Category Archives: attunements

How Can Reiki Symbols Unlock Such Power?

 

The other day a Reiki person mentioned to me that when people use symbols in Reiki, it just seems ridiculous that they can unlock all this power, and she was a bit embarrassed by it all. It seemed to her to be a bit like “Open Sesame!” or “abracadabra”: just foolish and ridiculous that flailing your fingers in the air could create all this cosmic power.

And it does seem strange, doesn’t it? A bit like wizards and incantations and ancient, mysterious, closely-guarded, power-imbued sigils that initiates can use to control and direct natural forces, in our case for good.

So, how can symbols unlock such power?

They can’t.

Attunements don’t attune

The word “attunement” is a very unfortunate one to use to describe the initiations that Reiki people go through in order to practise Reiki. The word “attune” suggests that you are being attuned to something and, since symbols are involved in most attunement rituals, it is also natural to assume that you are attuned to those symbols and that it is the process of being attuned to a symbol that allows you to do the Reiki thing.

And for a long time in the world of Reiki, where the only way that you could be initiated was by going through an attunement, and basically all attunement rituals involved the use of symbols, it made perfect sense to believe these things.

But here’s the thing: Mikao Usui didn’t attune anyone to anything. No rituals, no putting a symbol in your aura or your head or your palms, or any of that paraphernalia, and most of his students never even got to see a symbol. And while he would have his students practise initiating others using a ritual, no symbols entered into that process either.

[Go here for more Reiki symbol heresies]

 

Now, you could take the view of one of the UK’s Reiki associations, where their view of Reiki is so narrow that they believe, in effect, that none of Mikao Usui’s students were properly initiated by him and so wouldn’t qualify for membership of their organisation. I don’t think we need to entertain such silliness.

So, where did ‘attunements’ and the use of symbols within them come from?

Enter the Imperial Officers

By the time that Usui Sensei died, the Imperial Officers – Dr Hayashi and his associates – hadn’t trained with him for long enough to have achieved the sort of level of development where they could have initiated people using intent only.

They had already been taught a variant of Usui’s system that used symbols (because they had approached Usui wanting to be taught a hands-on healing system to use in the Japanese military, whereas Usui was teaching a spiritual/self-development system to the other students) and after Usui’s death they created an initiation ritual that gave them the same sort of energetic experience that they noticed when they were ’empowered’ by Usui.

That constructed ritual used the symbols that they had been taught by Usui, symbols that represented earth ki, heavenly ki and a state of oneness. So Reiki attunements started with, and were invented by, the Imperial Officers.

That ritual passed via Dr Hayashi (who may have altered it) to Mrs Takata, she passed it on to her students, and then the ritual has mutated and altered endlessly as it has been passed from one teacher to another in different lineages, with bits added, bits taken away and parts embellished or simplified. I have seen no mention of Mrs Takata talking about a person having to be ‘attuned’ to a symbol as part of the initiation, nor that one needed to have been attuned to a symbol for it to work for you.

But in any case, from Japan about 20 years ago came details of a ritual that Usui had his trainee Masters use to initiate people into the system. It’s called Reiju, it doesn’t use any symbols, and when that ritual has been used then the recipient can use the Reiki symbols – or any other symbol – to direct and focus the energy.

“Attuning” someone to a symbol is not a necessary step in initiating them into Reiki and does not have to be done to enable a Reiki person to use the Reiki symbols.

So, where does the power of the symbols come from?

It’s all about focus

I don’t know whether you have ever tried this exercise, but if you were to sit at the head of a treatment table and rest your hands on either side of a client’s head, obviously they would most likely feel something happening: usually a sense of heat from your hands, passing into their cheeks or temple. But if you imagine that you have additional pairs of hands cupping behind the person’s head and hovering over the front of their face/forehead, the recipient will usually experience a very different sensation, where the heat increases and envelops their whole head.

If instead you had imagined the extra hands holding onto that person’s ankle, say, then they are likely to experience heat or pressure or some sort of sensation in their foot or lower leg.

What’s going on here?

Well, you are focusing your attention in a particular way and the energy is following your focus and focusing itself where your attention is directed. Where thought goes, energy flows. A gentle but definite, undistracted and mindful focus = increased energy flow.

What’s that got to do with symbols? Well…

Symbols frame your focus

The Reiki symbols are a graphical representation of one aspect of the energy. They provide a visual stimulus that you focus on and which allow you to rest your attention on that aspect of the energy, for example earth ki or heavenly ki.

And just like when you rest your attention on someone’s ankle, and the energy flowed there strongly, when you focus on a symbol you are narrowing the focus of the energy, a bit like focusing a magnifying glass, and things get intense.

If you visit my resources page about Reiki symbols – Focus on the Reiki symbols – you can read more blogs about these issues and discover how any symbol can focus the energy strongly; you can even find out how to create your own, bespoke symbols, to use on yourself and your clients

And if you visit my “Energopsychograms” pages, you can practise experiencing energies derived from abstract drawings too.

You can focus in different ways

Once you are connected to the energy, and now we know how to do that without you having to be “attuned” to a symbol (whatever that means!), there are a whole range of different methods you can use to focus on various aspects of the energy.

Above we spoke about using symbols, bespoke/intuited symbols and other visual images. You can experience the energies of other Reiki systems that use different symbols, without you having to be ‘attuned’ to those symbols. So, for example, my Five Element Reiki system uses five symbols to represent the energies of earth, metal, water, wood and fire.

No-one needs to be attuned to these symbols to use them: you just need to be ‘connected’ to Reiki, and away you go.

In the original system that Usui Sensei taught, most of his students did not see or use symbols. Many were given kotodama – Shinto mantras – to experience different aspects of the energy. They were not “attuned” to these sounds: they just used them as an aid to focus.

The sounds represent different aspects of the energy, you use them, and you elicit a particular energy.

It’s the same with symbols. They represent an aspect of the energy. You focus your attention on them. You elicit that energy.

It’s that simple.

So I agree with the lady who thought it seemed quite nonsensical to imagine that waving your hands about in the air gave you a key to unleash powerful energetic forces. That is ridiculous. When we practise Reiki it’s not about “Open Sesame!” or “acracadabra”. It’s not about learning special, sacred, secret symbols that turn you into some New Age version of Dr Strange from Marvel Comics. We are initiated into a simple and powerful energy healing system that anyone can do, which is based on carrying out meditations and simple energy exercises, it has a long history in Japanese esoteric practices and the symbols are just a useful tool that we can use to aid focus.

Symbols do not bestow mighty cosmic power on us; to think otherwise is fantasy.

 

Did you like this blog?

If so, you are going to love this book…

 

Liberate Your Reiki!

“Whether you are at Level 1, 2 or Reiki Master Teacher Level (regardless of the Reiki flavour you are trained in), this book is very much for you! Within hours of starting to read this book, it has rejuvenated and enriched my own practices with a wealth of information and useful examples too.

The more you read the more you’ll have those wonderful ‘aha’ moments. I know I am already benefiting personally from the knowledge I’ve gained, but so will all my family, friends and clients too. Thank you Taggart for creating this incredible, uniting, enlightening book.”

Heidi Gaffney-Evans

Liberate Your Reiki!

86 Articles About Reiki: One Inspiring Vision

In this Reiki book you will find 80+ articles about Reiki, written by Reiki Master Teacher Taggart King. You will discover how to set your Reiki free, free from the constraints, dogma, rules and regulations of Western-style Reiki courses. Get back to Reiki’s original Japanese method and embrace simplicity, flexibility, creativity and intuition.

This book is suitable for people at all Reiki levels: beginners, those who are developing their Reiki, and Reiki Masters/Master Teachers. You will find advice about self-treatment meditations, energy exercises to build your ability as a channel, you will discover how to work with your intuition and embrace the power of intent.

Explore different distant healing methods and discover the beauty of Reiki’s original Japanese form. Learn how to use creativity and visualisation to enhance your self-treatments and treatment of others, and ditch all the silly rules and regulations that stifle the practice of Western Reiki in many lineages.

Finally, read Taggart King’s “10 Rules of Reiki”, the essential principles for a powerful and fulfilling Reiki practice.

This professionally-printed Reiki manual has 370 A5 pages, a glossy soft cover and we will send it to anywhere in the world!

Read the contents list before you order, if you like, by clicking on this link: Table of contents

Book: 370 pages.

Price: £15.99 + p&p


Or Download a PDF version now for only £12.49

 

 

 

Picture credit: Miriam Espacio

 

 

Diet, Health and Reiki

Do I need to be a healthy, teetotal vegan to learn & practise Reiki?

A common question that I am asked revolves around health and diet, both before someone goes on a Reiki course, and once they are practising. People ask whether they need to follow a particular sort of diet before attending for a Reiki First Degree course, and then subsequently, and they also ask whether it’s ok to treat someone when you feel ill, or if you’re under the weather, or have a cold, for example.

A further question asks why Reiki hasn’t resolved a particular health condition for a practitioner or a client.

The perfect diet

There is no particular diet that you need to follow before going on a Reiki course. Some people ask whether they should avoid red meat, or junk food, or stop drinking alcohol, or follow a vegetarian diet for several weeks before their course date, and my answer is that you do not need to do any of these things. Whatever your diet is like, you will receive an effective ‘connection’ to the energy and you will be able to channel the energy for your benefit and for the benefit of people that you treat.

But, and this is a big ‘but’… Reiki attunements (or empowerments, because they are the same thing, essentially) will often give you quite a ‘clear-out’, where you experience perhaps emotional ups and downs, or a need to declutter or simplify or alter your life in some way, and Reiki can also give you a physical clear-out, where you can feel tired, or full of energy, or sleepy, or have disturbed sleep for a time, and you may experience what has ended up being referred to as a ‘Reiki cold’, with aches and pains, a fuzzy head and other physical symptoms.

If you live on red meat, junk food and alcohol then you are likely to experience a much stronger physical clear-out than would a teetotal vegan, so while there is no diet that you need to follow to go on a Reiki course, the poorer the quality of your diet, the more pronounced your physical reaction to the attunements is likely to be.

