Work on yourself daily

To get the most out of your Reiki, you need to have a regular practice of using the energy on yourself.

You’re not going to gain the greatest benefits from this wonderful system that we all have if you just pick up Reiki once in a while, do something with it, and then put it down again for whatever period. So if you are looking for consistent benefits through Reiki then you need to have a consistent practice.

The precepts start by saying “just for today…” and we can extend that by saying, “Just for today I will do something with my Reiki”.

And you can manage that; everyone can.

Everyone can make some time for Reiki each day because it doesn’t have to be hours and hours and hours’ worth. Do something for just 10 minutes: you have ten minutes. Do something for 20 minutes. And if you don’t have 10 minutes then get up 10 minutes earlier in the morning: problem solved.

Everyone can find a way of doing something with their Reiki today, and we don’t have to concern ourselves about tomorrow: tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow we’ll start with “just for today I can do something with my Reiki”, and we can find some time.

What could you do with your Reiki today?

Perhaps you’re giving someone a full treatment, or perhaps you’ll give someone a short blast of Reiki in your lunch-break: when you use Reiki on another person, you are gaining some benefit for yourself through channelling the energy. It doesn’t pass through you without doing good things for you, and you’ll be familiar with that lovely, chilled state that you experience as you get to the end of a Reiki session with someone else, almost as if you gain as much benefit as the person who’s receiving!

Maybe someone has a bad back or a headache or an aching wrist: give them a short blast and snatch a little blissed-out-ness for yourself!

Can you take ten minutes in a lunch-break to become still and send some distant healing? That would be a lovely way to unwind and recharge your batteries half way through the day, while benefiting someone else at the same time.

Ten minutes of mindfulness and bathing in the energy at the same time.

Work on yourself in some way

You will have been taught a self-treatment method or methods, so use one on yourself, even if it’s just for 10 minutes: you could just treat your shoulders, or rest your hands on your heart and solar plexus, which is a lovely way to experience the energy.

Have you tried that as a way of going off to sleep? The heat from your hands can be incredible sometimes, penetrating so deeply.

Take 10 minutes to do that for yourself, or maybe 15 minutes. Just drift with the energy as it flows. And of course you can do this for yourself whenever you’re sitting down: do you sit at your desk reading something during your day: give yourself some Reiki as you do that.

Do you watch television? Reiki yourself as you do that and you might find that you start to drift off; that soap opera wasn’t worth watching anyway! Preparing food… turn on your Reiki and channel it into what you’re preparing: flood the kitchen with Reiki.

And you might be surprised how Reiki can turn itself on and flow when you’re doing other things, particularly if you have some sort of a meditative practice that isn’t Reiki: well, Reiki doesn’t mind: it will turn itself on and click in, following your focus when you’re doing any sort of meditation.

If you practise yoga or tai chi or chi kung:, Reiki will be there, being guided and moulded by your movements and visualisations, flowing and balancing and doing you good.

Build momentum

What’s important here is the cumulative effect of using Reiki on yourself regularly, building momentum, small change building on previous small changes, taking you in the right direction for you.

Far better to do a bit each day than nothing for days and then doing a great big, long Reiki marathon on a weekend. That would be a wonderful experience, of course, and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do a mega Reiki session of you can, but make Reiki a regular part of your daily routine and you will be amazed by the benefits that this will bring you… remembering, of course, that you shouldn’t beat yourself up if you don’t manage to use Reiki every day.

Everything better than nothing is success and when we practise Reiki we embrace compassion and forgiveness, including forgiving ourselves for not being perfect, which of course we don’t need to be in order to gain tremendous benefits from this simple spiritual system.

About the 10 Rules

The Ten Rules of Reiki were put together by Taggart King as a helpful guide to getting the most out of your Reiki.

If you like what you’ve read, Taggart has a wealth of Reiki resources for you to use to get the very best out of your Reiki.

Read comprehensive manuals, listen to audio CDs or MP3s and follow special guided meditations.

Click below for more info:

• Reiki manuals (printed)
• Reiki manuals on PDF
• Reiki CDs
• Reiki MP3s

You can even use all these resources for your own Reiki students: Click for ordering manuals and CDs at discounted rates.

