Reiki Evolution

Reiki is very simple, you know. You start working with energy at First Degree and at Second Degree you’re introduced to three symbols that you can use. These symbols were taught to the Imperial Officers by Usui Sensei and he passed them on to Mrs Takata, who taught them in the West. One of those symbols was CKR, perfect and complete on itself. So we started messing about with it, which is fine – experimentation is a good thing – but some of the experiments have become ossified in different lineages and passed on as ‘the’ way to do Reiki, rather than being taught as interesting variations. Let’s have a look at some variations.

CKR with a spiral going the wrong way

There was only ever one CKR and it had an anticlockwise spiral. If you’ve been taught one CKR and it has a clockwise spiral then you’ve been taught something that is quite different from what Usui intended. Different shapes can be used to represent different aspects of the energy, and they will all frame the energy in a particular way, and if you want to frame the energy in the way that Usui intended then you do need to use the symbol that he taught.

Use two mirror-image CKRs, not one

There was only ever one CKR and it had an anticlockwise spiral, so if you want to use an additional symbol that is a mirror image of the original then that’s your choice, but please realise that this is not what Usui was teaching and most Reiki people don’t do this. Certainly don’t feel that you ‘have’ to use these two symbols for Reiki to work properly because that simply isn’t the case.

Use CKR to put energy in and reverse CKR to take energy out

CKR is an image that you can use to represent or elicit earth ki, one of the two basic energies or aspects of our existence: earth ki and heavenly ki. The person who you are working on will draw that energy to where they need it to go, and in the right amounts for them on that occasion. If you’re stepping in to decide for yourself that they need more energy or less energy, you aren’t really allowing the energy to do what it needs to do, unless you are doing this intuitively, in which case you’re working in partnership with the energy.

Usui Sensei didn’t teach two CKRs, one of them to take out energy; there was a reason for that: Reiki will do what people need to have done, and if energy needs to be released then plain Reiki will help a person with that without you having to use a specific symbol to achieve it. If you are currently using a reverse-CKR to ‘take out energy’, you might try dispensing with that for a while and see what happens.

So if you want to use the variations on CKR then that’s your choice, but please know that while this is a way that you can work with Reiki, it is not the only way, other Reiki people work in a different way from you, and these variations were not part of the system that Usui taught.