Philomena Baker-Myerowitz placed her hands on my right ankle, and though the warmth of her touch spread quickly, her question gave me the chills.

“Have you ever been injured here?” she asked. “It’s asking for a lot of energy.”

I had, in fact, sprained the ankle quite badly, nearly five years ago. But I had just met Baker-Myerowitz, and she had no way of knowing about the injury. Or did she?

As a Reiki master, Baker goes with the flow – of energy, that is. Reiki, a combination of Japanese words that means “universal life force energy,” is an alternative wellness discipline whose practitioners believe physical and mental ailments are rooted in energy imbalances or blockages.

“Reiki takes care of whatever there is that is out of balance,” Baker said during an interview at her office in Bangor. “It responds to whatever is needed.”

And my ankle needed a boost, as did my adrenal glands (though many journalists run on adrenaline and caffeine, this is not necessarily a good thing). So Baker placed her hands on my ankle and went to work directing “ki,” or energy, to the injured spot.

“We become a channel,” Baker said. “We can’t tell the energy what to do. We don’t want to tell it what to do. It’s all-knowing.”

Reiki is based on the premise that energy flows through the practitioner’s hands into a client, according to “Reiki for a New Millennium” by William Lee Rand. The practice is said to have originated in Tibet nearly 3,000 years ago, but it was rediscovered in the 1800s by Mikao Usui, a Japanese spiritual healer. During a Reiki treatment, the client remains fully clothed while the practitioner places his or her hands in a series of standard positions on or near the client’s head, shoulders, stomach, feet and back.

Though people of many faiths long have believed that the laying on of hands has spiritual and healing powers, treatments such as Reiki are starting to catch on in the mainstream medical community, as well. Portsmouth Regional Hospital in Portsmouth, N.H., offers Reiki treatments at its Pain Management Center.

A little closer to home, Reiki master Elaine Bisbee of Dover-Foxcroft has used the discipline as a registered nurse at St. Joseph Hospital in Bangor.

Though she is an educator now, she frequently used Reiki and therapeutic touch when she worked in the maternity ward, and found that it complemented traditional medical techniques.

“When you’re coaching a mom and helping a mom you can use that type of thing [more readily]” Bisbee said. “I think it deals with us more holistically, which is something I think traditional medicine needs to integrate.”

Several years ago, a breast-cancer patient and her doctor at Mayo Regional Hospital in Dover-Foxcroft asked Bisbee to come in and teach the patient Reiki. She completed the first two levels.

“Was she cured? No. But it definitely made the process more comfortable,” Bisbee said. “It gives you an option to offer comfort, which can decrease pain, help people be more relaxed, and deal with some of the emotional pieces that are involved with being sick.”

According to Baker, Reiki doesn’t target specific ailments, nor does it prioritize – cancer and a headache are treated the same way.

“It’s an imbalance in the body, and no matter what we call it, Reiki can heal it,” Baker said.

For Katherine Tsoulas of Bangor, the imbalance was cancer. Tsoulas, a tarot card reader and naturopathic healer, had known about Reiki for more than 20 years. But she hadn’t needed to use it until she was diagnosed in October 2001. She walked into Baker’s office and started sobbing.

“The fear of cancer is so huge, your life flashes before you,” Tsoulas, 46, said. “Through Reiki, I immediately got my emotions back on track, and I was re-empowered to make intelligent choices about my health.”

One of the choices she made was to have a cancerous tumor removed. The other was to continue her treatments with Baker. Today she is cancer-free, without chemotherapy, and she attributes much of her health to Reiki.

“Oh my, it’s a very spiritual type of healing in one way and it’s also reaffirming that your body can heal itself,” Tsoulas said.

Self-healing is one of the tenets of Reiki. The treatments take care of the energy imbalance, but it only helps those who help themselves, Baker says. Negative thoughts, words and actions only make the problem worse.

“There also needs to be a change within that person, in their way of thinking and [their lifestyle],” Baker said.

Since she received her first Reiki treatment, Baker’s lifestyle has changed dramatically. Though good health always has been a priority in her family – her husband, Moshe Myerowitz, is a chiropractor, as are her daughters and his sons – she suffered from intense pain. She shattered her pelvis in a car accident as a young woman in Germany, and many years later, after she came to Maine, another accident reinjured the area.

The pain was interfering with her work as a portrait photographer, and though she and her husband were champion racewalkers, she couldn’t do that, either. Traditional medicine wasn’t helping her, so she turned to Reiki.

“After I felt Reiki, I realized that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” Baker said.

So after 40 years as a photographer – a career that started in Germany and continued when she moved to Fort Kent and later Bangor – she made the tough decision to change careers. She took a first-degree Reiki class, which allowed her to treat both herself and other people.

“The first degree is the most important,” Baker said. “That brings energy into our hands.”

Then she took a second-degree Reiki class, which enabled her to send healing energy from a distance. She started a practice, and more than five years later, she became a Reiki master, which allows her to teach Reiki. While pursuing her mastership, she searched for a teacher who demanded excellence and she found it in Fran Brown, a California-based master whom Baker followed to France, Canada and California.

Baker stresses the importance of lineage – for example, Baker is a fifth-generation practitioner – five steps removed from its founder, Mikao Usui. It was a long apprenticeship, but Baker says it was worth the wait.

“We can’t learn it in a book and go practice Reiki,” Baker said. “We can learn about it. It’s the final attunement to that energy, the initiation – it’s a very sacred, very wonderful, and powerful thing. After that attunement, you can feel the energy running through our hands.”

During my treatment, I did feel the energy – prickly and tingling on my neck and forehead. I didn’t have a deeply spiritual experience, as some people have reported. The headache I had coming in didn’t go away on the Reiki table. But I left much more relaxed than I was when I got there.

And my ankle? It feels like a million bucks.

Philomena Baker-Myerowitz’s Reiki Center of Bangor is located at 50 Broadway. For information on treatments or classes, call 945-3509. Reiki studios can be found in the Yellow Pages under “Holistic Practitioners.”