Lessons in the note that is Reiki

When I was 15, I took Level I Reiki from a great teacher, Beth Gray, and Level II from an even greater teacher, Colleen Kennard. I practiced it for 12 years. It has made me, in many ways, the person I am, both for good and ill. Here are my life lessons from that reality, in my own words!


"Some things I have learned about Reiki, and through Reiki a little about life and myself . . ."

Reiki is not a philosophy or a religion or even a spiritual path. It is a form of healing that requires no scalpel or needle or pill. As it was given to Usui, it is a powerful, complete and simple way of restoring the body to health, if given enough time. Do not mistake it for metaphysics or mysticism.

Reiki is not an exercise in techniques, it is a system so simple that a child can learn it, and apply it with as much success as an adult. There are the attunements, there are the hand positions, and there is the patience to thoroughly cover a person’s entire body with the hands to fill it with Reiki. That is all.

Boredom and creativity are the anti-Christ’s of Reiki. To come to the massage table with just your hands and your intention to do Reiki, without getting caught up in the impulse to “be creative” and use entertaining techniques and extra symbols and all the other forms of alternative healing – to simply sit there, for minutes or hours at a time and just let the Reiki flow THAT is bravery and discipline. Are you up to trying some discipline?

When you are attuned to Reiki, your hands become the most powerful diagnostic tools that a human can have. Through them, you can feel the pull of the energy in the client’s body. You can feel where they need more, and you gently slip your hand to cover that area. Some people can feel vibrations or tingling or pulsing or even movement, but they all boil down to the same event – the client’s body pulling Reiki through you, and your hands telling how and why it’s doing so. Listen to your hands. I say again, listen to your hands.

Being a Reiki channel does not make you healer. Many are called, few are chosen. If you were not born with the personality and the constitution of someone who is here to “heal” people, Reiki will not give it to you. But, that does not mean that Reiki will not help you or help others through you. Simply recognize the truth of whether you are genuinely here to make sick people well, or if you are simply trying something new and interesting.

Power is a dangerous reality to be given, and Reiki is actual, REAL power. It can literally change living things. Because of this, people have abused its simplicity and manifested all kinds of unhelpful energies, using the symbols and initiations to make them real. There is no real benefit in this. Look to the way Usui, Hayashi and Takata practiced Reiki – with discipline, simplicity, patience and integrity.

Reiki heals best that which it is made to heal. What is Reiki? It is a concentrated form of life-force energy. If the cause, or the effect, of an illness is the depletion of life-force, Reiki often creates what appear to be miraculous recoveries. I have seen it. But, more often than not, life-force is not the cause, or the effect, of the problem, and Reiki requires time, sometimes lots of it, to make a significant difference. This is where patience and discipline, of both the channel and the client, are required to make Usui Shiki Ryoho work.

Perhaps the most important thing to be forewarned about being a Reiki channel is this – if you do not practice the Triangle of Giving, Reiki will lead you astray. There are three aspects of Reiki that should be practiced – giving Reiki to yourself, giving Reiki to others, and receiving Reiki PASSIVELY from other people. Each is has an important role in keeping both the energy and the activity of Reiki balanced in your life. Not only your body, your life.

- When we give Reiki to ourselves, we keep ourselves tuned in to the ebbs and flows of our own bodies. We fill ourselves up so that we are always ready to give Reiki to others.

- When we give Reiki to others, especially those who actually need it (hint – people with genuine illness, esp severe ones), we learn the life lessons of humanity: birth, death, tragedy, recovery, growth, connection and above all simply being a presence in someone else’s life. No amount of reading, seminars or seat-warming at Reiki conferences will give you that. I suggest you go out, find someone with AIDS or cancer or leukemia, and give them Reiki, every day for three months. And prove to yourself that Reiki is here to heal bodies, not titillate your spiritual curiosity.