Reiki in its Japanese form emphasises working on yourself, self-healing, embracing the Reiki precepts, and there is something quite incongruous about working with energy on a regular basis to care for yourself, while at the same time assailing yourself with junk food, perhaps smoking, drinking to excess and eating an unhealthy, animal-product-based diet. We need to care for ourselves not just by meditating and doing energy exercises, but also by ensuring we have a healthy diet and doing physical exercise regularly.

Reiki will not save you from a junk-food, couch potato lifestyle!

Being in perfect health

Sometimes people ask whether it is ok to treat other people when you are ill, and the question usually revolves around whether all the energy will be ‘used up’ in dealing with the energy needs of the sick practitioner, and whether there will be very little left to pass on to the recipient. I will come to that, but I’d just like to make the practical point that if you are ill, is it really a good idea to sit with your face 6 inches away from the face of someone else and place your hands on them, when you are possibly contagious? The answer is ‘no’: people don’t want to come to you for a Reiki treatment and leave with whichever disease you are currently nurturing!

The question about whether all the energy will be used up by the practitioner is a bit of a red herring because there is not a limited supply of Reiki. When you channel Reiki, you are connecting to an unlimited supply of energy, and when you treat someone you are creating a ‘healing space’ that allows them to draw what they need in that moment; you are a bystander in that process and your system will not be able to greedily grab the energy that is available, and prevent the person you are treating from being able to access what they need.

Certainly some people seem to be better channels for the energy than others, but that is a separate issue and is to do with their personal Reiki practice: how regularly they work with the energy, how practised they are in ‘getting out of the way’ and entering into a gentle, neutral, mindful state when they treat someone. That is what gives you ‘clear pipes’. But that’s a bit of an unhelpful metaphor because there are no pipes and there is no plumbing that travels into the practitioner first, with what’s left trickling into the client.

When you treat someone you are also treating yourself. You merge with the recipient and stand aside, there is no you and there is no them, and you are creating a energetic space that allows you and the recipient to obtain what they need in that moment. What you need is different from what they need, and what you receive is different from what they receive. What one person receives is not dependent on what the other person receives, so your state of health or otherwise does not affect what the client receives.

But if you’re ill, don’t treat people!

Look after yourself, get some rest, and if you have some sort of a virus… don’t infect others!

What do we do when we treat?

I heard of a Reiki student once, who decided that they were no longer going to learn or practise Reiki. The reason? They noticed that Mikao Usui wore glasses and concluded that if even the founder of Reiki was not able to ‘heal his eyes’ with Reiki, then Reiki wasn’t much of a healing system. And that got me wondering what people expect from a system such as Reiki. Do we expect all Reiki practitioners to live to be 150 years old, in perfect health? Do we expect Reiki to be a perfect cure-all, able to zap and eliminate any disease, with the thought that if this is not happening then we’re doing it wong in some way or perhaps we are not good enough as a practitioner.

While Reiki has, is and will continue to do produce some quite miraculous things for people, it is not a 100% cure-all and it will not resolve everyone’s ailments. I spoke earlier about how Reiki will not save you from a junk-food, couch-potato lifestyle, unclogging your arteries and strengthening unexercised muscles, but what it can do for us or for another person is to help that person’s body system to heal itself, as far as that is possible for that person. It will support that process, giving the practitioner or recipient its best chance to bring things back to normal, to health. But there are no promises made. There is no offer of a miracle cure. And sometimes the best that Reiki can offer is to provide some comfort, or acceptance, where a physical condition is not going to resolve.

I wear glasses. I have done since I was 21. I look at computer screens too much, and that certainly does not help. Reiki has not resolved my astigmatism for me. And at the same time, I think Reiki is wonderfully effective. The two things can live side by side: my lack of perfect eye functioning and my belief that Reiki can produce quite incredible effects in some people, and for most provide a sense of calm, of contentment, helping to release stress and tension and allowing people to feel more positive and better able to cope with whatever they are facing.

And that is a miracle, in my eyes!

 

Did you like this blog?

If so, you are going to love this book…

 

Liberate Your Reiki!

“Whether you are at Level 1, 2 or Reiki Master Teacher Level (regardless of the Reiki flavour you are trained in), this book is very much for you! Within hours of starting to read this book, it has rejuvenated and enriched my own practices with a wealth of information and useful examples too.

The more you read the more you’ll have those wonderful ‘aha’ moments. I know I am already benefiting personally from the knowledge I’ve gained, but so will all my family, friends and clients too. Thank you Taggart for creating this incredible, uniting, enlightening book.”

Heidi Gaffney-Evans


Liberate Your Reiki!

86 Articles About Reiki: One Inspiring Vision

In this Reiki book you will find 80+ articles about Reiki, written by Reiki Master Teacher Taggart King. You will discover how to set your Reiki free, free from the constraints, dogma, rules and regulations of Western-style Reiki courses. Get back to Reiki’s original Japanese method and embrace simplicity, flexibility, creativity and intuition.

This book is suitable for people at all Reiki levels: beginners, those who are developing their Reiki, and Reiki Masters/Master Teachers. You will find advice about self-treatment meditations, energy exercises to build your ability as a channel, you will discover how to work with your intuition and embrace the power of intent.

Explore different distant healing methods and discover the beauty of Reiki’s original Japanese form. Learn how to use creativity and visualisation to enhance your self-treatments and treatment of others, and ditch all the silly rules and regulations that stifle the practice of Western Reiki in many lineages.

Finally, read Taggart King’s “10 Rules of Reiki”, the essential principles for a powerful and fulfilling Reiki practice.

This professionally-printed Reiki manual has 370 A5 pages, a glossy soft cover and we will send it to anywhere in the world!

Read the contents list before you order, if you like, by clicking on this link: Table of contents

Book: 370 pages.

Price: £15.99 + p&p


Or Download a PDF version now for only £12.49


 

 

Photo credit: Kim Siever

 

Let’s Talk About Reiki Initiations

reiki attunements reiju empowerments initiations

Do we connect at all?

It all starts with a connection, doesn’t it? We “attune” to the energy, connecting them or hooking them up to a source of energy that they did not have access to before… or do we?

Are we connecting people to something external to them?

One of the important principles of the original system was the concept of ‘oneness’ and in fact one of the goals of the original system was to experience this state, by working with meditations and/or kotodama at Second Degree.

The idea here is that what we experience as reality is said to be ‘illusion’ : the notion that we are individuals, separate and distinct from other people, is an illusion, and ultimate reality is oneness. There is no me, there is no you. In fact one way that you could explain distant healing is by saying that there is no problem in ‘sending’ the energy to another person because there is no other person and there is no you!

And in that light, how could there be something external to us that we ‘connect’ to, how could there be something that we were not ‘at one’ with: we already have the connection.

So what does the attunement do?

Well we could see the ritual as a way of directing the student’s attention in a particular way, helping them to recognise or notice something that has always been there.

I like to explain this in these terms:

Imagine that you are visiting a friend and you walk into their lounge. They say to you, “can you hear that high-pitched noise?”. You can’t hear anything, well not to begin with, anyway.

Then you listen, you really listen, you focus your attention in a new way, in a different way from how you were paying attention when you first walked into the room… and suddenly you can hear the sound because you have ‘tuned in’ to it.

You have been ‘attuned’ to something that had already been there, and you were only attuned to that sound through the intervention of your friend, who asked you the right question.

And to take this metaphor a little further, does it matter exactly what wording your friend uses to direct your attention to the sound that you couldn’t initially hear?

No, of course not, there are many ways of asking someone to pay attention to a ‘mystery’ sound.

Your friend needed to be there in some way to facilitate the process, but the detail of what they said isn’t so important. Their intention in directing your attention in a particular way is what’s significant.

And in fact they didn’t even need to have been in the room: they could have called you on the telephone and asked the question, or they could have left you a note to read. The end result would have been the same: the intervention of a third party, in some way, helping you to ‘tune in’ to something that had already existed and which you had the potential to experience, but didn’t until your friend helped to point you in the right direction in terms of your awareness.

That is what attunements do.

Where did attunements come from, and which are the right ones?

It seems fairly clear that Usui Sensei did not attune anyone to anything: he did not use attunements. He empowered people using intent.

Attunements only came into being after Usui’s death when the Imperial Officers got together and created a ritual that gave them the same sort of experiences that they had noticed when being empowered by Usui.

They had only trained with Usui for a relatively short space of time and would not have reached the level where they would have been taught how to empower others, so they put together their own ritual.

And what was this ritual, exactly?

Well, it’s difficult to say. There is information about a ritual that Tatsumi was taught by Dr Hayashi, but there is some disagreement about exactly what the ritual was for.

Dr Hayashi will have taught attunements to Mrs Takata, and one assumes that she passed these on in an unmodified form to the teachers that she initiated but, as I understand it, even within “The Reiki Alliance” – an organisation greatly wedded to the Office of Grandmaster – the attunement rituals have been altered and modified in different lineages.

There is a notion that you have to have four attunements for First Degree for it to be ‘kosher’, though in some lineages they might carry out three, or two, or even one.

Different philisophies & systems creep into Reiki

Various principles from different energetic systems have been slotted into Reiki over the years, and symbols from non-Reiki sources, too.

So, for example, the attunements that Reiki Evolution use, which are slightly mutated ‘William Rand’ attunements, include the ‘Tibetan’ Master Symbol, and also the use of the HuiYin, the Fire Dragon and the Violet breath. We are taught three different First Degree attunements, but we do the third one twice to make that magic number four!

Not all Reiki teachers have the ‘Tibetan’ Master symbol, not all use the violet breath, not all connect the HuiYin, not all use the magic ‘four’ attunements approach, and the empowerments used by Usui’s surviving students did not involve using any of these things.

So I suggest that if we’re going to carry out attunements then we use the method that we were taught, and make sure that we are doing it ‘correctly’, while also remembering that the individual details of a particular attunement style are not so important.

You are there as a facilitator, someone who helps the student to recognise something that is already there within them, and this can be achieved in different ways.

Distant connections

There is controversy about the use of distant attunements and, currently, none of the Reiki associations will accept students that have received distant attunements, only ‘in person’ ones.

