My Weekend

Well, I'm pretty much caught up on Shadow Shot Sunday and Wordzzles and it's gloomy and snowing hard outside - we are supposed to get at least 8 inches, I think - so I thought maybe I'd share a little bit about my weekend. Afraid it's a bit garbled. A lot happened over two days and as you know already, reiki is hard to explain. It's more experiential. But I'll try to share anyway because I have nothing else much to talk about today.

My thanks to Shannon. She took a lot of wonderful pictures (all of the ones here today). I can't really share any of the workshop shots without violating people's privacy so you will get mostly cats and objects and a picture of me and my mad scientist eyebrows hidden behind a cup of chai tea.

My friends Nate and Dan had long asked me to teach them Reiki but although I had shared information about the concepts, we had never set a date. Then sweet Shannon asked me to teach her and in the way of kids wanted a "when." This was the push I needed to set a date and it became my Christmas gift to my friends. Originally I expected four but ended up with six. Wow. What a joy! And how terrifying. It's been at least 12 years since I've attuned anyone to reiki and my inner demons had a grand party at my expense. I didn't sleep well for the two nights before the workshop. My brain went wild with "what ifs" and "you cant's." (Too bad I didn't remind myself of the reiki principles listed below, eh?)


I always have a bit of trouble with the second one. Worry is second nature to me. And I had a brief struggle with a one/two combo since everyone (except Rosalie) was very late the first day and I had truckloads of material to get through. I discovered there is still quite a bit of my mother lying dormant in my psyche, though, to be honest the anger part (such as it was) was more anxiety. I made a big joke of "yelling" at all of them for being late and got it out of my system and pretty much threw my schedule out, only to discover that I had built in so much time that we quickly caught up with my schedule anyway. Just for today I will not worry. Such good advice.


So anyway, we began the day with some sharing, did a meditation on and talked about the above principles and then did the first attunements. (Attunement? What's that?) Well, an attunement is a ritual that formally "turns on" the reiki connection. For people like Melli (hi, Melli), let me say that I believe Reiki is God's Love or Unconditional Love and I believe that everyone on earth has the capacity to channel it with or without attunements. I think tuning in to Reiki is like turning the dial to a specific station on the radio. It's all radio waves, simply a different band width or frequency, so to speak. Attunements don't put anything into the recipients - at least not from my perspective - they help turn the switch on for what God has already put there. So anyway, the attunements aren't strenuously physical for someone who can stand and walk, but for me it was quite an adventure and I was worried that I would fail my friends. But then I reminded myself that God/Spirit would never punish them for my failings... and He/She/It didn't.

The rest of day one involved practicing - first self-healing, then working on each other. One of the best things about reiki is that you can use it on yourself... and when you share with others, the energy moves through you as well, so you also receive at the same time you offer the energy to someone else. At the core of what I teach and believe is that we ourselves are not the healer. We offer ourselves as channels and what happens is between God and the recipient. It's unfortunate that so many humans put up barriers to receiving this unconditional gift from God. I love working on animals because they have the wisdom to just open their hearts and being to love when it comes their way.

We had a lovely lunch break in the middle of the day with vegetarian chili that Rosalie made and other good things that the others brought. It was a long day. They didn't leave until almost 8:30. I don't know about them, but I was as tired as I've been in a very long time. I felt almost too tired to get up and go to bed, which I did at 11:00 - incredibly early for me.

Sunday was a much easier day. We started with sharing and a meditation, had two more attunements and practiced sending reiki energy long distance. I was slightly less exhausted on Sunday but very tired indeed! It's so much fun to watch people experience the feeling of this warmth and love moving through their hands and open to the potential to be of service to themselves and others in such a pure and simple way.

Angel and Tara Grace, of course, felt a need to participate. Tara is in one of her talkative phases - and sang to us quite a bit. Angel decided that a nice loud toy that she ordinarily never plays with would be the perfect background for the quiet of meditation time.

It felt wonderful to share something that is such a profound and precious part of my life with people I love. Magical as it is to use (or really be used) by this sacred energy to help others, it is even more miraculous to be able to pass the gift along to others. And now I have a wonderful pool of six people who can send reiki energy to ME when I need it. How cool is that!

Curmudgeon Lite

(Please scroll down for the Saturday Wordzzle Challenge.)

