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by Daniya Osamah I feel my memories slipping. They shouldn’t slip away, not like this. Not when it was the house I grew up in, not when it was my home for twelve years. Not when someone says ‘home’ and it’s the place that comes to mind. Not when I’m so desperate to keep them intact. The architecture is blurry, I don’t remember the paths, I forget the rooms, I forget the stairs. I have trouble remembering the kitchen. One cannot claim that this house was home and forget the details of everything, can they? What I do remember comes from fond re-tellings, “remember when you fell down the stairs?” And for a fleeting second, I remember the stairs, and I laugh at the memory, at the collective sadness that seems to always lie within these conversations. The mere mention of ‘Yaad hai?...

By: Khadija Faruqui I’m lying on a table in a dimly lit room. A woman I have just met has her hands clasped around my head. Save for the soft whirring of the fan above, the room is silent. I wait with bated breath, after all, if this worked, my life would never be the same. The woman is Mrs Riffat Irfan, and she has been a reiki practitioner for the last 22 years. Reiki is a Japanese energy healing technique which seeks to promote a healthy flow of energy in the body. Enthusiasts believe that whenever the body experiences trauma – mental or physical – the energy in the body stagnates. That’s where reiki comes in: the practitioner acts as a channel for ‘universal energy’ or ki and transmits it to the recipient’s body with their hands, thus allowing the en...

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I Tried Energy Healing (Reiki) for Stress