None of the societies have specified what is the maximum safe distance that a teacher has to be from the student in order for an attunement to qualify.

This aversion to distant attunements involves amazing mental gymnastics: on the one hand such people believe that Reiki can be sent from one side of the planet to another, to the future, to the past, just by thinking about it (or by using a symbol and thinking about it), passing through the planet, whizzing through time… and yet when it comes to ‘connection’ rituals the teacher has to stand right in front of the student otherwise it won’t work.

Of course a lot of online Reiki courses are rubbish, but that can also be said of many ‘in person’ Reiki courses, where students emerge with no clear idea of what Reiki is, nor how to use it for their own benefit or to treat others.

The individual stages of attunement methods

yorkshire reiki harrogate courses
An attunement ritual is an outer expression of an inner intention

We know that attunement rituals have mutated and altered as they have been passed on from teacher to teacher, and some of the changes will simply reflect that teacher’s particular style of working, where they have expressed their intention – or their understanding of what is going on when you ‘attune’ someone – in terms of a particular hand or arm movement, a particular affirmation or visualization.

The outer ritual expresses an inner intention, and an intention can be expressed in different ways by different people.

Of course, people have come to different conclusions about what they are doing and why, based on their belief systems and other practices that they are involved with, so teachers will have conflicting beliefs about what is a necessary part of an attunement, what needs to be carried out for an attunement to be effective.

There are many attunement styles, reflecting differing belief systems, and these conflicting attunements work.

They all work because they are all expressions of an intention, which underpins what you are doing when you ‘attune’.

 

 

Did you like this blog?

If so, you are going to love this book…

 

Teaching Reiki

“Spot on! I’ve been teaching reiki for many years and I must say I wish this book had landed back then!

I’ve put together courses and really would have loved a book like this to refer back to, it’s concise, clear, laid out really well and is informative and a mini support system to boot.

If you’re entering the Reiki world with an aim to become Master/Teacher then having this book in your armoury will benefit you.”
S J Price


Teaching Reiki

A Comprehensive Guide to Running Great Courses

This is the book I really wish had been available when I started running Reiki courses in 1997. And it would have helped me greatly in my journey as a Reiki teacher thereafter.

You’ll find a wealth of advice about how to set up and run your Reiki courses: read articles about planning and structuring your courses; find out how to explain things to students in a way that honours their learning preferences and personality types; discover how to create top quality course materials and how to support your students long-term.

We look at the differences between ‘Western’ and Original Japanese Reiki and I explain how I created “Reiki Evolution” courses, which pass on the essence of Reiki’s original form. Read this book and you’ll know how to teach “Reiki Evolution” style: what to say, what to teach, and even how to teach Reiki in a ten-week ‘Evening Class’ format.

This book will be of interest to anyone who is about to start teaching Reiki, or to established Reiki teachers who are interested in enhancing the quality of their courses.

Read the contents list before you order, if you like, by clicking on this link: Table of contents

Book: 370 pages.

Price: £15.99 + p&p




Or Download a PDF version now for only £12.49



Reiki teaching: advice for new Reiki Teachers

pic of reiki students, advice for master teachers

It’s nerve-wracking preparing for your first Reiki course, isn’t it? You’re taking a step into the unknown and you are going to be guiding a group of people who are trusting you to do a good job. You probably feel that you don’t know enough and that you’re not ready yet. I know how that feels.

I this article I thought I would just pass on a few pieces of advice that might be of help to you, to ease some of your anxiety. Here goes…

It’s OK to teach differently from how you were taught

I’m sure that the First Degree course you went on was great and gave you everything you needed. But the course may be a bit hazy now, given that you have gone on to take Second Degree and your Master Teacher course.

Maybe you have a sense that you would like to do things a bit differently from the way that your teacher taught you: you are a different person, you have a different personality, you approach things in different ways.

And that’s ok: you should not feel that you have to exactly replicate the way that they taught or the content of their course. You can be yourself and find your own distinctive way, so long as you pass on the essentials, which you can read about in this blog: Back to basics: all about Reiki First Degree. So if you think you can explain things better, provide better course materials, or think the course would flow more logically if you did things differently, go right ahead.

Teach Reiki, not stuff that has nothing to do with Reiki

This is a bit of a bug-bear of mine, but I shall say it anyway: make sure that when you teach Reiki, you just teach Reiki, rather than a whole load of New-Age add-ons that have very little or nothing to do with Usui Reiki but have crept into Reiki over the years, and here I am thinking about smudging, crystal healing, chakra balancing, tarot cards, clairvoyance. When you run a Reiki course I recommend that you teach Reiki, just Reiki.

Make sure that you have practised your attunements well

No matter what lineage you have, you are going to carry out some initiations with your students, whether that be Reiju empowerments or some other variety of attunement ritual. You need to be comfortable in giving these initiations because you don’t want to have to keep flicking through your notes half way through the attunements. That would be so unprofessional.

So practise, practise and practise some more! Attune a teddy bear, attune an empty chair, sit in your lounge on a sofa with your eyes closed and imagine in your mind’s eye you giving an attunement, see yourself going through the movements, explain out loud what you are doing (as if you were explaining to someone else how to do it), gesticulate so you get used to the hand movements, walk up and down like a mad person, talking yourself through the stages you have learned, draw little stick-figure diagrams to summarise the stages, rap a little rhyme to remind your mind! Be creative!

Once you have the attunements sorted you will feel a lot more confident.

You don’t need to have all the answers

You are probably worrying about what people might ask you on your course and whether you will know the answer to all their questions. You probably think that you don’t know enough. To be honest, so long as you know more than they do then you will be fine, and you know far more than you think. Your students don’t really know anything about Reiki and you have been using it for some time now, so you have a wealth of experience to draw upon.

But there’s more to say about questions because you do not have to have the answer to every question; I know I don’t. Some questions do not have an answer, or nobody knows, or nobody knows and it doesn’t matter anyway. Don’t waffle or try to make up an answer: people can tell if you’re bullshitting, and if you’re honest with your students then they will take more notice of you when you do have something to say.

Remember that Reiki is a practical art

Remember that Reiki is a practical art and that when you teach Reiki you are passing on what you have learned and noticed during your personal experience of working with the energy. You are not passing on high-blown academic theories that you have to revise and might get wrong: you have personal experience of doing all the things that you will be guiding your students through, so you are on very solid ground.

You have given yourself a lot of self-treatments and if you learned Japanese-style Reiki then you will also have experience of using Hatsurei ho most days, and working with the Reiki precepts. You have given Reiki treatments to other people and you have become comfortable with this, learning from your experiences and finding your own comfortable way with the process, making it your own.

You know far, far more about all this stuff than they do, you know far more than you realise, and you have personal experience of doing all the things that you will be guiding your students through… so you can chill, be yourself, and enjoy the day.

And I am sure that you will have a wonderful time on your course.

 

Need some help with your course materials?

reiki first degree course book cdI have put together comprehensive and detailed course manuals and easy-to-listen-to audio CDs with commentaries and guided meditations. All these are available for you to use on your own courses (no matter what lineage you have) and you can order them in packs of four at greatly discounted prices. Reiki teachers all over the world are using them. Find out more by clicking here:

Reiki Evolution Manuals and audio CDs.

 

 

 

Did you like this blog?

If so, you are going to love this book…

 

Teaching Reiki

“Spot on! I’ve been teaching reiki for many years and I must say I wish this book had landed back then!

I’ve put together courses and really would have loved a book like this to refer back to, it’s concise, clear, laid out really well and is informative and a mini support system to boot.

If you’re entering the Reiki world with an aim to become Master/Teacher then having this book in your armoury will benefit you.”
S J Price


Teaching Reiki

A Comprehensive Guide to Running Great Courses

This is the book I really wish had been available when I started running Reiki courses in 1997. And it would have helped me greatly in my journey as a Reiki teacher thereafter.

You’ll find a wealth of advice about how to set up and run your Reiki courses: read articles about planning and structuring your courses; find out how to explain things to students in a way that honours their learning preferences and personality types; discover how to create top quality course materials and how to support your students long-term.

We look at the differences between ‘Western’ and Original Japanese Reiki and I explain how I created “Reiki Evolution” courses, which pass on the essence of Reiki’s original form. Read this book and you’ll know how to teach “Reiki Evolution” style: what to say, what to teach, and even how to teach Reiki in a ten-week ‘Evening Class’ format.

This book will be of interest to anyone who is about to start teaching Reiki, or to established Reiki teachers who are interested in enhancing the quality of their courses.

Read the contents list before you order, if you like, by clicking on this link: Table of contents

Book: 370 pages.

Price: £15.99 + p&p




Or Download a PDF version now for only £12.49



Photo credit: Teresa Ostos

Energopsychograms for the Reiki attunements

energopsychogram r1 reiki first degree attunement

So this is my fifth post on the subject of  energopsychograms, which started with What are energopsychograms?

I have talked about these special images and how they can be meditated upon to elicit a particular energy, just like meditating on a symbol or a sound can frame the energy in a particular way, or produce a particular Reiki frequency that you can experience in a distinctive way.

I have shared the images that represent the energies of CKR and SHK, and the state elicited when you use HSZSN, and I have published energopsychograms that represent the energies of the Reiki kotodama (sacred sounds).

In this post I wanted to share images that represent the essence of what is experienced/transmitted when you receive Reiki attunements at First Degree, Second Degree and Master level.

Above, you can see an energopsychogram that represents a Reiki First Degree attunement.

To meditate on the energopsychogram, just sit calmly with the image in front of you. Stare at the image. let it wash over you, defocus your eyes.

Notice the quality of the energy that is being elicited within you. What is the nature of the energy? Where do you feel it? How does it feel. Bathe in the energy of the image.

Second Degree energopsychogram

Here you can see the energopsychogram that represents a Reiki Second Degree attunement.

energopsychogram r2 reiki second degree attunement

Master attunement energopsychogram

And finally, here is the energopsychogram that represents a Western Reiki Master attunement.

energopsychogram r3 reiki master attunement

Over to you

Time to experiment, then!

Meditate on the energies of the three energopsychograms.

What do you notice?

Post your experiences below so we can all see how things went.

