One of my clients had a miscarriage last week, her second after many unsuccessful rounds of IVF. Losing a baby is one of the most primal traumas and it’s experienced by a big proportion of women and birthing people.

From an energetic perspective, we tend to experience and process baby loss in our sacral chakra, in our lower abdomen/womb space, and in our heart chakra, in the center of our chest.

When we experience pain or difficult emotions, it’s likely that we’re not able to fully express them. That might be because of our conditioning, or because the feelings are too much to tolerate.

Most of us have been conditioned from a young age to stop crying. With the best of intentions, when we were hurt or sad, our care givers probably told us we were ok and there was no need to cry. As we got older, there might have been shame and humiliation in crying, something that could be considered ‘babyish’.

That energy gets stored somewhere in our body. On the whole we tend to store different emotions and experiences in different parts of our body. The most common place for us to store our emotions about losing a baby is in our womb space.

It’s not helpful to hold on to those emotions. They keep us locked into the trauma of the experience and prevent us from letting go and moving forward. They can also manifest physically in that part of the body, so emotions stored in the womb could be involved in fibroids, for example. Trapped energy in the womb can also affect our ability to fall pregnant.

Giving someone Reiki while they’re navigating a baby loss supports them to keep moving their grief, anger, guilt, whatever emotions they’re feeling, through their body so they can be processed and transmuted, and so they don’t become trapped.

Set the intention that you’re processing these emotions at the start of your session. If you work on their sacral chakra/womb space it will help keep that area energetically clear and strong and help prevent feelings from getting stuck there.

Giving Reiki to the heart chakra is also helpful during this time. The heart is our emotional center and where we most deeply experience grief and loss. Giving our attention to this part of the body creates more space for the body to hold and process those feelings.

Feeling our feelings is often uncomfortable. Having someone to hold space for us to feel them is very nourishing and healing. People usually feel safe and held when they receive Reiki.

If there’s no heartbeat but the miscarriage hasn’t happened yet, we can use Reiki intentionally to support the release of tissues.

If there are some tissues that remain after a miscarriage, we can again use Reiki intentionally to encourage the release of those final tissues and hopefully avoid a D&C.