“The Ten Rules of Reiki” MP3s

Author: Taggart King
Picture Credit: U.S. Army

Practise mindfulness

Although mindfulness is something that doesn’t tend to turn up very often on most Reiki courses, it was actually a very important part of the system that Mikao was teaching, dovetailing with the precepts and the energy work to create a powerful method for self-healing and personal development.

And as you will have heard earlier, the practice of mindfulness is hidden in the Reiki precepts, hidden inside the phrase “just for today…” which for me is the most important part of the precepts: the phrase from which the other precepts flow.

So what is mindfulness?

Well mindfulness is a form of meditation that you can do anytime, anywhere.

You don’t need to be sitting alone in a quiet room, setting aside time each day for your mindfulness practice: mindfulness is a meditation that can become part of your daily routines and activities. You can be mindful when you’re doing the washing up, you can be mindful when you’re eating your dinner, you can be mindful when you’re typing on a keyboard or sipping cup of tea.

It is something that you can incorporate into your daily life as your daily life unfolds before you and it’s not something that you need to set aside special time for, which makes it such a versatile way of meditating.

When you are mindful, you are consciously and fully aware of your thoughts and actions in the present moment, non-judgmentally, just existing in the moment, and in such a state you are free from thoughts of the past or the future, and free from the anger and the worry than can flow from such a dwelling on the past and the future.

By fully engaging with each moment, you are actually living your life, because all you have is this moment, this current awareness of the present: your life is a whole stream of present moments, and if you spend your time in the past and the future you are missing out on your life, because your life is here, now, not in the past, not in the future!

Find out more about mindfulness

The two books that I recommend about Mindfulness are both written by a Buddhist monk called Thich Nhat Hanh (pronounced: “Tick Nut Hunn”). The two books are “The Miracle of Mindfulness” and “Peace is every step: the path of mindfulness in everyday life”.

I’d just like to read a small quote from Thich Nhat Hanh about mindfulness and washing dishes. Here goes:

“To my mind, the idea that doing dishes is unpleasant can occur only when you aren’t doing them. Once you are standing in front of the sink with your sleeves rolled up and your hands in the warm water, it is really quite pleasant. I enjoy taking my time with each dish, being fully aware of the dish, the water, and each movement of my hands. I know that if I hurry in order to eat dessert sooner, the time of washing dishes will be unpleasant and not worth living. That would be a pity, for each minute, each second of life is a miracle. The dishes themselves and that fact that I am here washing them are miracles!”

So mindfulness is all about being fully aware of yourself, other people and your surroundings in the moment, focusing your awareness on each moment as it unfolds. And by doing that, you can savour each experience as it appears.

Getting started with Reiki mindfulness

Now obviously, when you start to practise mindfulness you are only going to gain little glimpses of that lovely ‘in the moment’ state, before your mind drags itself off to think about the past and the future, taking you away from your actual existence, and you need to be forgiving and compassionate.

This is a new way of doing things and it will take a while before your mind starts to understand how to do mindfulness consistently. Mindfulness is a work-in-progress and you’ll find that over time those little glimpses of being ‘in the moment’ occur more frequently, you may find that occasionally you bliss out on some lovely mindful moments, and these moments, these glimpses, will build over time and become just a normal way of existing for you.

If your mind wanders, just gently bring your attention back to hat you were doing, what you were experiencing.

There’s no harm done.

Mindfulness lives in your Reiki practice already

You might be surprised to find that mindfulness is an integral part of your practice of Reiki.

When you’re treating someone and you’re in that lovely, merged state, blessed out on the energy, you’re being mindful, just there in the moment, with the energy and the recipient, no expectations: that’s mindfulness.

When you’re sending distant healing, you’ve set your intent, maybe you’ve visualised something and you’re just there, letting it happen, no thoughts of the past or future, just there with the energy: that’s mindfulness.

So your mindfulness practice in your daily life – when doing the washing up, when eating a sandwich – will benefit your experience of mindfulness when using Reiki, and your experience of mindfulness when treating someone, or self-treating, or sending distant healing, will help you to experience mindfulness more easily during your everyday life.