 

 

Author:

 

Founder of Western Reiki did Distant Attunements!

reiki distant attunements

A very awkward discovery

As we know, Western-style Reiki has drawn to itself a lot of dogma, rigidity and blinkered-thinking, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in the area of distant attunements.

As far as many Reiki teachers and societies are concerned, teaching Reiki to someone who isn’t sitting in front of you is tantamount to heresy and we are all expected to believe that distant attunements do not work.

In fact, if I recall this correctly, one of the requirements of the UK Reiki Council’s core curriculum is that the student, to be properly taught Reiki, has to believe that attunements must carried out face to face, so we even have Reiki thought-police at large in the world!

This is nonsense, of course, and it takes quite some mental gymnastics to believe both that Reiki can be sent from one side of the planet to the other just by thinking about it (à la distant healing) while maintaining that you can only be initiated into Reiki by being corraled in the same room as your teacher for some close-quarters mystical hand-waving.

Mrs Takata has put the cat amongst the pigeons!

takata reiki distant attunements
Mrs Takata taught using distant attunements

But new evidence has just come to light which shows that Mrs Hawayo Takata, the lady responsible for teaching Dr Hayashi’s version of Reiki in the Western world, the source of Western Reiki, actually gave a distant attunement and taught someone remotely, in fact ‘over the telephone’.

The research was carried out by Robert Fueston, who was examining archive material at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. You can read a fuller report on this by visiting Pamela Miles’s Reiki site: Takata and distant initiation.

This is very important.

Hawayo Takata was *the* source of Reiki in the West and until very recently all Reiki practitioners and Masters will have had Mrs T sitting there in their lineage. In many quarters, Mrs Takata’s approach and her teachings are almost sacrosanct and underpin the approach of the Reiki Alliance, for example, or the Reiki Association in the UK.

And it will be these more ‘traditional’ organisations who will be dead against any sort of distant teaching of Reiki.

But now we know that distant teaching, and distant initiations, were right there from the very beginning.

Dangerous knowledge?

I was a little disappointed when reading the report of Robert Fueston’s endeavours that he “felt conflicted about releasing this information, lest it be taken as a precedent to justify remote teaching” and he goes on to try and limit the application of distant teaching, saying that Mrs Takata “only used remote initiations when it seemed absolutely necessary” and “this way of teaching was the exception rather than the norm.”

What are people afraid of?

Either it works or it doesn’t!

And if it works, it doesn’t have to be limited to ’emergencies’ only.

My experience of teaching at a distance

Distant attunements and distance Reiki training work.

I have taught Reiki to students all over the world. I have taught 500+ people in 28 countries, in fact, from USA to UAE, from the Netherlands to Netherlands Antilles, from Norway to Taiwan. All my students have been initiated at a distance and have followed courses that gave them far more practical, hands-on experience of using Reiki on themselves and other people than is possible on any sort of live course.

When carried properly, distant Reiki courses are just as good as live training, with the distinct advantage that you can have the one-to-one attention of your teacher over an extended period and you can take your time, getting all the hands-on practice that you need and only moving on when you feel comfortable with what you have learned.

But don’t take my word for it! Look at these testimonials from some of our students:

First Degree home study course testimonials

Second Degree home study course testimonials

Reiki Master Teacher home study course testimonials

Interested in trying distant Reiki training?

reiki master attunements course reiki 3 rmt classes
Click the image to explore our Reiki home study courses

If you like the look of Reiki Evolution courses and the way we do things, why not try one of our home study courses?

You can take the usual First Degree, Second Degree and Master Teacher levels, and also train in:

 

Some heresy about Reiki symbols

using reiki symbols heresy

You don’t need to be attuned to a symbol

In my article, Reiki Symbols, Attunements & Beyond, I explain that although it has been a belief of traditional Western Reiki that the Reiki symbols will not work for you until you have been specifically ‘attuned’ to them, this belief is not correct.

I suggest that you zip across and read that article now because if you do then this article here will make more sense to you!

I’ll wait…

.

.

.

Done?

OK, so we have a situation in the modern Reiki world where people can now be initiated into Reiki without any symbols entering into the process and, when that happens, the Reiki symbols – CKR, SHK – still work fine, eliciting the energies of earth ki and heavenly ki, as they are supposed to.

The ‘attunement’ thing isn’t a necessary step.

The energy can be focused and modified in many different ways: you can use chants, you can use intent and you can use *any* symbol that you like, whether that’s a symbol from one of the many Reiki variations, or an entirely new, channelled, or random symbol. They will all focus or frame the energy in a particular way.

Let’s experiment with some symbols

So if you feel drawn to, say, Karuna Reiki, which is heavily symbol-based, and you have access to the symbols used in that system, then explore its symbols. Meditate on them, draw their energies into your body, flood yourself with their quality or essence, and come to your own conclusion about what they are all about.

Here’s a simple experiment that you an carry out to prove to yourself that a symbol that you haven’t been attuned to will frame the energy in a distinctive way.

Meditation on “O”

I would like you to meditate on a simple circle. Rest your hands in your lap, palms up, close your eyes and take a couple of long, deep breaths to release any stress and tension. Then imagine a perfect circle, black & white, up in the air above you. Imagine that energy or light is cascading down to you from that symbol above you, flooding over you, flowing through you, and just bathe in that energy, merging with it.

Alternatively, meditate in time with your breath so that on the inbreath you draw energy down from that circle into your tanden, allow the energy to flow and spread through your body, and on the outbreath just flood that energy out of you.

And notice how that energy feels:

  • Where do you feel it most?
  • What quality does it have?
  • What impression do you have of its nature?
  • What does it do to/for you?
  • What is its essence?

Over to you

Carry out the meditation a few times and post a message below to let me know what the energy of the circle felt like.

What did it do for you?

How did the energy of the circle differ from the energies of CKR and SHK when you meditate on them?

Did you like this blog?

If so, you are going to love this book…

 

Your Reiki Workout

“In this comprehensive, informative and fun book, Taggart provides a multitude of detailed, practical exercises and guidance on strengthening sensitivity and intuition. Additionally, and seldom found in other publications, Taggart explores more advanced techniques on how to work with Reiki, and intent, on a deeper level for the benefit of both you and clients. I highly recommend this book to those who have undergone Reiki training and wish to obtain practical answers to deeper questions that may not have been covered in their tuition courses, and to explore their experiences of Reiki at a higher level.”

A Gordon


Your Reiki Workout

Exercises and Meditations to Explore the Wonder of Reiki

This book started its life as a collection of ‘self-help guides’ that focused on: getting started with Reiki, becoming more sensitive to the energy, developing your intuitive side and exploring the use of intent.

What I have done is to take these guides and re-write and expand upon them, so that you have here a practical workbook that you can use over time to explore the potentials that Reiki has to offer.

I have also included all the work that I have done in developing “Reiki synthesis”: a way of using questions, language forms and a breathing technique to create bespoke symbols for yourself and others, and to deal with unhelpful emotions or beliefs. Reiki synthesis focuses specific energies on freeing you from what is holding you back in your life, releases negative emotions and beliefs and creates specific energies to move you forward in the most powerful and positive way.

This book will be of interest to anyone who is interested in exploring and experimenting with the energy and who wants to learn a unique and powerful system for self-transformation.

This professionally-printed Reiki book has 210 A5 pages, a glossy soft cover and we will send it to anywhere in the world!

Read the contents list before you order, if you like, by clicking on this link: Table of contents

Book: 210 pages.

Price: £15.99 + p&p




Or Download a PDF version now for only £12.49


 

 

 

Author:
Picture Credit: David Lofink

 

Mindfulness and compassion

In this article I want to talk about Mindfulness and Compassion, which I believe are two essential components of Reiki practice. Whether we are treating others, working on ourselves, empowering others or living our lives with Reiki, we should grow to embody those two states, the essence of the Reiki precepts.

Mindfulness

According to Usui Sensei’s surviving students, Mikao Usui introduced his students to the practice of mindfulness at First Degree level, and emphasised this more at Second Degree level. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary (9th Edition), to be mindful is to take heed or care, to be conscious. Mindfulness or being mindful is being aware of your present moment. You are not judging, reflecting or thinking. You are simply observing the moment in which you find yourself, fully aware. Moments are like a breath. Each breath is replaced by the next breath. You are there with no other purpose than being awake and aware of that moment.

So mindfulness is a state of living in the moment, of being relaxed, calm and fully engaged in what we are doing. Mindfulness is being fully aware of what is happening right now and giving ourselves completely to our task without distraction. By learning how to enjoy and be in the present moment we can find peace within ourselves.

Like precepts, mindfulness is largely associated with Buddhism and it is a meditative practice that is not reserved for special meditation sessions: it is a practice that you can embrace as part of your daily life and when carrying out routine and mundane tasks.

The best guide that I have found to the use of mindfulness as part of your daily life is the following book, written by Thich Nhat Hanh: “The Miracle of Mindfulness” and I recommend that all Reiki practitioners and teachers obtain a copy and practise being mindful during their daily activities.

I believe that Mikao Usui’s precepts are all about mindfulness, and that when we are exhorted by the precepts to “just for today” release anger and worry, we are being guided to exist as far as we can in a mindful state. Anger and worry are distractions, you see, and if we can exist in the moment by being mindful then we will not dwell on the past and beat ourselves up for things that did not go the way we wanted, and we will not dwell on the future, perhaps worrying about things that have not yet happened. We can learn to release our attachments to the past and the future and just “be” now, content and accepting in the moment, by learning to be mindful.

Compassion

The final precept, that of being “compassionate towards ourselves and others” is for me an exhortation to be gentle with ourselves, to be patient, to be light-hearted, to not take ourselves quite so seriously and above all to be forgiving – first of all of ourselves but also of others. By accepting and forgiving ourselves we start to release our anger and our worry, and move towards a state of contentment in the moment.

The original system was a spiritual path, a path to enlightenment, and the precepts were what Usui Sensei’s system was all about. These principles are a foundation for everything we do with Reiki: the states of mindfulness and compassion arise from following the precepts and from working with Reiki.

