postpartum depression and anxiety, though I wouldn’t understand that until much later. At the time, I believed he was a “difficult baby” and that I simply wasn’t a good enough mother. Even writing that now tightens my chest.

But that pain became an awakening.

As awakenings tend to do, it rearranged everything. I outgrew friendships, found new community, and felt called back more seriously to my spiritual path. I retook Reiki 1 and 2, completed my Reiki Master training, and met others who were also shedding old lives in favor of something truer.

That calling led me to open my first healing business, then called Causey Coaching, now Soulshine Reiki Healing.

I still remember the ribbon-cutting with the local Chamber of Commerce. Friends and family gathered, and I stood there, nervous, uncomfortable with attention, deeply outside my comfort zone. At the time, I didn’t realize that discomfort would become one of my greatest teachers.

Because what I learned over and over again is this:

I grow the most, spiritually and financially, when I’m willing to stretch beyond what feels safe.

Reiki became my anchor through it all. I used self-Reiki to build confidence while doing brave, uncomfortable things: walking into yoga classes alone, attending networking events solo, going live on Facebook, running meditations, and eventually teaching Reiki myself.

Then came another initiation: divorce.

It was long. It was heartbreaking. But this time, I wasn’t unprepared.

When anxiety, exhaustion, and grief surfaced again, I knew what to reach for. Reiki. Meditation. Journaling. Somatic healing. Nervous system support. I understood something deeply by then that trauma lives in the body, and under stress we don’t regress because we’ve failed…we revert because our body is seeking familiarity.

This is one of the great gifts of Reiki: it brings buried patterns to the surface, to offer us a choice. To heal deeper. To choose differently. To seek support instead of survival.

I am the mother of three incredible children, two sons and a daughter, who are the laughter and light, and OMFG WHAAAAT of my life. In 2020, I met my partner, and for the past six years we’ve been building a new, grounded, loving way of being together. A relationship rooted not in codependency, but in mutual respect, healing, and growth.

Today, my work has evolved.

I blend Reiki with Human Design, Past Life Regression, and divine feminine embodiment to help women reconnect with their bodies, their intuition, and their sovereignty. My clients are often women who have spent years people-pleasing, over-giving, and living on autopilot, women who are ready to come home to themselves.

I named it Soulshine because that is what energy healing does when it’s practiced with integrity and presence, it returns you to your own light.

This month marks 20 years since that first Reiki class.

Twenty years of choosing the work.

Twenty years of listening to the body.

Twenty years of letting energy teach me how to live.

Tomorrow, I’ll be opening something special to honor this milestone as a thank you.

Make sure you're on my email list. DM me your email address to nichole@soulshinereikihealing.com or 904-477-6672.

-N