One day when I asked the staff at the local shelter which cat needed Reiki, they immediately led me to a twelve-year-old Russian Blue cat, Smokey. He was feral and had been brought in three months earlier by a woman who had been feeding him for quite a while. She was moving and feared there would be no one to feed Smokey.

Smokey didn’t do well in the shelter and tried to escape several times. Soon after he arrived he became very sick and would have died if one of the staff had not force-fed him and nursed him back to life. As he grew stronger, however, he continued to be very wary of people, often biting volunteers who tried to handle him. About a month after he arrived, a staff member found a tooth on the floor of his cage, and when they looked in his mouth, they found a horrendous situation of pervasive gingivitis and infected teeth. The vet extracted several teeth, cleaned them all, and put him on medication for the infections. For about a week after this he was a little friendlier but then returned to his old ways.

When I met him they were very concerned because after three months in the shelter he sat hunched in one corner, never moving from that spot, severely depressed. He started at every noise and movement, and, although he could be taken out of his cage by a few of the most experienced volunteers, he would try to bite people¹s faces as soon as he saw them. I worked with Smokey over a period of several weeks, always sitting on a chair outside his cage, my hands in my lap. For the first treatment, Smokey accepted Reiki readily and allowed himself to doze lightly during the treatment, but each time there was a noise, or even the slightest movement of my hands, he would start and jolt himself awake.

During the second treatment, while I was deep in the meditative state often induced by giving Reiki, I received a strong impression of a blow to the head. I also felt certain that Smokey was very sensitive to light and that this vision problem and his dental problems were related to this blow to the head. I thanked Smokey for communicating this to me and told him how sorry I was that this had happened to him. I praised him for his courage in reaching out to me with this communication. I told the staff my intuition about Smokey and suggested that they try working with him with the light off, in just the dim light from the adjacent room. When they tried this, it made an amazing difference. Smokey came out readily and no longer lunged toward faces. There were no more biting incidents. He was still a cat to be handled only by the most experienced volunteers, but with them, he was an angel. He began to move around his cage, come to the front, and roll over on his back playfully and touch people gently with his front paws when they came to visit.

During his sixth Reiki treatment, he allowed himself to go deeply into a relaxed state and sleep, oblivious to the noises and movements around him. Afterward he got up and ate with his back to me, something he never would have done earlier. The next time I came, he was sound asleep, so much so that the volunteers had to tap on the cage bars and raise their voices to get his attention, and then he just opened his eyes briefly, stretched out toward me, and went back to sleep.

As I continued treating him, I kept getting the intuition that his dental problems had not been fully dealt with and finally shared my feelings with the staff. When they looked in his mouth, they found a large white area of abscess under a front tooth and several areas of gingivitis. For the week preceding his vet appointment, I continued to offer daily Reiki treatments. When Smokey went to the vet, there was no sign of the abscess or gingivitis. In examining Smokey the vet determined that he was almost blind and that his vision and dental problems had been caused by a blow to the head. There was a large area of calcification on the side of his jaw, where the vet felt the blow must have landed. Amazingly, Smokey’s blood work was perfect, not just for his age, but even for a young cat.

When the staff and volunteers learned that Smokey was nearly blind, they began to understand his point of view. They could see that as a formerly feral cat, who had been seriously injured by a blow to the head, he was understandably wary of humans. This wariness was compounded by his limited vision, which left him feeling vulnerable at all times. When people took him out of his cage onto their laps and he looked up at their faces, he was blinded by the strong fluorescent light just over their heads in the small room, became frightened because he couldn’t see, and reacted defensively by attacking in the direction of the light.

Now there was an outpouring of love and sympathy toward Smokey. Basking in this love and feeling that his situation was finally understood, Smokey relaxed and became positively affectionate with his favorite people. He was never at ease with just anyone who wanted to interact with him but was much more relaxed with his favorite people and no longer attacked anyone. I became unusually attached to Smokey and often let him lick baby food off my fingers, something I never do, but somehow Smokey was extra special. Smokey loved his Reiki, however, and more often than not, chose to have Reiki first and the baby food treat after his treatment was finished. For a cat who was very possessive of his food and had difficulty allowing people to remove his food dish and refill it, this was a high compliment indeed!