For example, how do we feel when we carry out a Reiki treatment? Treating someone with Reiki is a special, special gift. We feel a closeness, an intimacy, a merging with the recipient; we receive trust and we experience compassion. Ideally we should just be there in the moment, with the energy, with the recipient, with no expectations. We do not treat someone with the intention to resolve their health problem or eliminate their headache. We just merge with the energy and allow Reiki to do its work; we create a sacred space for healing to occur. If our mind wanders, as it may do, then we notice this and gently but firmly bring our attention back to the present and what we are doing. We become one with the energy as it flows through us, we become one with the recipient, and we experience that blissful contentment in the moment. When we treat we are mindful: we are an observer, not a participant.

Though some are taught that you can hold a conversation with someone as you treat, or watch television at the same time, this really will not lead to the best being given to the recipient. To be the most effective channel we can be, we need to be there with the energy, fully and gently engaged in our work, giving ourselves fully to the task without distraction.

Those same principles apply when working on ourselves, whether carrying out Hatsurei ho or self-treating. The state we should seek to achieve is that of being fully engaged in the endeavour, of being with the energy without distraction, merged, aware and simply existing in the moment, with a gentle feeling of forgiveness, love and compassion towards ourselves.

So both Mindfulness and Compassion are fundamental to our life with Reiki, fundamental to the Reiki precepts, to working on others and working on ourselves. Not surprisingly they are also an essential component of the transmission of Reiki to another person through carrying out Reiju empowerments. Reiju is the ‘connection ritual’ that Usui Sensei used, and taught to his surviving students. It is simple, elegant and powerful, free from the clutter and detail that surrounds most Western attunement styles. When we perform Reiju we have no expectations: we are there in the moment with the energy, following the prescribed movements. We are relaxed and fully engaged in what we are doing, aware of what is happening right now, and we give ourselves completely to our task without distraction. That is the essence of Reiju, the essence of treatments, the essence of the precepts, and the essence of our life with Reiki.

Back to basics: Reiki Second Degree

People learn Reiki for many reasons and come from an amazing variety of backgrounds, all attending for their own personal reasons. Reiki courses in the UK present a whole variety of approaches, some “traditional” Western-style, some more Japanese in content, some wildly different and almost unrecognisable, some free and intuitive, others dogmatic and based on rules about what you should always do and not do. Reiki is taught in so many ways, and students will tend to imagine that the way that they were taught is the way that Reiki is taught and practised by most other Reiki people.

What I have tried to do in this article is to present a simple guide to what in my view is the essence of Second Degree: what it’s all about and what we should be doing and thinking about to get the most out of our experience of Reiki at this level. My words are addressed to anyone at Second Degree level, or anyone who would like to review the essence of Second Degree.

The first thing I want to say is that there should usually be an interval of a couple of months or so between First and Second Degree if you want to get the most out of your Reiki experience, and that it is unwise to take both Degrees back-to-back over a weekend. We would not take an advanced driving test the day after passing our basic driving test, so why would we believe that moving on to a more ‘advanced’ level with Reiki would be an effective way to learn when we have had no opportunity to get the hang of the basics of First Degree? Can we get the most out of Second Degree when we have had no opportunity to get used to working with and sensing and experiencing energy, when we have had no opportunity to enhance our effectiveness as a channel and our sensitivity to Reiki through regular practice, when we have had no opportunity to become familiar with a standard treatment routine and have had no opportunity to feel comfortable and confident in treating other people? Reiki is not a race, and we need to be familiar with the basics before moving on.

Second Degree is all about:

1. reinforcing or enhancing your connection to the energy 2. learning some symbols which you can use routinely when working on yourself or treating others 3. enhancing your self-healing 4. learning how to effect a strong distant connection (distant healing)

And ideally it is also about opening yourself up to your intuitive side so that you throw away the basic Reiki ‘rule book’ and go freestyle, gearing any treatments towards the individual needs of the recipient.

There are many approaches to doing these things, and I wanted below to touch on each one and to dispel some myths that may have been passed on.

Enhancing your Connection to the energy

On your Second Degree course you will have received some attunements or some empowerments. Attunements are not standard rituals within the world of Reiki and take many forms, some simpler and some more complex. They have evolved and changed greatly during their journey from teacher to teacher in the West. There is no “right way” to carry out an attunement and the individual details of a ritual do not matter a great deal. They all work. Equally, there is no “correct” number of attunements that have to be carried out at Second Degree level. Whether you receive one, two, or three attunements on your course, that is fine.

On your course you may have received some “empowerments” rather than attunements, though these are less common. The word “empowerment”, or “Reiju empowerment”, refers to a connection ritual that has come to us from some Japanese sources, and is closer in essence to the empowerment that Mikao Usui conveyed to his students. If you are receiving empowerments rather than attunements then you really need to have received three of them at least.

What we experience when receiving an attunement or an empowerment will vary a lot. Some people have fireworks and bells and whistles and that’s nice for them; other people notice a lot less, or very little, or even nothing, and that’s fine too. What we feel when we have an attunement is not a guide to how well it has worked for us. Attunements work, and sometimes we will have a strong experience, but it’s not compulsory! Whether we have noticed a lot, or very little, the attunement will have given us what we need.

Since in Mikao Usui’s system you would have received empowerments from him again and again, it would be nice if you could echo this practice by receiving further empowerments (or attunements) and perhaps these might be available at your teacher’s Reiki shares or get-togethers, if they hold them. But it is possible to receive distant Reiju empowerments and various teachers make them freely available as a regular ‘broadcast’. This is not essential, and your connection to Reiki once given does not fizzle out, but it would be a beneficial practice if you could receive regular empowerments from someone.

Being “attuned” to a symbol

For many years within the world of Reiki, people believed that the symbols would not work for you, that they were essentially useless, until you had been “attuned” to the symbol: then it would work for you. Unfortunately the only connection rituals available in the West were ‘attunements’ which involved attuning you to a symbol, so no-one knew how to carry out a ‘symbol-free’ attunement to see if you really needed to be attuned to a symbol for it to work for you.

But in 1999, from Japan, emerged Reiju empowerments, a representation of the empowerments that Usui conferred, and these empowerments do not use symbols. Finally we were able to see if you really needed to be attuned to a symbol for it to work for you. Lo and behold we discovered that the symbols work fine for people who are connected to the energy using Reiju; they work fine for people who are connected to Reiki but who have not been ‘attuned’ to the symbols. It seems that once you are connected to Reiki – and now we know how to achieve this without symbols entering into the process – the symbols will work for you, and in fact any symbol seems to push the energy in a particular direction without you having to be specifically ‘attuned’ to it (whatever that means). The Reiki symbols are simply graphical representations of different aspects of the energy, a way of representing and emphasising what is already there.

“Sacred Symbols”

In some lineages students are not allowed to keep copies of the symbols and have to reproduce them from memory, based on what they learned on their Second Degree course. There is the suggestion that the symbols are sacred and not only sacred but secret, and should not be shown to people who are not involved in Reiki, or people who are at First Degree level. Where this idea came from in the Western Reiki system is not clear, since certainly Dr Hayashi had his students copy out his notes by way of preparing their own manuals, including copying down the symbols.

For me, the Reiki symbols are simply graphical representations of different aspects of the energy, useful tools to assist us in experiencing or becoming consciously aware of different aspects of what we already have, and what is special or sacred is our connection to the source, not the squiggles we might put on a piece of paper.

Because of the ‘Chinese whispers’ that have resulted from students not being allowed to take home hard copies of the Reiki symbols, there are many different versions of the symbols in existence, but they are mainly variations on a theme and they all seem to work in practice. Do remember, though, that the original CKR had an anticlockwise spiral, and to use a version of CKR with a clockwise spiral is to use a symbol that is not part of the Usui/Hayashi/Takata system.

Using Symbols in practice

Some students are taught there is one ‘correct’ way that symbols have to be used. Reiki is not so finicky. The important thing when using a Reiki symbol is to focus your attention on the symbol in some way, so whether you are drawing the symbol with your fingers hovering over the back of your hand as you treat someone, whether you are drawing out the symbol using eye movements, or nose movements, or in your mind’s eye, all approaches will work. You do not need to visualise the symbols in a particular colour and if you can see the symbol in your mind’s eye in its entirety – this takes practice – you can ‘flash’ the whole symbol rather than drawing it out stroke by stroke.

Just because we have been taught some symbols does not mean that we are now obliged to use them all the time when we treat or when we work on ourselves. They can be used to emphasise different aspects of the energy, but this is optional. Use of symbols does seem to boost the flow of energy, so we can use them when it feels appropriate. This is the key: to bring a symbol into a particular part of a treatment when we have a strong feeling that we ought to, to work intuitively rather than following a set method.

I have written in other articles below about the issue of simplicity within Reiki practice, and the complicated way that people have ended up using the Reiki symbols, for example mixing symbols together or using complicated symbol sandwiches. Remember that the simple approach is usually the most effective, and that there is no hard and fast way that you ‘have’ to work with the symbols you have been shown.

By the way, if you have been taught that you have to draw the three Second Degree symbols over your palm each day or else they will stop working for you, you can safely ignore these instructions. The symbols will work for you no matter what you do or don’t do with your palms!

Why the symbols are there

At Second Degree, the prime focus of Reiki is still your self-healing, and the first two symbols are there to help you get to grips with two important energies that will further or deepen your self-healing. Putting the ‘distant healing’ symbol to one side, the other two symbols represent the energies of earth ki and heavenly ki, and we need to fully assimilate these two energies to enhance our self-healing and self-development. If we are going to use these energies when we treat other people, it makes sense to be thoroughly familiar with these energies, to have spent time ‘becoming’ these energies. We can do this by carrying out regular symbol meditations.

Making ‘distant’ connections

The third Reiki symbol that you are introduced to on a Second Degree course is commonly called the ‘distant healing symbol’. We should remember that distant healing is perfectly possible at First Degree level and that we do not need to use a symbol in order to send Reiki to another person: intent is enough. But using this symbol can help us to learn to better ‘click’ into a nice strong merged state.

