I want to talk about trees. Bear with me.
Science has confirmed what many traditions have long known. Trees communicate. Not metaphorically. Actually. Through underground fungal networks, they share nutrients, chemical signals, water. A mother tree will divert resources to her struggling offspring. When a tree is under attack, it sends chemical warnings to its neighbours. A forest is not a collection of individuals competing for light. It is a community. A web of relationship.
I find that deeply moving. I always have.
What the Old Stories Knew
My heritage is Greek, and the ancient Greeks knew something about trees. They believed nymphs dwelt inside them. Dryads. Tree souls. Each tree a living being with its own spirit, its own presence, its own interiority. You didn't just chop down a tree. You considered what you were doing.
Other traditions felt it too. The Celts revered the elder tree in particular. They asked its permission before harvesting. They understood the elder as both healer and threshold-keeper. A tree that stood at the edge between the living world and something older.
Our stories still carry this. The spooky forest with its feeling of being watched, the sense that something in there is ancient and not entirely friendly. The wise, slow, magnificent Ents of Tolkien, who had been walking the world so long they had grown into the landscape itself. We keep reaching for these images because something in us recognizes them. The forest is alive. And we know it.
Indigenous Ways of Knowing
I want to pause here and acknowledge something. Before I talk about my own small elderberry story, I want to name the much larger, older, deeper tradition of human relationship with the living world that I am only lightly touching.
Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island and around the world have held this knowledge for thousands of years. Not as philosophy. As lived practice. As a way of being in the world. The understanding that we are not separate from nature. That we are part of it. That the land, the water, the trees, the animals are not resources to be extracted but relatives to be in relationship with. That we are stewards, not owners. That what is given to us is a gift, and gifts require reciprocity.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about this with a depth and beauty I keep returning to. In Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry, she describes a way of knowing that holds plants as teachers, that understands the act of harvesting as a conversation, that recognizes gratitude not as a feeling but as a practice. A way of moving through the world that says: this was given to me, and I will give something back. I will not take more than I need. I will tend what tends me.
I don't want to romanticize or flatten the complexity of indigenous cultures and traditions. They are not monolithic, and they are not mine to claim. What I can do is hold deep respect for the wisdom that was and is carried there. Wisdom that western colonization has worked hard to silence. Wisdom that is more urgently needed now than ever.
Reiki is one practice. One thread. But I believe it is part of the same movement toward wholeness. Toward re-membering our connection to the living world. Toward recognizing that the energy flowing through us flows through everything. That love, as a practice and not just a feeling, is something we can offer outward — to our communities, to the people we love, to the trees on our street, to the earth beneath our feet.
The Elderberry and the Revoked Permission
A story from my neighbourhood
Last autumn I went foraging. There's an elder bush not far from where I live and I'd been watching it for weeks, waiting for the berries. When I finally went to pick, I asked permission first. Out loud, quietly, feeling a little self-conscious and also not caring. The picking felt easy, joyful, generous. The bush felt willing.
And then something shifted. I can't describe it better than that. A change in the energy, an inner knowing, a quiet but unmistakable signal. Enough. That's enough. Don't be greedy.
I stopped. I said thank you. I left.
I can't prove any of that happened in any scientifically meaningful way. I'm not trying to. What I can say is that I felt it clearly, that I trusted it, and that I walked away with exactly the right amount of elderberries and a feeling of having been in relationship with something.
That experience changed something in me. Or perhaps it confirmed something I'd suspected for a long time. That the living world has more going on in it than our materialist frameworks can currently account for. That asking permission, giving thanks, moving with awareness rather than entitlement — these aren't superstitions. They're a form of respect that the world seems to respond to.
I hug my favourite trees now. I give thanks for their bounty. I find it grounding in the most literal sense of the word.
Sending Reiki to Trees. Yes, Really.
In Reiki practice, sending healing energy to trees, to the earth, to the living world is entirely valid. Not fringe. Not eccentric. Consistent with the very foundation of what Reiki is.
Reiki, at its heart, is universal life force energy. The same energy that moves through a human body moves through every living thing. We are all made of the same energetic stuff. The Reiki Solas tradition I studied under understands Reiki as the expression of universal life force, with love as its currency. Sending love to another being. Human, animal, plant, tree. Fills your own being with love in the process. And spreads it outward.
Trees are sensitive beings. They respond to their environment in ways science is still mapping. That they might also respond to focused, loving intention doesn't seem like a stretch to me. It seems like a natural extension of what we're already learning about them.
You Don't Need to Be a Reiki Master to Do This
This is important. Reiki is intention. It doesn't require a specific lineage or a formal attunement to offer love and healing energy to the living world. Intention, openness, and genuine connection are enough. A Level 1 attunement can make the energy flow stronger and more precise. It opens the channel in a way that deepens the practice, but it is not the entry point. The entry point is simply turning toward a tree, with an open heart, and offering something.
And honestly? You don't need a practitioner for self-Reiki either. Self-Reiki is a real and beautiful practice. Placing your hands on your own body, setting an intention, offering yourself the same care you'd offer another. It is one of the most quietly radical things I know how to do. Especially for those of us who spend a lot of energy caring for others and very little receiving care in return.
So then. What is the point of working with a practitioner?
A few things, honestly — practice and experience do add something. A practitioner who has worked with hundreds of people develops a sensitivity, a precision, a depth of attunement that takes time to build. But beyond that, there is something that happens when you let someone else care for you. When you don't have to be the one holding the space, when you can simply receive, without effort or reciprocity, for once.
Many Reiki practitioners. including myself, do regular Reiki exchanges with other practitioners for exactly this reason. Not because we can't do it for ourselves, but because being in someone else's care, being witnessed, being held — that is its own kind of healing that self-practice can't quite replicate. We all have blind spots to ourselves. We all carry things we can't fully see from the inside. Sometimes another pair of hands, another set of eyes, another heart turned toward you, is exactly what's needed.
And sometimes, simply knowing that someone is sending you Reiki, that somewhere someone is holding you in their intention with warmth and care, is enough to shift something. That comfort is real. Don't underestimate it.
Want to try it?
- Find a tree you feel drawn to. It doesn't need to be dramatic. Your garden, a park, your street.
- Stand or sit near it. Take a few slow breaths and arrive in your body.
- Place your hands on the bark if that feels right, or simply hold them open toward the tree.
- Set an intention. Something simple. I offer you love and healing. I am grateful for you.
- Stay for a few minutes. Notice what you feel. Notice if anything shifts.
- Thank the tree before you leave.
Why This Matters
There's something that happens when you extend care beyond your own immediate circle. When you send love not just to the people in your life but to the living world around you. It connects you to something larger. It reminds you that you are not separate from nature but part of it. That the same life force running through you is running through the oak on the corner and the elder at the edge of the field.
In the Reiki Solas understanding, love is the currency of the universe. Sending it outward costs you nothing. It fills you as it flows through you. And it spreads.
Isn't that something to be grateful for? Something to be in awe of?
I think so. Go hug a tree. Give thanks. Send it something. See what comes back.