How To Incorporate Energy Healing Into Your Skin-Care Routine

I’ve been an avid Reiki enthusiast for about two years now, ever since I went for my first healing treatment just days after the horror that was the 2016 presidential election. Its stress-relieving and anxiety-battling qualities have done wonders for me, centering me and undoing months of damage from various traumas and anxieties.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with it, Reiki is Japanese for Universal Life Energy—basically, the life force. A healer that has gone through proper Reiki training is able to direct this energy onto others through light touch, which can do everything from relieving emotional and mental stress to helping speed up the body’s natural healing processes.

For the first time in my life, it’s a form of “therapy” that I’ve managed to be pretty consistent with, doing my best to book a session every couple of months. So, naturally, when I started to hear the buzz around Reiki facials, I had to try one. As a beauty editor, taking care of my skin is one of the single most important things to me; it's a form of self-care I take very seriously. Add my go-to way of healing my soul, and it's a match made in heaven.

I did some research on where to get one in NYC (surprisingly—err, not surprisingly—most Reiki facialists are based in L.A.) and stumbled across esthetician Julia Marchevkova, who prides herself on infusing Reiki and other forms of energy healing into her work.

When I reached out to her with my skin (and mind) concerns, she sent me her Dynamic Skin Assessment, a tool that allows her to custom tailor any facial to a client’s specific needs. For me, she tailored her glow-inducing O2 Revitalizing Facial to my extra-dry summer skin.

It was a pretty long session—which I am most certainly not complaining about—and involved a pumpkin and peptide enzyme mask for refinement, ultrasound exfoliation, a collagen and hyaluronic sheet mask applied with a microcurrent machine programmed with calming turquoise frequencies, and, of course, plenty of Reiki. In between almost every treatment, there was a pause for a quick session of healing touches on important pressure points of my face.

Oh, not to mention, the entire time, I was clenching lab-grown quartz that were hooked up to a computer, delivering healing currents “based on mathematical sequences that get communicated to hand chakras, nerves, and meridians of the body.” Um, how COOL? (Very!) I also was lying on an amethyst and tourmaline BioMat, which uses “deep-penetrating far infrared rays and an influx of negative ions” to help relax the body and stimulate natural healing.

So, why is it worth infusing your facial session with energy healing? Marchevkova explains:

Energy work in facials calls on universal healing life force energy, or chi, and helps to restore a client on a cellular level. My clients report more vitality, clarity, optimism, little pains and headaches gone, overall surge of energy, calmness, and feeling as if they just came from a vacation. Not to mention, Reiki or other healing modalities help us to get into meditative Alpha State easily and effortlessly. This is a state of vitality, renewal, recharging, and regeneration. It’s like having an energy healing, meditation, and a facial in one session.

All in all, my facial was just as focused on skin care as it was in some deep healing. In between relaxing, quiet bouts of Reiki on my forehead and jawline (which was extremely clenched from stress, by the way), Marchevkova made sure to squeeze all of the blackheads from my nose and declog my chin. It was just enough “woo-woo” to leave me feeling spiritually reset, and just enough “skin care” to yield noticeable results upon leaving.

I emerged from her Midtown studio with a fresh and glowing face and a practically weightless existence. Not only did it do wonders for my complexion (guess who didn’t put on any makeup for the rest of the day?), it also left me feeling cool, calm, and collected—despite knowing that, as I headed to my office, I was about to walk into a shitstorm of a day.

The only question I have upon leaving is, can I begin every day with a Reiki facial?

If you’re in the NYC area and are interested in trying an energy-healing facial for yourself, check out Marchevkova’s offerings, here.