There was a time when, before certain experiences had even begun, I almost unconsciously already knew what was supposed to happen. Not truly knew, but expected. When I worked with Reiki, I anticipated warmth in my hands, tingling, a sense of calm or that particular inner shift that is so often described. I would sit there, place my hands and wait. Not tensely and not with any conscious demand, yet still with an idea of what a “real” perception ought to feel like. It was only much later that I began to realise how strongly that idea had already directed my attention before anything had happened at all.
Expectation is rarely loud. It does not necessarily say: you must feel something now. More often, it is far subtler. It grows out of what we have read, heard or experienced before. Someone speaks of intense warmth and suddenly we pay attention to warmth. Someone else describes colours or images and we begin searching behind closed eyes for something similar. A book explains what energy might feel like, and before we have perceived anything for ourselves, a possible answer is already waiting in our thoughts. I know this movement very well from my own experience. The more clearly I knew what might happen, the harder it sometimes became to distinguish what was actually happening.
For me, this does not mean that every spiritual or energetic perception is imagined. Nor can I conclude from my own experience which explanation is right for somebody else. What interests me more is the narrow space in between. That moment when perception and expectation come so close to one another that they are difficult to separate. If I feel warmth, there is first of all warmth. Only afterwards may the mind begin to explain where it comes from and what it means. Over time, that distinction between immediate sensation and the interpretation placed upon it has become increasingly important to me.
I have found in my own experience that perception becomes more precise when I do not immediately give it a name. A hand can feel warm without my having to turn that warmth into an energetic statement straight away. Tingling can arise without my needing to know at once why it is there. An image may appear in the mind without automatically carrying a message. At first, that may sound rather sober, yet for me there is a particular depth in it. When I do not immediately decide what something is, the experience remains open for longer. It is allowed simply to happen first.
This attitude has also changed the way I relate to Reiki. In the past, I was more likely to wonder whether I was perceiving enough. Whether my hands were becoming warm enough. Whether something was flowing. Whether a particular sensation was evidence that it was “working”. Those questions matter far less to me now. When I place my hands, I try not to produce anything. I observe. Warmth, coolness, pressure, calm, restlessness or perhaps nothing remarkable at all. At first, all of it is allowed to be equally valid. It is often the apparently unspectacular moments that have shown me how much I had previously been searching for confirmation.
Perhaps this is one of the more difficult aspects of spiritual experience. We want to remain open while carrying an entire world of ideas with us at the same time. Concepts, images, traditions, explanations and the experiences of other people. All of these shape us. It would probably be unrealistic to imagine that we could perceive without any prior assumptions at all. I cannot simply forget what I know or remove my previous experiences from myself. But I can notice when they begin to lead my perception. That noticing alone already changes something.
I see this especially clearly when we search for the extraordinary. Intense sensations often feel more convincing than subtle ones. Strong warmth appears more significant than a barely noticeable change. A clear inner image impresses us more than an indistinct feeling. Yet intensity is not, in my experience, a reliable measure of depth. Some experiences that seemed almost unimportant at first have stayed with me for a long time. Others were powerful and impressive and disappeared just as quickly as they came. Over time, I have stopped equating strength with meaning.
For me, this extends far beyond Reiki. In everyday life too, we rarely perceive in a completely neutral way. We expect a conversation to be difficult and suddenly hear every small remark as a possible attack. We believe someone does not like us and notice above all the moments that confirm that suspicion. We fear failure and every uncertainty becomes evidence that we may be right. The mind looks for agreement. It fits impressions into stories that are already there. I observe this in myself again and again, and I find it striking how convincing a perception can feel when it matches exactly what I expected in the first place.
A more honest perception therefore does not begin, for me, when I no longer expect anything. That would probably be another illusion. It begins when I perceive the expectation as well. When I notice: I am hoping for a particular sensation. I want this conversation to end well. I would like this experience to mean something specific. The expectation does not disappear in that moment, but it becomes visible. And once it becomes visible, it no longer has to remain the only unnoticed voice shaping the experience.
This has become an important part of spirituality for me. Not making every experience larger immediately, but staying close enough to it to encounter it as it is. What I feel may be less spectacular than what I expected. It may be entirely different. There may even be nothing that can be meaningfully named at all. For me, that openness has lost none of its depth. Quite the opposite. The less I prescribe what an experience should look like, the more interested I become in what is actually there.
Even now, I sometimes sit with my hands resting on the body and notice my mind reaching for an old measure. It asks whether something is strong enough, clear enough, special enough. I do not need to fight that thought. I can notice it too. And beneath it remains something very simple: hands, body, breath, a moment that does not have to prove what it is. Perhaps that is where, for me, a form of perception begins that I have come to trust more. Not because it gives me final answers, but because it is less concerned with confirming an answer that was already there.