- And finally, receiving Reiki passively from others is the ultimate way of giving to yourself. You can let go and let someone else do the driving, and this lets us experience rest. Real rest. From burdens, from cares, from responsibilities and from internal conflicts. Giving to yourself by receiving Reiki is good for your soul AND your self-identity, and it builds trust, it builds Reiki communities, and it just feels . . . good.

Let me end by saying that becoming a Reiki channel was the most miraculous thing that has ever happened to me, but I’m also glad that I don’t practice it any more because I know better. My life has been the lessons learned above, and I did it the hard way.

Namaste

ZULE!

Yes, we're somebody

So, I don't normally go in for political rhetoric, nor am I prone to soap-box preaching, but after watching the Wal-mart Documentary, I felt I should express something that has long been in my heart - we are losing the freedom to have Unions and to therefore negotiate with companies as equals.

For twenty years, in the early part of the last century, people fought and actually died so that American citizens could have the right to create unions, the purpose of which was to guarantee good wages, decent working conditions, and give us all some moderate leverage over our corporate masters. Now, that right is all but extinct.

Most people now can't even name a union, the purpose of a union, or name anyone they know that's in a union. Corporate America has made it seem like unionizing is immoral and undesirable. And, from their point of view that's very true. However, if we as a people do not exercise and flex that right to negotiate as equals with businesses, then it is a right that will wither and die, and we will be no better off than the mill workers of Victorian England, who lost hands, eyes, lives and limbs for mere pennies a day and with no hope for recourse. And, sadly, that's not as big an exaggeration as you might think.

At my present job, the few people I've ever heard talk about unions do so in a dead-whisper; no one dares to even suggest that people should unionize in current corporations. Yes, it's true that unions have earned bad reputations by becoming their own bureaucratic nightmares but that's true of just about any human institution, and is sort of inevitable. The actual right to group-negotiate is a hard won freedom that is not being employed, pursued, or reinforced.

Sadly, I'm reminded of the fact that our culture is, in many ways, backsliding into allowing fewer freedoms in the name and sake of global economy and greater profits. In some sense, the Dilbert comic strip (which I happen to love) is a sad commentary of our lives because it satirizes, and unfortunately in doing so validates, the fact that the people at the top of companies care nothing for those who work for them, but only of the "bottom line" and their shareholders.

In short, Americans have given up thinking we have the right to control our own work-lives. And it may well be, in x number of years from now, we will be no better off than people in other countries who can fired or harmed for presuming to have as many rights as a corporation.

Think about it.

ps. The pluralization of friends in the slogan is intended - I feel that friendship and unionization go hand-in-hand, because they're both something we do for both ourselves AND each other. Friendship is the first step in a collective identity.

The Repressives Entertain

In this next episode, our prim and proper couple host afternoon tea with a distinguished acquaintance. Catch the earlier episodes here and here

The Repressives Entertain

Pressensia’s hand hovered over the porcelain sugar dish. “One lump or two, Colonel Muskgrave?”

The corpulent officer nodded to her. “Five, if you would, my dear Mrs. Repressive. I’m trying to cut back.”

“Ah, dietary restraint is the hallmark of the civilized individual,” commented the elegant lady of the house, an enormous stuffed Amazonian duck perched on her hat, threatening to fall of at any moment and squash the petite-fours. She dropped the Caribbean-grown sugar into his tea.

“Speaking of civilized individuals,” remarked Clod, his walrus mustachio waggling in anticipation, “Please regale us with your latest military exploits in deepest, darkest Africa.” Clod puffed away on his Cuban cigar.

The Colonel’s superior sized baleen mustachio rocked violently in response. “Of course, of course old chap. As we speak, my fleet of native servants are organizing and unloading my collection of animal parts, trophies and stuffed witchdoctors in my Hystoria Hotel suite. They do so make for a cozy atmosphere.” Clod and Prissy nodded in polite agreement.

“Won’t the native tribes miss their witchdoctors?” asked Clod.