Well, this isn't really curmudgeony (I don't think), but it is the second half of what I was going to talk about on Tuesday. It's a difficult subject for me because it's something profoundly important to me and the fact that other people don't feel the same as I do is really my problem and not theirs, but... it makes me sad. So here goes...

Most of you who visit here with any regularity know that I'm a reiki master and that reiki (more here and here) is a big part of my life and who I am. I don't think there's anyone who holds this against me, but I know that large numbers of people - in life and in the blogosphere - just go kind of quiet when the subject comes up and sort of tip toe quietly out of the room hoping that I won't hear the silence. I understand that. I really do. We are not a naturally airy-fairy society. We are taught to believe in science and the "provable." There are also people who feel that the idea of reiki is "un-Christian." That one puzzles me because I think the opposite is true. Jesus performed and talked about everyone being able to do healing and always stated clearly that healing had much to do with the faith to receive it.... But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I have to admit that I thought reiki was a lot of hooey when I first encountered the idea of offering healing touch to anybody. This was at a workshop. "Oh, Lord," I thought. "These people are goofy." Then we started doing some experiments. First we took dowsing rods and started exploring people's energy fields. My eyes were rolling at first but then the dowsing rods started responding as people expanded and contracted their "energy," myself included. Different people could impact the rods from different distances. Hmmm. Imagination? Manipulation? If would have been hard to manipulate. There were about 40 of us, all having similar but unique experiences. This was before I had even heard of reiki. At this workshop we experimented with sending loving energy to each other. I later made some home-made dowsing rods and got my mathematician/actuary father - the ultimate skeptic - to experiment with me. He couldn't explain the rods or rationalize them away, though he tried. Then we got my mother, who was already fairly deep into the throes of dementia, to get onto a make-shift table. After I worked on her, she was more coherent than she had been in a long time and that lasted for several days. My father let me work on him too and then rationalized away his own experiences... and my mother's. But at least he pried the door of his mind open for an hour. I give him that. It just bothered him that he couldn't find a logial explanation, so he dismissed his experience. I see that often. How sad. And how unscientific. Worse still are those who won't even try reiki but simply dismiss it as bull****. I find it very illogical and unscientific to simply dismiss reiki without trying it. My nephew - another skeptic - got on my table to humor me and had the pain in his wrists and elbows (he was studying martial arts) go away. It bothered him that he couldn't explain what happened, but he didn't deny his experience. He sent a friend to me who had gone through doctors, chiropractors, medications and even surgery for a shoulder injury with no success. Reiki helped him when nothing else did. It baffles me why reiki works. It is an act of faith both to offer it and to receive it. It's a mystery... and a wonderful one.

I experimented with the concept of energy in another context when I was attending Seminary. Our thoughts and energy have much more power than we traditionally acknowledge. One of the more interesting courses I took at General Seminary was something called "Vision and Audition in the Bible." The professor was a priest who had been a scientist and not put much stock in things like dreams or intuition until he himself had a profound personal experience that changed his life. He then became deeply enmeshed in the idea of dreams and energy. At one point he had each of us hook ourselves up to a machine that monitors alpha and delta waves. Alpha is supposed to be our waking/thinking state. Delta is associated with dreaming and with deep meditation. The idea of this machine was to use it to bring yourself into a delta state. It would start buzzing when you got to a delta state. According to the machine, I live in a delta state as it went off immediately. I kept thinking I was doing it wrong, but I double and triple checked and I consistently set it off just plugging it in. Maybe that has something to do with me being empathic. I don't know. It would be interesting to do a study on that. Do empaths and people who work with the healing arts operate from a different energetic place naturally? I know some of you out there don't believe in empaths either, but you haven't lived in my body so don't dismiss what you don't understand. One of the reasons I got interested in learning reiki was because it is supposed to help protect you from taking other peoples feelings into your own body. Sounded good to me.

But I have way digressed from what I wanted to talk about. Whew. This subject is so huge for me and so impossible to explain in a way that makes sense to people. My main point was that I don't understand total resistance to something like reiki. I understand skepticism. I think that's healthy. Dismissal bugs me. It's like turning away angels because they might be mythical. Or maybe a smarter parallel might be refusing water when you are thirsty because you like orange juice better. Or maybe there is no analogy.