There is no set form of ritual that ‘has’ to be used in distant healing, there is not set form of words that has to be recited, no established sequence which needs to be reproduced in order for distant healing to be effective, so we can find our own comfortable approach, different from other people’s but equally valid. The details of the ritual that we use are not important. All we need to do is to focus our attention on the recipient and maybe use the symbol in some way, merge with the energy, merge with the recipient, and allow the energy to flow.

Intuitive working

Ideally, Second Degree should be the stage where you start to leave the basic ‘rulebook’ behind and go ‘freestyle’, gearing your treatment towards the recipient’s individual energy needs, so that each treatment will be different, as the recipient’s energy needs change from one treatment session to another. Some students will already be modifying the basic treatment routine by the time that they arrive on their Second Degree course.

Set hand positions and a prescribed scheme to follow are useful things to have at First Degree, and allow the student to feel confident in treating others, but sequences of hand positions can be left behind when we open to intuition. Intuitive treatments seem to do something special for the recipient: when you direct the energy into just the right combination of positions for that person on that occasion you allow the energy to penetrate deeply and this seems to lead to a more profound experience for the recipient. Treatments using intuitively guided hand positions may involve much fewer hand positions being held, and each combination being held for much longer, than in a ‘standard’ treatment.

We recommend that the Japanese “Reiji ho” approach is used to help Second Degree students to open to their intuitive side, since the approach is so simple and seems to work for most people even within a few minutes of practice. The resulting strong belief that the student is “intuitive” is a hugely empowering state and opens many doors.

Finally

Reiki has the potential to make an amazing, positive difference to you and the people around you. Remember that Reiki is simplicity itself, and by taking some steps to work on yourself regularly, and share Reiki with the people close to you, you are embarking on a very special journey. How far you travel on that journey is governed by how many steps you take. Carry on with your Hatsurei and self-treatments, get to grips with the energies of CKR and SHK through regular meditation, find your own comfortable approach to carrying out distant healing, and open yourself to intuitive working. And have fun!

Back to basics: Reiki First Degree

People end up on First Degree courses for many reasons and come from an amazing variety of backgrounds, all attending for their own personal reasons. Reiki courses in the UK present a whole variety of approaches, some “traditional” Western-style, some more Japanese in content, some wildly different and almost unrecognisable, some free and intuitive, others dogmatic and based on rules about what you should always do and not do. Reiki is taught in so many ways, and students will tend to imagine that the way that they were taught is the way that Reiki is taught and practised by most other Reiki people.

What I have tried to do in this article is to present a simple guide to the essence of First Degree: what it’s all about and what we should be doing and thinking about to get the most out of our experience of Reiki at this level. My words are addressed to anyone at First Degree level, or anyone who would like to review the essence of First Degree.

First Degree is all about connecting to the energy, learning to develop your sensitivity to the flow of energy, working on yourself to develop your ability as a channel and to enhance self-healing, and working on other people. There are many approaches to doing these things, and I wanted below to touch on each area and to dispel some myths that may have been passed on.

Connecting to the energy

On your Reiki course you will have received some attunements or some empowerments. Attunements are not standard rituals within the world of Reiki and take many forms, some simpler and some more complex. They have evolved and changed greatly during their journey from teacher to teacher in the West. There is no “right way” to carry out an attunement and the individual details of a ritual do not matter a great deal. They all work. Equally, there is no “correct” number of attunements that have to be carried out at First Degree level. The number four is quoted often as being the “correct” number but this has no basis in Reiki’s original form, and whether you receive one, two, three or four rituals on your course, that is fine.

On your course you may have received some “empowerments” rather than attunements, though these are less common. The word “empowerment”, or “Reiju empowerment”, refers to a connection ritual that has come to us from some Japanese sources, and is closer in essence to the empowerment that Mikao Usui conveyed to his students. Again, there is no correct number of empowerments that has to be carried out. One is enough but it is nice to do more.

What we experience when receiving an attunement or an empowerment will vary a lot. Some people have fireworks and bells and whistles and that’s nice for them; other people notice a lot less, very little, or even nothing, and that’s fine too. What we feel when we have an attunement is not a guide to how well it has worked for us. Attunements work, and sometimes we will have a strong experience, but it’s not compulsory! Whether we have noticed a lot, or very little, the attunement will have given us what we need.

Since in Mikao Usui’s system you would have received empowerments from him again and again, it would be nice if you could echo this practice by receiving further empowerments (or attunements) and perhaps these might be available at your teacher’s Reiki shares or get-togethers, if they hold them. But it is possible to receive distant Reiju empowerments and various teachers make them freely available as a regular ‘broadcast’. This is not essential, and your connection to Reiki once given does not fizzle out, but it would be a beneficial practice if you could receive regular empowerments from someone.

Developing your Sensitivity to the energy

People’s experience of energy when they first start working with Reiki can vary. Some people notice more than others, particularly in the early stages, and if we perhaps notice less going on in our hands when compared with another student on the course we can become disillusioned to an extent: that little voice in your head says “I know Reiki works for everyone… but it’s not going to work for me. I knew it wasn’t going to work for me”. Well if this describes your situation then I can say to you that Reiki will work for you, and is working for you, and the vast majority of Reiki people can feel the flow of energy through them in some way, though your particular ‘style’ of sensing the energy may not involve the more usual heat, fizzing, tingling, pulsing etc. that many people experience. There are a few Reiki Master/Teachers out there who feel absolutely nothing in their hands, but this is not common, and Reiki is still working for them.

Sensitivity to the flow of energy develops over time, with practice. Some people are lucky enough to be able to feel quite a lot in their hands and in their bodies to begin with, but others have to be patient, trust that Reiki is working for them, and perhaps focus more on the feedback that they receive from the people that they treat, rather than what they feel – or don’t feel – in their hands.

It would be worthwhile if all First Degree students spent some time regularly practising feeling energy: between your hands, around your cat or dog or your pot plant or a tree, around someone else’s head and shoulders, over someone’s supine body, noticing any differences in the sensation in your hands as you move your hands from one place to another. Don’t expect to experience a particular thing or a particular intensity of feeling. Be neutral and simply notice what experience you have and how that experience might change from one area to another.

On some First Degree courses this process will be taught as “scanning”, where you hover your hands over the recipient’s body, drift your hands from one place to another, and notice any areas which are drawing more energy. This can provide some useful information in terms of suggesting additional or alternative hand-positions to use when you treat, and can suggest areas where you are going to spend longer when you treat.

Working on yourself

It is vital that after going on a First Degree course you establish a regular routine of working on yourself in order to develop your fledgling ability as a channel and to obtain the benefits that Reiki can provide in terms of balancing your life and self-healing. Most people decide to learn Reiki because they are looking for some personal benefits as well as looking to help other people, and the way to get the most out of the Reiki system is to work on yourself regularly.

On your First Degree course you will have been taught a self-treatment method, perhaps a Japanese-style meditation but more likely the Western “hands-on” self-treatment method. You will most likely have been given a set of hand-positions to use, but please remember that these positions are not set in stone and, particularly if some of the hand positions are quite uncomfortable to use in practice, you will develop your own style. It is fine to change the hand positions based on what feels right from one self-treatment to another, and you should do what feels appropriate. There is no “correct” set of positions that you have to use, and each hand-position does not have to be held for a particular period of time. Treat for however long you have time for, and however long feels right for each hand-position you decide to use.

Many people are taught that they have to do a “21 day self-treat”, and some people have the impression that they then do not need to self-treat any more. The “21 day” period has no real basis, and I can say that you ought to be thinking in terms of working on yourself long-term. To gain the greatest benefits from this wonderful system you need to persevere and make working with energy a permanent feature of your life with Reiki, a basic background practice, the effects of which will build up cumulatively as you continue to work with the energy.

You may have been taught a series of energy exercises and meditations called “Hatsurei ho” which comes from Japanese Reiki, and I can commend this practice to you. It is a wonderful way of grounding, balancing, and enhancing you ability as a channel, and should be a regular part of your Reiki routine.

Treating other people

First Degree is also about starting to work on other people, a process which also benefits the giver, so plus points all round really! A few students may have been taught not to treat others at First Degree, or for a particular prescribed period, but this is an unnecessary restriction and Reiki can be shared with other people straight away.

There are many different approaches to treating others, and we should not get bogged down with too many rules and regulations about how we ‘must’ proceed. Reiki can be approached in quite a regimented way in some lineages, and students may worry that if they are not remembering all the stages that they ‘have’ to carry out then they will not be carrying out the treatment properly. This is an unnecessary worry because treating other people is simple.

So here is a simple approach that you can use: close your eyes, maybe put your hands in the prayer position, and take a few long deep breaths to calm you and still your mind. You should have in mind that the energy you will channel should be for the highest good of the recipient, but there is no particular form of words that you need to use when commencing your treatment. Now we are going to focus your attention on connecting to the energy. Imagine that energy is flooding down to you from above, flooding through your crown, through the centre of your body, down to your Dantien (an energy centre two fingerbreadths below your tummy button and 1/3rd of the way into your body). Imagine the energy building up and intensifying there. You are filling with energy. Now direct your attention towards the recipient and imagine that you are merging with them, becoming one with them. Feel compassion and enjoy the moment.

You may now begin your treatment, and maybe it would be nice to rest your hands on their shoulders for a while, to connect to them and to get the energy flowing. What hand positions you use will vary depending on what you were taught – there are many variations – and they are all variations on a theme, a way of firing the energy from lots of different directions to give it the best chance of getting to where it needs to go. Hand-positions for treating others are not set in stone and do not have to be followed slavishly. They are just there as a set of guidelines to follow to build your confidence when treating others, and with time and practice you will start to leave behind these basic instructions and gear any treatment towards the needs of the recipient on that occasion, perhaps based on what you picked up when you were ‘scanning’ and perhaps based on intuitive impressions, where you feel drawn to a particular area of the body. Don’t try and work out ‘why’ you have felt drawn to a particular area of the body: just accept your impression and go with it.

Reiki is basically a hands-on treatment method, though for reasons of comfort and propriety you will choose to hover your hands over the recipient in some areas rather than resting on the body. I do not plaster my hands over the recipient’s face or throat, for example, because I think that this is uncomfortable and unsettling for the person you are working on.

