The idea of learning the healing art of Reiki may not sit easily with many people. Will this change who I am? Am I ready to accept what happens? What if I am not? Will Reiki enhance or confound my existing beliefs? Can I change my mind?
Different people will have different experiences but there is something important that is common to everyone with whom I have worked. Over the years I have enjoyed meeting clients and students of many religions, also people who reject any notion of divinity. In all this time, I have yet to find anyone who considers Reiki to be at odds with any existing beliefs to which they feel an affinity. My own experience of approaching Reiki can serve as a good example. I was born and raised as a Jew. It has served me well, and the more I grow the more I am amazed at how well it defines life, on its focus around rules for living, our relationship with universal energy and the importance of respect for all living things. Hours of thought and many pages of a journal were written before I was ready to take my first Reiki class. I find, of course, that I need not have worried, but I had to arrive at this understanding on my own. Excitingly, Reiki has drawn me closer to a faith my parents introduced me to and marvel even more the wisdom of the people first guided to establish the concept of a universal, singular, intelligent, divine energy, and to describe our relationship to it. What these sages already knew I am just learning now. What I considered dry and dusty, but mine for good or bad, now seems vibrant and alive. While I am no more religious than I was before, I am aware of having a greatly enhanced spirituality. Far from teaching something different, Reiki has helped me find so much more from within something that was already mine. It was already here for me; its only ask of me was that I inquired
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As I have stepped through the Reiki levels I have felt the power of Reiki strengthen and refine. And yet even after reaching master teacher level in both Usui and Karuna Reiki I was still having trouble getting to grips with the inward journey on which I had embarked. For me consensus unreality was hard, really hard, and though Reiki makes the subject of metaphysics approachable, it required me to look beyond the rational and re-explore everything I had once held as certain with a more open mind. Fortunately each time I began to lose confidence, something would happen that was sufficiently inexplicable, and good, that I was compelled to go on and not back. Still, there was something very comfortable about consensus reality. I missed it. You knew where you were: the impossible was just that, impossible! Now even that wasn't true there really wasn't anywhere to hide. The journey seemed safe but it wasn't always necessarily comfortable. There were so many questions spinning in my head. Was I showing sufficient respect? What happened if I overstep the line? Was it really possible to project energy through time and space? Where did my imagination end and Reiki unreality start? Was Reiki concerned that I was always testing to see if what just happened was repeatable? The questions were endless and yet the discoveries were fascinating and worth all the confusion.
After many years of testing Reiki, experimenting with it and doubting it, I did at least arrive at one answer. Maybe Reiki takes a dim view of all my skepticism and desire for proof but it is clearly willing to put up with it. I am absolutely certain of this: otherwise it would have given me up as a bad job long ago! by Michael Emanuel at 12:15 AM |