Reiki is no more fool-proof than allopathic medicine, which works differently for different people and which sometimes heals and sometimes doesn't.. I don't think I'm Jesus. Reiki practitioners don't make promises. What happens is between you and the energy. We are channels through which it comes. That said, sometimes my own and the recipient's expectations are disappointed. When I'm doing it right - truly remembering that I'm just a channel and not a "doer," I avoid expectation and disappointment. I'm not really quite so wise that I can do that completely but I'm better at it than I used to be. Ever time I send reiki is always different because each human and each day are different. Sometimes I feel nothing and the recipient feels a great deal. Sometimes I feel things and the person at the other end doesn't. Sometimes - this is when it's most fun - we have matching experiences. I used to reiki a freind of mine while we talked on the phone. She could always tell me where on the teddy bear surrogate my hands were. That was great fun. Animals are fun to do. They way too smart to second guess a gift. With few exceptions, they soak the reiki energy in gladly. They don't question whether it's logical or possible. They just know it feels good. Humans are more prone to doubt and resistence.

Still, it makes me sad that there are people suffering who could suffer less, that there are gifted people like Dennis Puffett out there offering a great gift and asking nothing in return and people tip-toe out of the room as though they have overheard something wicked being discussed. I don't get not exploring something so potentially wonderful. The worst that can happen is that it doesn't work. But there's always the possiblity that you might feel better.

So this isn't a criticism or really curmudgeonyness. It's puzzlement and sadness because I love reiki and I love to share those things that are precious to me. When I offer reiki, when I talk about it, I am opening my heart. I am stepping out of my own comfort zone in some ways because I know not everyone believes in it and some even have judgements about it. I won't say that rejection of something so important to me doesn't make me a touch sad, but even worse than rejection for me, is silence.

Thanks for listening to me here. I hope I have made a little bit of sense.

Poem of the Week: Called by the Spirit

CALLED BY THE SPIRIT


Called by the Spirit
We back away
For fear of being burned, consumed
We let the holy fire within us die
Called by the Spirit
We do not hear
That the voice cries from within
To be set free
To set us not afire but alight
And bring us to communion
With our God.

- Katherine E. Rabenau

This doesn't really have much to do with the poem but I always like to have something visual and not just text and I think these photos are very cool so I'm adding them. And they do kind of show the fire within... In the summer of 1996 a friend and I did a healing workshop in New York City. We had made friends with a woman who did aura photography and as part of the workshop everyone - including us - received before and after aura photos. I think the workshop had about 12 or 15 participants and I was doing reiki on all of them throughout the evening, so I was really on fire so to speak. I just think these are amazing.




















I'd like to ask a favor of everyone. Part of what made me think of these photos is that my niece, Diana has been trying to improve my reiki site. This weekend she offered to move it onto a much slicker wordpress website than my geocities site that I made myself. I'd love to know what people think. (I'm pretty sure I know the answer, but... ) Diana is still working on the do-over site since I was all freaked out about my tree when she broached the subject with me and I'm not that good at change anyway - even good change. So anyway. What do you think?

Oh - and if you think of it. The aforementioned Diana and her significant other have started their own web design company called Xondie. They are pretty darned talented in my opinion. If you know anybody looking for web design help, they are the best. While I'm bragging about her, maybe you could check out Diana's Foodscout website too. It's an awesome source of information on nutrition and food.

Friday at the Movies: More about Reiki

I'm still a touch down in the dumps today. The sky is gray and dreary and it's cold out even though it should be balmy and spring-like and I'm tired and cranky... So, I thought I'd let someone else do the talking. And since some people expressed curiosity to learn more about reiki than what I shared in my post on Monday, I thought these videos might be of interest.

There's quite a lot of video here. The first is fairly short and I just thought it was pretty. The next six seemed to me to be a pretty good basic pragmatic discussion about reiki so I decided to share it here.

In the second series, they quite a bit about "release forms." I thought that was a touch disingenuous. When I was doing a lot of hands-0n reiki in NYC, I used to have people sign a release form because I was advised to do so simply as a way to protect myself from the unlikely but still possible risk of being sued by some unhappy or unstable person. Reiki doesn't fall under the parameters of therapy or medicine, so the release form is really a way of protecting yourself legally, because there are crazy people out there who will sometimes want to blame you for everything that's wrong in their life. Reiki offers miracles, but practitioners aren't god and we don't control what the miracles or non-miracles a person experiences will be. We're just channels or facilitators. What happens is not in our hands. It just comes through our hands.

I hope this has added a little depth to your understanding of reiki. I love reiki so much. It has changed my life and brought much joy into it. I hope some of you will explore it for yourselves.