You do not have to hover your hands for every hand position, as some people are taught, and equally you do not have to keep at least one hand in physical contact with the recipient’s body at all times, for fear of ‘losing’ your connection: your connection to the recipient is a state of mind, and where your hands are is irrelevant!

As you treat, you should aim to feel yourself merging with the energy, becoming one with the energy, to imagine yourself disappearing into the energy, and this can give you a quite blissful experience. Your mind may wander, particularly in the early stages of your Reiki practice, but you do not need to worry about this. If you notice thoughts intruding, pay them no attention; let them drift on like clouds. If you make a big effort to try and get rid of your thoughts then you will have in your head the original thoughts and then all the new thoughts about getting rid of the first lot of thoughts… you have made things worse! Just bring your attention gently back to the recipient, to the energy, feel yourself disappearing into the energy, merging with the recipient, and let the energy flow; your treatment can become a wonderful meditation.

It is not acceptable to chat to other people while giving a Reiki treatment. If you want to be an effective channel for the energy then you need to direct your attention to the work at hand and make sure you are not unduly distracted. For this reason, conversation between yourself and the recipient should be restricted. Reiki works best of you are still and focused, merging with the energy, in a gentle meditative state. Developing this state takes practice and you can’t do it properly if you are chatting.

You do not need to stay for a particular set amount of time for each hand position. Though it would be probably be best to stay for a few minutes in each position, if in a particular hand position you feel a lot of energy coming through your hands then you can stay in that position for longer – sometimes a lot longer – until the sensation subsides and you can then move onto the next area. Your hands can guide you. Work from the head and shoulders, down the length of the body, and it is nice to finish with the ankles. Many people are taught to smooth down the energy field at the end of a session, and that is a nice thing to do, but remember that you do not have to follow any rituals slavishly, particularly in terms of any sort of ‘closing’ ritual; you do not need to touch the ground, you do not need to say a particular set of words, you do not need to visualise anything in particular, and you do not need to make any ‘set’ movements of your hands or body.

The Reiki Precepts

On your First Degree course you will have been introduced to the Reiki Precepts, or Reiki Principles, Mikao Usui’s “rules to live by’”. Just in case you have been given a slightly distorted version of the precepts, here is a more accurate translation:

The secret of inviting happiness through many blessings
The spiritual medicine for all illness
For today only: Do not anger; Do not worry
Be humble
Be honest in your work
Be compassionate to yourself and others

Do gassho every morning and evening
Keep in your mind and recite

The founder, Usui Mikao

NOTE
The phrase “Be honest in your work” really means “be honest in your dealings with other people”.

Any reference to ‘honouring your elders, parents and teachers’ is a later addition to the list, and is not what Mikao Usui taught.

The precepts were the hub of the whole system, and it is said that as much spiritual development can come through following the precepts in your daily life as would come from any energy work, so they are important. If we can try to focus on living in the moment, not forever dwelling on the past or worrying about the future (fear is a distraction), if we can remind ourselves of the many blessings we have in our lives, if we can forgive ourselves for not being perfect and if we can see things from another’s point of view, if we can be compassionate towards ourselves as well as others, then we have gone a long way towards achieving a liberating sense of serenity and contentment. This is not something to be achieved overnight, of course: it is a work-in-progress.

Finally

Reiki has the potential to make an amazing, positive difference to you and the people around you. Remember that Reiki is simplicity itself, and by taking some steps to work on yourself regularly, and share Reiki with the people close to you, you are embarking on a very special journey.

How far you travel on that journey is governed by how many steps you take.

Reiki Sensations

In this article I would like to talk about the sort of things that students might feel – or not feel – when receiving attunements or empowerments, when working with energy and when treating or being treated, and the significance of these sensations. The article is particular addressed to people who have just taken a First Degree course or who are only just starting on their journey with Reiki, though it should be of interest to people at all Reiki levels.

Attunements or empowerments

(Please note that, to avoid unnecessary repetition, I am going to use the word ‘empowerment’ to refer both to Reiju empowerments and Western-style Reiki attunements.)

When we arrive on a Reiki First Degree course, we probably have very little idea of what we might experience when going through an empowerment. If you read books about Reiki, everyone seems to be going through an exceptional, once-in-a-lifetime experience, but for most people it really isn’t like that.

There is no way of predicting what an individual will experience when receiving an empowerment, whether in person or at a distance. You may have an amazing experience, or you may feel very little or nothing. It is not uncommon for people to see some colours or feel some heat or tingling or pulsing or pressure in various areas of their bodies. For some people an empowerment is a unique experience, profound, emotional, an experience that is almost unbelievable. For others very little happens.

Sometimes you might find that there will be four people, say, on a course. Three people are talking about the surprising, or interesting, or special experiences that they just had, and one poor soul is sitting there thinking to themselves “I knew this wouldn’t work for me… I know Reiki is supposed to work for everyone, but it hasn’t worked for me”. We assume that if we notice a lot happening then the empowerment has ‘taken’, that it has worked really well, and we assume that if we felt very little – or if we felt nothing – then the connection ritual has not worked, that we haven’t been attuned, or we haven’t been attuned properly.

But what a student experiences when they receive an empowerment is no guide as to the effectiveness of that empowerment. In fact what a student experiences really is irrelevant, because empowerments always work. Of course it is nice and reassuring to have the “bells and whistles and fireworks” – it helps you to believe that something definite has happened – but someone who has noticed all these things has not been more effectively empowered when compared with a student who felt very little or nothing.

Experiences are interesting, but not important. They don’t mean anything in terms of whether, or how well, an empowerment has worked, because empowerments always work, no matter what the student feels or doesn’t feel.

Experiencing energy

People are all different, and people differ in terms of how sensitive they are to the flow of energy in the early stages of their work with Reiki. Sometimes people arrive on a Reiki course massively sensitive to the energy, and perhaps better able to sense subtle differences than is their teacher, and that’s nice for them, while other people may notice something very subtle, or perhaps nothing at all. Most people will feel something.

So when playing with energy, most people will feel something in between their hands when they try to make an energy ball. Most people will feel something when they try to feel someone else’s energy field, or if they practise ‘scanning’ (assuming that there is something there to detect – there won’t always be). But not everyone will feel these things to begin with, and the people who do not feel anything should not be disheartened: because sensitivity to such things can develop with practice and repetition. Most people will find that, no matter how sensitive they find themselves when they first learn Reiki, when they start to work with the energy regularly – for example by carrying out Hatsurei ho every day, and by self-treating – their sensitivity to the energy will increase. But this is a work-in-progress and we may need to be patient. And we may find that our sensitivity to the energy never reaches our goal, or is never as great as other Reiki people that we come across. Maybe we are setting an unreasonable target for ourselves.

And we should remember that sensitivity to the flow of energy is not the be-all and end-all of Reiki. We can work on ourselves and derive the many benefits that come through Reiki, no matter what we feel or don’t feel when we carry out hatsurei ho or self-treat. We can treat other people effectively no matter what we might feel or not feel in our hands. I have come across several successful and effective Reiki Master / Teachers who do not feel anything going on in their hands, and never have done. The reason why they continued their Reiki training, rather than giving up in the face of no physical sensations to encourage them, was because they practised on lots of people and they could see, by the positive responses they received from the recipients, that something was definitely going on, that they were doing good things, that Reiki was certainly doing something for the people they treated even though they couldn’t feel the energy.

You may ask how you can treat someone when you can’t feel anything, or if you can’t scan very well at the moment. Well, most people in the world of Reiki are taught a standard set of hand positions to use when they treat, and these standard positions can be followed, giving general coverage over the body; the energy is drawn to areas of need, so that works perfectly well. Not everyone scans. Not everyone is taught how to scan. It isn’t a vital step in a treatment, but it can be a useful one to perform if you can do it.

But if you can work intuitively then of course you can place your hands in the right places for each person you work on, and stay in each position for the most appropriate amount of time, not based on the sensations you are feeling in your hands but based on your intuitive impressions. Everyone can work intuitively with some practice, and you may well be taught how to carry out “Reiji ho” (a Japanese method for opening to your intuition during a treatment) on a Second Degree course. So an intuitive approach to treatments actually eliminates any advantage in being able to sense strongly in your hands.

Sensations experienced by people you treat

Now, you will not be surprised to know that the experiences of people being treated also varies a great deal. For some people, on some occasions, treatments are very strong. They might feel intense heat from the practitioner’s hands, see coloured lights, drift in and out of consciousness. And on other occasions that same person might feel the treatment to be mild and gentle. The energy is drawn by the recipient in amounts that are appropriate for them on that occasion, so the perceived ‘strength’ of any treatment is determined by the recipient’s need. The practitioner is just a necessary bystander in the treatment process.

While some people seem to quite often notice a lot happening when they are treated, there are also people who feel very little or nothing when they receive a Reiki treatment, no matter who they receive the treatment from. If you have just started out on your Reiki journey and you just happen to treat one of these people, or a few of these people, as your first ‘clients’ then you may end up disheartened, thinking that their lack of a strong sensation means that you are ineffective as a practitioner. We want the recipient to feel a lot because that reassures us that we are doing things ‘correctly’, that we are effective as a channel for the energy. But things aren’t always so simple: while quite often there may be general correlation between what the practitioner feels and what the recipient feels (a very hot area for the practitioner is felt as a very tingly area, say, for the recipient) this correlation will not always be there and, sometimes, you might find a practitioner feeling a raging furnace in their hands, amazed at the strength of what is going on, while the recipient did not notice anything at all, and perhaps didn’t notice anything at all during the entire treatment!

Summary

So really this whole article boils down to one simple phrase: “just for today, do not worry”. While it is perfectly natural to want to have some physical sensations to help us believe that we are really doing something when we use Reiki on ourselves and on other people, and while most people who learn Reiki will receive sufficient feedback to reassure them, this will not always happen. With practice and experience we start to let go of the need to be reassured by what we and others feel, and we come to realise that no matter what we feel or don’t feel, Reiki is working for us. But it can be difficult to accept this in the early stages, particularly if we are a little sceptical.

