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SOUTHWEST HARBOR – Upstairs at the Main Street headquarters of the Harbor House Community Center, meditation music quietly shimmers in the cavernous front room.

Three clients are stretched out on three massage tables. Each is in the care of one of three reiki practitioners – Rebecca Brugman, Connie Wagner and Phoebe Barnes. Wagner places her hands on her client’s head. Barnes grasps her client’s ankles. Brugman delicately touches her client’s side.

Gradually, the practitioners move around the tables, focused on their clients, repositioning their hands and touching new spots for minutes at a time. Each has an air of patience, concentration and kindness. Birds can be heard chirping outside, their song melding with the recorded music and the relaxed atmosphere.

At the end of the 30-minute session, after the first clients have left, Wagner invites me to partake. Doffing my sneakers, I stretch out on her table, hands folded on my stomach. Wagner stands at my head, waits a moment, and then lightly places her hands on my scalp. Instantly, the nerves around my head and down my spine quiver. The nonstop tingling comes in waves that nearly put me to sleep. My eyelids grow heavy, but I’m determined to stay awake so that I remain aware of the session. Still, an altered state of consciousness irresistibly sets in. I gradually become aware that I am no longer aware of when she has moved down my torso, but am only aware of that fact that she has already done so. The reiki circuit around my body is a sedative. A sort of trance sets in, a play of consciousness and half-consciousness.

When she’s done, she leans over and tells me I can get up now. Later, she tells me that, when I was coming awake, I said I’d never had anyone put me in a trance before.

“That’s not how reiki works,” she says. “Reiki just allows you and your body and mind and psyche and emotions to do what they were going to do. You did it.”

Reiki is a Japanese healing technique for channeling the universe’s “life force energy.” Said to be easily learned, it is considered empowering for students, who are taught how to tap into the energy in order to improve their health and enhance their quality of life for themselves. The ability to channel energy is transferred to students by other reiki practitioners, through a process that is called “attunement.”

“It comes through us,” Barnes says later in the week, as she, Wagner and Brugman make themselves comfortable on the porch swingseat at Brugman’s home in Southwest Harbor. “We as practitioners are channeling it. It’s different from other kinds of hands-on modalities where the practitioner actually has to intend, and hold that intention, and will it in a certain way. But reiki, once you’re attuned, you’re a channel. You call in the energy and it comes through you, and we benefit a lot as being the channel. We receive the reiki, too. It’s not exhausting at all. You become refreshed from being in the deeper state of channeling the energy. One way to explain it is that the receiver is in charge – the wisdom of your own body/mind, your cellular wisdom, the energetics of your own body takes this universal life force and sends it where it’s needed in your body. You also can have your own intention – ‘I want to work on my hip or my arthritis or a problem I’m having in a relationship’ – and you can take an intention at the beginning of a session and it’s like, ‘Ask and you shall receive.’ You have to say what it is that you want. Then it usually comes for you. It’s different from other modalities in that we are not doing it to the person; it’s coming through us. I always try to make that really clear; it empowers the recipient. Then people feel more comfortable. They’ve been told that there’s an inner wisdom in themselves that will use this energy for their higher good.”

Wagner and Barnes agree with my observation that reiki seems to be a very “kind” healing art. The practice doesn’t seem to have the knotty exertions of massage, the thorny dilemmas of conventional medicine, the self-centric leanings of meditation, the doing-to-another application of acupuncture. Instead, the practitioners have a stillness, in their gentle laying on of hands, that seems to speak of their hopes for the other person.

“People ask, ‘What is reiki?’ It’s the universal life force and it’s the energy of unconditional love,” says Barnes. “You say ‘kind.’ Yes, that’s a lot of what’s going  on. Acceptance and unconditional love.”

Barnes, who recently moved to Southwest Harbor, has been a yoga instructor for more than 20 years, and has studied reiki for 10 years. As a volunteer, she brought the practice to patients at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

“We were everywhere – intensive care, oncology, neurology, lots of very sick people,” she says.

Wagner, who lives in Hulls Cove, began reiki about 12 years ago. She came to the practice as part of her work as an ed tech in Maryland and an assistant program director in Jackman, where she worked with people with mental retardation, some of them with a history of violence.

“I said, ‘These people need some way to relax,’” she recalls. “It took me several years to find a modality that fit. But I finally found it.”

The practice allowed her to “reach” her clients, she said.

Reiki wasn’t allowed in her subsequent position as a mental health case manager in Ellsworth, although she continued to practice it as a volunteer at the Beth C. Wright Cancer Resource Center and with family and friends.

“It became a healing journey of my own, through my own life circumstances. And I’m still on that journey,” she says.

