release, restore, reclaim

You’ve said it this week. Probably more than once.

Someone asked how you were, and you said fine, thanks, and you meant please don’t. And then you went back to your desk and did the work, because you always do the work, and that’s rather the problem.

Because here’s what’s actually true.

You read your own emails six, seven, nine times before sending them. You check your phone in bed. You can’t tell the difference anymore between a real emergency and someone else’s ordinary Tuesday. There’s a low hum under everything and you’ve stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a fridge.

And nobody has asked, because from the outside you are absolutely fine. Better than fine. You’re the one everyone relies on.

Here’s the part I most want you to hear.

In any given week in Canada, three times as many people go to work while impaired by their mental health as stay home because of it. Thirty-six per cent had at least one day in the past week where they were so depleted or distracted that they couldn’t do their job properly — and turned up anyway. Only eleven per cent actually took the day.

(Mental Health Research Canada, 2025 — five thousand employed Canadians.)

Read that again, because it means something specific about you.

The people who are struggling are not the people who are absent. They’re the ones still going. Still delivering. Still saying fine, thanks.

You have probably decided you don’t qualify for help — that help is for people who have actually fallen over, and you haven’t. You got up, you did the day, you’ll do tomorrow.

That reasoning is exactly how women end up doing this for years.

 It’s coaching, and it’s reiki, and the combination is deliberate.

Here’s why. Everything you already know you should be doing — asking how much time they actually want you to spend, protecting one morning of your weekend, not replying at 11pm — you already know. You’ve read the articles. You’ve listened to the podcast. You didn’t do it, and then you decided that meant something about your character.

It doesn’t. It means your nervous system currently reads that conversation as danger, and nobody can act on good advice from inside a threat response.

So we settle the body first, and then we do the work.

There are four reiki sessions, and each one is placed for a reason — the first so your body can find out this room asks nothing of it, one after each group call to settle what it stirs up, and one full uninterrupted hour at the midpoint.

That hour is what the program is named after. No goals. No check-in. Nothing required of you for sixty minutes.

When was the last time that was true?

Then, in the last two weeks, no reiki at all. That’s deliberate too. The point of this is not that you feel better in my room. The point is that you can settle yourself, on a Tuesday, at 11pm, with nobody’s hands anywhere near you.

You should finish this program needing me less than when you started. That’s the design.