You are training your mind, over time, to approach things in a different way, and your mind will learn what to do.

About the 10 Rules

The Ten Rules of Reiki were put together by Taggart King as a helpful guide to getting the most out of your Reiki.

If you like what you’ve read, Taggart has a wealth of Reiki resources for you to use to get the very best out of your Reiki.

Read comprehensive manuals, listen to audio CDs or MP3s and follow special guided meditations.

Click below for more info:

• Reiki manuals (printed)
• Reiki manuals on PDF
• Reiki CDs
• Reiki MP3s

You can even use all these resources for your own Reiki students: Click for ordering manuals and CDs at discounted rates.

“The Ten Rules of Reiki” MP3s

Author: Taggart King
Picture Credit: U.S. Army

Base your practice on the Reiki precepts

It’s interesting that whereas in the Judaeo-Christian tradition we are given a list of things that we shouldn’t do: “thou shalt not kill” etc, in Buddhism, followers are given a list of precepts or rules to live by that seem to be framed in more of a positive way.

And in Mikao Usui’s system, he also provided his students with a simple, or apparently simple, set of precepts to follow, which seemed to be a way of distilling the essence of Tendai Buddhist principles into a form that anyone could understand. His five precepts have a long history, coming from a Tendai sect of Shugendo that Usui was in contact with, and this is what they are:

Just for today
Do not anger
Do not worry
Be humble
Be honest in your dealings with people
Be compassionate to yourself and others

The most important precept

For me, the first phrase is the most important, the “just for today…”.

For me, this encapsulates all that follows it.

“Just for today” means being in a mindful state, fully engaged in the moment. If you are fully engaged with the present moment then you are in a state that is free from anger and worry, which are based on either dwelling on the past or imagining the future.

So “Just for today” means being in a state that is free from anger and free from worry. We don’t want to distract ourselves through fear and we can remind ourselves that all is illusion.

We can simply exist in the moment.

And in that mindful space, you have the room to be compassionate, compassionate and forgiving towards other people and compassionate and forgiving towards yourself, being mindful means being in a centred, nurturing space where you can embrace honesty (and being honest with yourself is as important as being honest towards others) a space where you can truly experience the many blessings that you have in your life.

It all stems from, “Just for today”.

The very heart of Usui’s system

These five precepts are at the very heart of Usui’s system and it was said that as much spiritual development could come through following the precepts as could come through carrying out the energy work.

So how can we work with the precepts?

Well we need to remind ourselves of them on a regular basis, and some people will say them out loud each day, perhaps as part of their routine of daily energy exercises and meditations. Maybe you could recite them in your head.

But it’s not enough to just know what they are: the precepts need to infiltrate themselves into our daily lives, our thoughts, feelings and our behaviour. And we can achieve this in a couple of ways…

Firstly, we can ponder a particular precept, examining it and how it might have affected our lives, had we lived our lives by that precept in the past. How would we have behaved in past situations, how would we have reacted differently, or dealt with people, if we had embodied that particular precept?

1. What would we have felt, what would be have been thinking in different past situations if we were living that precept fully?
2. How would things have gone differently or been better for us and maybe for other people?
3. How would that precept have affected your relationships or your priorities?

Do some mental ‘re-runs’ of past events and see how they would have been different had you been following that precept.

Doing this can provide you with some useful insights into how a particular precept can make your life flow more smoothly.

Precepts rehearsal

Secondly, what you can do is to imagine some future situations or scenarios, events where, based on what you have discovered about your past, you can imagine things going differently in the future.

Bring to mind typical future events or scenes which would benefit from the use of that precept, and imagine yourself in that future situation, embodying that precept, and notice how that future event runs its course; notice the differences in the way that you think and feel, become aware of the ways that you are behaving and reacting differently, responding to people differently. Bring to mind clearly the new you who uses that precept as part of their daily life.

Click here: Rehearse your future life with that precept.