For Brugman, reiki was a natural complement to her hypnotherapy practice. She trained with another local practitioner, Charly Weir of Bass Harbor, two winters ago.

“I really found it’s a great pairing with hypnotherapy,” she says. “It seemed like another tool to put in the box and bring into the practice.”

According to WebMD, hypnotherapy “uses guided relaxation, intense concentration, and focused attention to achieve a heightened state of awareness that is sometimes called a trance. The person’s attention is so focused while in this state that anything going on around the person is temporarily blocked out or ignored. In this naturally occurring state, a person may focus his or her attention – with the help of a trained therapist – on specific thoughts or tasks.”

The hypnotic state may make the person better able to respond to a trained therapist’s suggestions, such as stopping smoking. It may be useful in treating pain, and the relaxed state may help to find the root cause of a disorder or symptom, such as a traumatic past event.

Brugman says she eases clients into hypnosis through techniques of progressive relaxation of the body and mind, such as deep breathing and creative visualization. Reiki, she says. is an additional tool that helps clear the mind and spirit, and allow universal energy to enter.

“I like knowing that I can use these tools to remind people of that inner peace we all have,” she says. “Once you take the 20 minutes to sit down and be still, you can step away from the chaos and the distractions and just be restful. That’s why I got into the hypnotherapy. You may not feel anything during the session, but it’s actually working.”

“It’s like coming home to yourself,” says Barnes.

“We can talk and talk and talk about reiki, but until you feel reiki, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” says Wagner.

For Brugman, reiki and hypnotherapy are elements that naturally evolved through a life of some challenges, many joys, and a sense of connection with the universe.

On another visit to Brugman’s home, her  four-year-old son, Isaiah, is playing upstairs while her husband, Rob Rhiel, is at the Common Good Soup Kitchen perfecting flavors for his new line of ice cream, which he hopes to turn into a business. Their other children, 11-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son, are at school.

A string of faded Tibetan prayer flags and a patch of lupine frame an old hull sitting in the front yard and Brugman’s vegetable and flower garden in the side yard.

“Beans, peas, radishes, lots and lots of squash, carrots,” she reels off with a laugh, then heads up the porch stairs and into the kitchen, where she’s heating up water in a saucepan to make raspberry tea. Shelves, crannies and stairwells are filled with children’s toys and stacks of books. Large, colorful cloths and the children’s watercolor paintings hang on the walls. An upright piano and a green conga drum take pride of place in the living room.

Sitting on a settee amid the chaotic scene, Brugman explains that she was raised in “hootenanny” country in upper-state New York, where her family had 60 acres in dairy country. From a young age, she feels like she was just waiting to grow up to do what she was supposed to do in life.

“I’ve always been interested in esoteric stuff,” she says. “As a kid, I did the ‘Let’s stay up under a full moon and have a séance.’

She followed a  path that allowed her to explore the flow of a spiritual life through things such as writing and music.

“I appreciated that I was able to do that, but I was able to do that because I was home alone,” she says. “It was a double-edged sword. You’ve got all this time to do things, but you’re home alone all the time.”

In high school, she was often plagued with migraines. CAT scans didn’t turn up anything. Doctors advised only that she watch her diet.

In college, she was focused on getting an elementary education degree and was distracted from her interest in cultivating the spirit. After teaching fourth-grade for five years, she headed out to New Mexico, where her sister had landed, and suddenly found herself in a  place where there were a lot of people like her.

“There’s a huge percentage of the population that is alternative and alternative-minded, off-the-grid, new-age hippies,” she says. “It was hugely eye-opening.”

Coming across a sign advertising a hypnotherapy teacher and past-life regression therapy, she decided to give that a try.

“It was fascinating and intense,” she says. “It really reopened and solidified the pathways that I had been helter-skelter exploring anyway. I said, ‘Oh, this is a tool I can use and practice and pave my way safely and confidently into this spiritual realm. And not only can I do that for myself to help with all manner of issues, I can teach people this tool by working with them.’”

After some time studying the techniques, Brugman headed east, met Rhiel and discovered Mount Desert Island. As it happened, the combination of hypnotherapy, a loving husband and a baby to love cured the migraines.

“I was home and that alleviates a lot of stress and I had Rob and things were stable and that was good,” she says.

Wherever she went, she found lots of friends and peers and teachers and information.

“It goes with the whole teacher thread. I’m always gathering information and spreading it around. Rob calls me the cosmic rolodex. I love Facebook. I go, ‘Oh, you and you and you, you guys can help each other, you have something in common.’ I enjoy orchestrating things that can come out in a positive way.”

Eventually, she had the glimmering of a vision that went beyond her hypnotherapy practice.