“I doubt it. We killed all of them too. Far too many to stuff, of course. They were in the way, you see. Our regiments’ officers were on safari, hunting Gnu’s, to pass the time, and the blighters kept getting in our way. Whole villages right in our path! Well, what else could one do?”

“Oh, very sensible,” remarked Prissensia, as she sipped her Ceylon tea.

“Indeed,” commented Clod, the ash from his cigar settling on the Indian-made porcelain butter dish. “These natives are just lazy lay-abouts. They should be grateful to be part of the Empire. Why, most of them wouldn’t even know what shoes were, if it weren’t for us.”

“Here, here,” ejaculated the Colonel in agreement. “See these boots,” as he held up one of his own legs, “Real African Crocodile!”

“Did you shoot it yourself?” asked Prissy.

“Oh no. Far too dangerous. I killed several chieftains who wore crocodile skin and had them sown together. Saved myself an infinity of trouble, you see. Very clever, these chieftains.”

“Don’t these uncouth natives try and defend themselves?” asked Clod conversationally.

“Well, they’re mostly armed only with sharpened fruit and wicker baskets. Complete amateurs in the theater of war. Why, one of our men was almost impaled with a particularly sharp banana, during the last campaign. Can you imagine? The ignominy of being subdued by produce. It was almost too much for him to bear.”

“How horrid,” exclaimed Prissy.

“Indeed. Well, of course we gave them the option of indentured servitude before we decimated their kiwi-bearing warriors, but I don’t think the translator was able to convey that clearly. Pity. They would have made great factory workers. Small hands, you see.”

“What a pity, indeed,” said Prissensia, sympathetically. “Don’t they know we offer then a lifestyle far more advanced than their own?” With a negligent hand, she absentmindedly adjusted the blooming-dead flowers in her Ming vase. ‘The coral colored flowers and jade carvings set each other off, so well,’ she thought to herself.

“Well,” said Clod, “As least the natives have taken to moral religion, instead of all that superstition and heathenism. Saved their souls from eternal perdition, that’s what I say.” Clod looked down and noticed his Mason’s ring which had been inadvertently smeared with a small amount of jam from his scone. He surreptitiously polished it with his napkin.

The Colonel smiled broadly, his mustachio splitting in twain. “Did I tell you how our chaplain singlehandedly converted an entire city of aboriginals? Yes, his bout with smallpox killed off most of them (after they’d been baptized, of course), and the few that remained, he convinced to build him a church on their old burial ground. Quite the coup for Christianity. Speaking of which, I’d like to congratulate you on your Egyptian obelisk. Is it real?”

“Oh, yes,” said Clod. “From the tomb of Ramses the II. Quite the acquisition. We obtained it from the British Museum, after they rescued a whole cartload of relics from some shady Arabs who came to London.”

“Traders?” asked The Colonel politely.

“Antiquarians, I believe” replied Clod. “Shifty lot, these Arabs. Trying to get money for starting a museum in Cairo. In Cairo!”

Colonel Muskgrave snorted derisively. “As if camel riders could appreciate the value of ancient cultures.”

Prissensia nodded calmly. “I do agree, good Colonel. But it’s not just savages who don’t appreciate the past. The Reprehensibles, two doors down. They purchased a mummified cat from the tomb of Khufu. And do you know what they did with it?”

“Do tell, good lady.”

“Chastity ground it into a powder, and is now using it as a tonic. Apparently Victor is getting on in years.”

“Shocking! How uncouth!” exclaimed the outraged soldier, sipping his tea, calmly.

“Indeed, we purchased one too, but we’ve been much more sensible,” noted Prissy.

“Oh yes,” agreed Clod, “We use ours as a doorstop.”

Something Whimsical

I haven't posted in a long while, but here's something funny (but strange) I put together one day.




You know . . . widgets! Those stupid fictitious manufactured things they always use as examples in economy classes.

OK. whatever. It's still funny.