If you do this over a number of days, you will have a very clear idea of how the precepts could have changed past events in a positive way, and a solid understanding of how the precepts can be used by you in the future in different circumstances and events, how the precepts will work their way through your life, changing things for the better in many ways.

The precepts are something that we drip-feed into our daily lives, a work-in-progress where, over time, they become more and more a part of our basic blueprint.

We don’t have to be perfect, though: we don’t have to follow the precepts every waking moment and then beat ourselves up because we didn’t achieve that. We are allowed to be human, we are allowed to not be perfect, which is all about embodying compassion and forgiveness for ourselves.

About the 10 Rules

The Ten Rules of Reiki were put together by Taggart King as a helpful guide to getting the most out of your Reiki.

If you like what you’ve read, Taggart has a wealth of Reiki resources for you to use to get the very best out of your Reiki.

Read comprehensive manuals, listen to audio CDs or MP3s and follow special guided meditations.

Click below for more info:

• Reiki manuals (printed)
• Reiki manuals on PDF
• Reiki CDs
• Reiki MP3s

You can even use all these resources for your own Reiki students: Click for ordering manuals and CDs at discounted rates.

“The Ten Rules of Reiki” MP3s

Author: Taggart King
Picture Credit: U.S. Army

Reiki is all about you!

Although in many circles, Reiki is seen as basically a hands-on healing system, a complementary therapy, something that you do to other people, it hasn’t always been like that and if your Reiki is mainly about working on other people then you really are missing out on a system that has the potential to transform your life in so many ways!

If we go back to the origins of the system and Mikao Usui’s original teachings, treating other people didn’t feature a great deal at all: it was all about working on yourself.

We know that the word ”Reiki” wasn’t used by Usui, and that he referred to his system as a “method to achieve personal perfection”, so that gives us a big hint as to the main thrust of his system: working on ourselves.

And I know that most Reiki systems will include hands-on self-treatments, and the precepts will be referred to, but there’s a lot more to Usui’s system in terms of self-healing, and spirituality, and self-development, if we can embrace the original practices and make them the foundation of what we do with Reiki.

What I’m talking about here are daily energy exercises and some form of self-treatment, I’m talking about the practice of mindfulness, and an ongoing focus on Mikao Usui’s original precepts. When taken together, these practices when carried out on a regular basis have the potential to make such a difference to people.

Interestingly, I have heard some people saying that it’s a bit selfish to use Reiki on yourself, that you should be spending your time working on other people, and I don’t agree with this of course: it seems a very strange belief to choose.

Firstly, by treating other people you are also benefiting from the energy that you are channelling, so there’s no way of separating out the energy so that it’s only benefiting the person you’re working on, and ignoring you.

Secondly, if we are following the Reiki system, following the precepts that deal with compassion and honesty, then how can we neglect ourselves? How can we deliberately refuse to nurture ourselves, refuse to give ourselves that special space in which to heal and balance?

I know it can be scary sometimes having to deal what’s holding us back in our lives, and change can be frightening, but it’s only by striving to be the best person that we can be – by letting go of emotions that are stifling us, by allowing the energy to heal us on all levels – that we can truly help others in the most powerful and positive way, because we can then channel the energy from a place of composure and mindfulness, a still calm vessel for the energy, channelled by someone who is a living embodiment of the many blessings that Reiki can bring into our lives.

So be an advert for what Reiki can do for you: work on yourself, let go of anger and worry, embrace compassion and forgiveness for yourself and embody the benefits of this wonderful system.

About the 10 Rules

The Ten Rules of Reiki were put together by Taggart King as a helpful guide to getting the most out of your Reiki.

If you like what you’ve read, Taggart has a wealth of Reiki resources for you to use to get the very best out of your Reiki.

Read comprehensive manuals, listen to audio CDs or MP3s and follow special guided meditations.

Click below for more info:

• Reiki manuals (printed)
• Reiki manuals on PDF
• Reiki CDs
• Reiki MP3s

You can even use all these resources for your own Reiki students: Click for ordering manuals and CDs at discounted rates.

“The Ten Rules of Reiki” MP3s

Author: Taggart King
Picture Credit: U.S. Army