“I had the idea of not only having a hypnotherapy practice, but creating a healing center, which is really at the root of a lot of the work that I’ve been trying to do the past six years,” she says. “We didn’t have a car, so I spent a lot of time walking around town and watching who was where, doing that cosmic rolodex thing in my head, and seeing which building was available, tracking it down, knowing that if I was doggedly determined, something would open up. The other layer is wanting to be what I’ve been calling a ‘mobile holistic unit.’ I’ve got this image of this Wonder Woman superhero; on her chest is a badge that says ‘mobile holistic unit.’ Traveling and doing the work, maybe bringing a team of people with me – locally, California, wherever I’m willing and able and wanting to knock on doors and see which one is open.”

Isaiah quietly comes down the stairs and into the living room. He smiles bashfully, then climbs onto one arm of the couch and nearly tumbles over. That doesn’t bother him. His smile widens.

“We had fun with the tattoo pen this weekend,” Brugman cheerfully says, referring to some small drawings on her son.

This is the moment to observe that her house is full of stuff.

She bursts into laughter.

“Our house is full of crazy,” she says. She lifts a colorful South American print off a wooden chest that serves as a coffee table. “When we showed up here, we were in a Suburban with this trunk. Everything else has been given to us.”

And the house is kid-oriented.

“My mom says, ‘Why do you live in a playpen?’ ‘Because we have children,’” she laughs. “I mean, I cleared us a path.”

Brugman says that, as the youngest child in the family, Isaiah grounded the family in the community and in the house, which is a rental but which has slowly acquired the family’s personality. That’s been something of a challenge, because the parents have struggled during the recession. Rhiel, a carpenter and boatbuilder, has found little work. Raising kids on a minimal budget, making sure there’s fuel in the tank and food in the fridge have been sources of anxiety.

But there are many joys.

“Charlotte came to us sometime over the winter and thanked us for being a stable family,” says Brugman. “That was huge.  She said, ‘At least you guys are together, you like each other, and we always can come home.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that is pretty huge.’ I said, ‘All right, we might be struggling in the conventional world, but look at what we’ve created. We have three happy, healthy, beautiful kids. We’re not going to starve.’ I never take it for granted.”

Brugman is aware that her style is, as she puts it, “a little nutty-crunchy.” She generally dresses in a long, flowy skirt over pants. Her uncombed hair is currently streaked with red. Her mother gave Charlotte a gift certificate to a local hairdresser. Charlotte got blue streaks and a feather. There was money left over.

“And Charlotte said, ‘Well, you do it.’ And I said, ‘Okay!’” Brugman says. “I’ve never dyed my hair any color at all. People are noticing me. It’s this universal subconscious placement of me in that chair that said, “You’re going to be marked this summer, you’re going to be noticed this summer.” I’m trying to figure out how to feel about it. Because I’ve always been here.” She hunches over, as though hiding from trouble. “And now I’m, ‘Yeah, I’m the one with the red hair. Yeah, that’s me!’” She throws her arms open wide.

When Brugman first sits down to talk, her “life force energy” seems a bit tense. She looks stiff and worried. At first, it appears that she never talks about her ideas with anyone. Her face soon relaxes and the hooded look comes off her eyes as she takes control of the conversation and the thoughts come racing out of her. It turns out that the worried look was about fear of judgment.

“I had to work through the process of finding my place in the town,” she says of her time in the community. “And then feeling a little ostracized here and there. ‘Oh, you’re that crazy hippie that lives down the road.’”

Despite that niggling feeling, she says, her sense of self-invention and exploration has thrived in this community. Part of that is due the community itself, and part of that is reiki.

“There’s the physical closeness of a small community, where people know people,” she says. “The degree of separation is small. You go to the library and you see everybody you know. You walk down the street and you see everybody you know. I started to treat every day as a waking, walking meditation and journey of, ‘All right, I’m ready, I’m fed, I’ve got my shoes on, I’m going out into the world today, and the people who cross my path are crossing my path for a reason.”

Reiki has helped to open up that sense of connection.

“I feel personally that I, in this capacity, siphon from everyone that I’m in contact with, from the town as a whole, and the island as a whole, and the universe. I have these layers and layers that I connect with. And if I am a vessel for transmuting the world’s anxiety into happiness, that’s a huge task and a good task and I’m up for it.”

Reiki clinics will be held at Harbor House every Wednesday from 6-8 p.m. The half-hour sessions are $10; first come, first served. First Thursday reiki talks and mini-clinics will be held at the Northeast Harbor Library from 10 a.m. to noon in June, July and August. Brugman is forming a meditation group at the Common Good, and she also plans to bring a holistic team to Frenchboro this summer.