If you aren’t feeling too much at the moment my advice to you is to follow the instructions you were given: carry out your Hatsurei ho every day, self-treat regularly, and get your hands on as many people as you can. Do short blasts on someone’s knee or shoulder, treat people in a straight-backed chair for 20-30 minutes, do full treatments; go with the time you have you have available. The important thing is to get the hands-on practice and you will find, if you treat a good cross-section of people, that you will receive from them the positive feedback that you need, and with sufficient practice you may find that you start to notice more with time.

So be patient, don’t worry, and have fun with your Reiki.

Attunements, empowerments & contact lenses!

Wait! Reiki can mess these up, apparently!
In this article I would like to talk a bit about attunements and empowerments used in Reiki, explaining the similarities and differences between these rituals. I was prompted to write this article after reading a message posted to an Internet discussion group a while ago, on the subject of Reiju empowerments. The message contained such a lot of misinformation and distortions that one could have concluded that it was posted mischievously, or maliciously, for ‘political’ reasons. Just the other day I smiled broadly because I came across an item on a web page which was trying to argue that the empowerments used by Mikao Usui were ineffective in connecting people to Reiki! Very strange. In any case, hopefully I can clear up some confusion or misunderstandings that people might have about attunements and empowerments, and this article should be of interest to people at all Reiki levels.

As for the contact lenses, you can find out about them towards the end of this article!

Introduction

No matter what sort of Reiki course you choose to follow, wherever you are in the world, you are likely to go through a ritual or a series of rituals which can be seen as a way of ‘connecting’ you to Reiki, a way of hooking you up to something that you were previously not connected to. That is a common way that such rituals are viewed: a way of ‘attuning’ you to something that you were not attuned to before, a way of plugging you into a new source of energy that was not available to you before.

But perhaps it is more useful to say that an empowerment, or an attunement, is a ‘ritual permission’, a permission to recognise something that is within, something that has always been there. The effect of the connection ritual is to allow you to channel energy for your own benefit, and for other people’s benefit, in a way that was not possible for you before you went through the ritual with your Reiki teacher.

Most people in the world of Reiki have been ‘connected’ using an “attunement” ritual, a version of the ritual that Mrs Takata was using, and while increasing numbers are now being connected using an “empowerment”, for the foreseeable future those attuned will always outnumber those empowered: most Reiki teachers attune, only a minority empower.

What are “attunements”

Until approximately 1999, everyone within the world of Reiki will have been ‘attuned’ using some sort of variation of the connection ritual that Hawayo Takata taught to the Masters that she initiated in the 1970s. Since the ‘70s Reiki has spread throughout the world and the attunement rituals used have evolved and changed as they have been passed from one teacher to another down the line. Some attunements are now quite complicated affairs, with many, many stages, while others are fairly simple, though there are some common themes that seem to run through most methods, for example the placing of the Reiki symbols into different parts of the student’s body (head and hands for example), tapping, blowing, affirming, visualising.

So there is not one standard attunement ritual used in the world of Reiki: there are endless variations, some quite contradictory to each other; if one method works in terms of the ‘theory’ behind it then a very different method does not make ‘sense’ and simply cannot work, and yet all methods do seem to work perfectly well. Some people insist that there have to be four attunements for Reiki First Degree, which is a big historical misunderstanding that I will not go into now, while others use three, or two, or even one attunement on their courses. All these approaches work.

It should be stated that Mikao Usui did not give people attunements, he did not attune anyone to any symbols, and he did not teach attunements. Attunements were not part of the system that Usui taught: he used empowerments instead. Usui taught empowerments to his Master students, and this was not done early on in their Master training – passing on the Reiki ability to others was only taught towards the end of the Master student’s formal training with Usui Sensei.

Now, the Imperial Officers who trained with Usui had not trained with him for long enough to have reached the level where they would have been taught to empower others, so where did the attunements used on most Reiki courses come from? Interestingly, it seems that after Usui’s untimely death the Imperial Officers put together a ritual that replicated the feelings or the experiences that they had when being empowered by Usui. Dr Hayashi passed on such a ritual to Mrs Takata, and then variations of this ritual spread throughout the world.

So attunements started their life as a constructed ritual put together by the Imperial Officers, and this ritual has now evolved, changed, altered over time as it has been passed from teacher to teacher in the West. These various attunement methods have been used to attune most of the Reiki people in the world.

So attunements work, of course. They ‘connect’ the student to Reiki. But that is not the end of the story: if we are going to get the most out of our Reiki then we are going to have to commit ourselves to working with the energy regularly, on ourselves, on other people, to develop our ability as a channel, to develop our sensitivity to the energy and to develop our intuition. An attunement gives us a baseline connection to the energy, but we can develop ourselves further, and benefit further, through our own efforts.

And in fact we can benefit from receiving further attunements, too. This is something that Reiki Master William Rand has been advocating for many years now, I believe. He does not say this because attunements are in some way ineffective, or temporary, or weak: he recommends that people get together to re-attune each other because he has found that there are definite benefits associated with having your ‘connection’ to the energy reinforced or renewed.

So one attunement is enough (or two, or three, or four, or however many attunements you had on your Reiki course, or however many attunements you believe are necessary), but there are definite benefits associated with being reattuned, and if we are serious about our Reiki then we need to also commit ourselves to working with the energy regularly. You don’t just go on a course and that’s the end of it: you need to work at your Reiki.

What are empowerments

When people talk about empowerments, they are referring to “Reiju empowerments”. You can write the word “Reiju” in two different ways using Japanese kanji, one way meaning “accepting the spirituality” and the other meaning “giving the spirituality”; spirituality in this case means ‘connection’ to the Reiki energy. In fact the word Reiju has been interpreted in several ways, for example “giving of the five blessings” and “the union of mind and ki”. The line in the Reiki precepts where it says “the secret method of inviting happiness through many blessings” might actually mean “the secret method of inviting happiness through receiving many Reiju empowerments”.

The empowerments that Mikao Usui used with his students can be referred to as “Reiju” and these were equivalent to a Tendai Buddhist blessing, a blessing that a Tendai teacher would bestow on a student with the intention that the student should receive what they need. Usui Sensei gave the blessing using intent only, but within Tendai Buddhism there is also a physical ritual that can be carried out which conveys the Reiju blessing; details of this ritual were passed to the West from Usui’s surviving students in the late 1990s and it is this ritual that we use on our “Reiki Evolution” First and Second Degree courses.

The effects of empowerments do not wear out. Empowerments ‘connect’ you to the energy; they allow you to recognise something that is already there. Just like attunements. The consensus that I have seen amongst those teachers who are using Reiju in practice, all over the world, is that not only are empowerments effective but they also confer special benefits. In my experience, students who receive Reiju seem ‘better connected’, better able to work intuitively, more sensitive to the energy in the early stages, when compared with people who have been attuned. Not everyone will agree with this, but many people who have moved from giving attunements to giving empowerments are saying the same sort of thing.

One empowerment is enough but it is nice do a few on a Reiki course, and we choose to carry out three empowerments on our First and Second Degree courses. But there are definite benefits associated with receiving Reiju repeatedly, and Usui Sensei’s students received Reiju from him again and again throughout their training at all levels. William Rand’s recommendation that Masters re-attune each other, because of the benefits associated, serves to echo this original practice. We echo Usui’s approach ourselves, by making distant empowerments available for all our students to tune into at any time on a Monday, every week, and Reiju empowerments are also given to students attending our teachers’ Reiki shares.

Receiving Reiju regularly helps to ‘reinforce’ your connection to the source. It enhances self-healing, it helps the student to develop spiritually, it enhances intuition and increases sensitivity to the flow of energy. Being reattuned will also help to achieve this, though as far as I can see it is not so common within the world of Reiki for re-attunements to be offered.

Now for the nonsense

One or two people are trying to argue that Usui Sensei’s method for connecting people to Reiki is ineffective. They are saying that Reiju is a weak and provides you with only a partial and lowly connection to the energy, that you are actually “dis-empowered”, unable to benefit from Reiki properly and unable to treat other people effectively.

These people – who will not have experienced Reiju for themselves, of course, or used Reiju in practice – are also arguing that Reiju-connected students are obliged to desperately carry out energy exercises every day to try and maintain some sort of a decent energy-channelling ability, and that they are dependent on their teacher for a regular ‘top’ up, without which their Reiki ability will dwindle and disappear. This is such a distortion of reality! By way of contrast, they also say that attunements give a far better permanent connection to the source, and the implication is that the student then does not need to carry out any energy work to develop themselves because they are perfectly connected right from the start, and no further commitment or responsibility for personal development is required.

Interestingly, in the same article, I was amused to hear that:

    You should not treat people with pacemakers. This is nonsense, of course. Please see my article “Restrictions on Reiki” for a longer discussion of this Reiki fable.
    First Degree does not really give you anything, and you cannot treat yourself and other people effectively at this level. This of course flies in the face of the cumulative experience of hundreds of thousands of people who have taken First Degree and whose lives have changed for the better through Reiki, and who have helped friends and family members at First Degree.
    You should take Reiki First and Second Degree in one weekend to be able to use Reiki effectively. Again nonsense, and the global consensus is that you should wait between Reiki levels to give yourself a chance to work on yourself and gain confidence, putting what you have learned into practice before moving on. Exhorting people to take Reiki1 and Reiki2 in one go, because they will not be able to do Reiki properly otherwise, is largely a marketing ploy in my view.

There is a lot of nonsense spoken about Reiki, and two more examples that were just sent to me the other day nearly had me choke on my cup of Tick Tock tea: there is a local college somewhere in the UK (I won’t name it) that tells it’s Reiki students that they should not treat people who wear contact lenses because the energy will distort the lenses, and in that same part of the country there is also a teacher who is telling their students that every time they use one of the Reiki symbols they are shortening their life by several minutes.

We have a word in England for such advice, and for the nonsense that is being written by one or two people about Reiju empowerments: “claptrap”. Claptrap should be avoided at all costs; claptrap will seriously diminish your enjoyment and experience of this wonderful system that we have been given. So the next time you hear that you shouldn’t treat people with pacemakers, or contact lenses, or green trousers for that matter, or the next time you hear that Usui’s method of connecting people to the energy doesn’t work properly, take such comments with a pinch of salt, ignore them, and move on!