Reiki tsm A new dimension of practice

I was asked a question online about the precepts, the numerous versions etc. My response follows, a longish text, and with no pics.

The first clarification with regard to the precepts that each of us might favour or have been taught, is that they are what they are, although distortions of meaning from the original are problematic with some. For me personally, there is the version that I received with my form of practice. At the same time, there are various translations from Mikao Usui’s memorial stone and later adaptations of them. Where I return again and again, is to the memorial stone and its direct translations.

Translation is an art form. The task of the translator is to change the original language form into another language form while retaining the meaning held in the original. Which means in the case of the precepts translated to English, various translators may use different English words and phrases from their own understandings. So it’s not so much the words used but the retention of the meaning that is key.

Many of the translations from the memorial stone are similar, although usually not made by professional translators. The translation that holds the most meaning for me comes from a professional translator and that version follows. Included are sentences either side of the precepts which are important to my mind in discerning the purpose behind them.

Translation begins:

The Reiki method is not only for curing illness. Its true purpose is to correct the heart-mind, keep the body fit and lead a happy life using the spiritual capabilities humans are endowed with since birth. Accordingly, when teaching people, first, respecting the dying injunction of the Emperor Meiji, recite the following precepts morning and evening, and keep them in one’s heart.

The five precepts are:

1- today, throughout the entire day, do not become angry;

2- worry about nothing;

3- express one’s gratitude;

4- be diligent in work;

5- be kind to others.

These are the most important teachings in cultivating the mind, and are inextricably linked with the path that the saints and sages of old kept uppermost in mind. The Sensei referred to this as “the secret method that summons happiness, the miraculous medicine that is effective against all kinds of illness.” Of this, there is no doubt because he knew their true meaning… If you quietly in seated meditation, join your hands together in worship and recite the five precepts, you develop a pure and sound heart, and return to acting fairly and honestly. It is so simple and easy that anyone can put the Reiki method into practice.

End:

I read particular significance into the terminology ‘Heart-Mind’ (not heart and/or mind) in the preceding paragraph, and ‘because he knew their TRUE meaning’ in the following one. The ‘secret method’ is in plain sight but not easily seen.

The version of the precepts I received and teach as my form of practice includes an addition by Hawayo Takata, ‘Honour your parents teachers and elders’. This I interpret as her perception that the concept of honour as held in Japanese culture was not present in western culture. My daily experience is that she was absolutely correct.

Which leads me to the understanding (right or otherwise) that Mikao Usui had an awakening experience and as with all such persons he sought to bring that experience to others. The precepts were referred to as ‘the secret method etc’. The core experience of awakening is in the nowness of everything awareness, being in the now, being present. ‘He knew their true meaning’ carries that significance.

So the version of the precepts as received in my form of practice is held alongside the direct translation from the memorial stone, in the understanding that each precept stands on its own, as a specific pathway for being in the now moment.

As to ‘what do the precepts as you follow them read as?’ My short answer is ‘Be here now’.

For many years now, the feeling that it would be really nice if the whole Grand Master trip would go away has been gaining ground within me. The GM trip began in the early 80s with the death of Hawayo Takata. No living grandmasters existed up until that point in the practice. Takata did not normally refer to herself in this way.

After Takata’s death, one master initiated by her announced she was now THE Grand Master of Reiki and the successor to Hawayo Takata. She also made major changes in the system that Takata had taught. Others initiated by Takata were unimpressed with the announcement, and were in agreement that Takata’s grand-daughter Phyllis Furumoto was the one Takata clearly intended to be her successor.

One result of this was the formation of The Reiki Alliance, with ironically a founding statement of masters being equal in the oneness of Reiki. And at the same time, recognising the concept of a position of Grand Master that was clearly not equal. This situation continues til this day. To be fair, the notion of a Lineage Bearer as a title for the successor had not then come into use.

While this can easily be explained away as a defensive reaction to the original claim of one person to be ‘The’ Grand Master, the grandmaster trip was begun. From that simple beginning there are now announcements of becoming a grandmaster after a week long ‘Grand Master’ training, so the concept is become almost ordinary by nature of being so easily gained, a piece of paper in fact.

For me, the designation no longer serves the practice, its students or the holder of the title. It serves to lead practitioners to regard someone as an authority figure which creates a power imbalance.

It doesn’t serve the practice and its students as practitioners too easily give up their power with a ‘tell me the answer’ or ‘tell me what to do’ approach instead of simply doing the practice and allowing the answers to surface in themselves. It also serves to create unhelpful identification of ‘My’ and ‘Our’ grandmaster.

It doesn’t serve the holder of the position as it’s all too easy to become hooked on the mind’s perceptions and manipulations of knowledge, position and power. As a useful marketing tool it becomes more difficult to give it up. The Grand Master pedestal becomes a barrier to the further and full potential of the holder.

Sadly, in the end it serves no-one.

You won"t have heard of NIPPS before. It is an acronym I recently invented!

Everything I really needed to know about the practice of Reiki, its very essence, was all present in my first degree class. The years of practice that followed simply served to expand my understandings of exactly what was held in that experience.

Hawayo Takata translated a Japanese healing art called “Reiki” into a form that could be received by the western world. After years of practice, I came to appreciate this translation as masterfully encapsulating the essence of the practice, not more, not less than was necessary, very Zen in fact.

My musings on this process led me to create the acronym “NIPPS” (Narrative, Introduction, Precepts, Practice, and Secrets) to describe the environment that was present in the first degree class which is the entry into this practice.

The Narrative is the so called “Reiki story”. Not a history, more a multi levelled story of origin, a connection to the beginnings and the teachings of the practice, the pivotal lineage bearers, and the continuing narrative of the here now, in which the student becomes a participant.

The specific method of Introduction used for entry into the practice has long been called initiation. Purely as a word it works, as it initiates a process. But as a process of “connection to Reiki energy”, this it is not my belief or experience. Mikao Usui (the founder of the practice) is quoted as saying that this practice was a way to “lead a happy life using the spiritual capabilities humans are endowed with since birth”. Every human being already has it. The ‘Introduction’ is a specific method of creating a conscious shift to awareness of something that has always been so.

Precepts and doing of a Practise (the two P’s) are obvious elements, without which the “practice” has no structure, no bones. Unfortunately the precepts are often not given the emphasis they deserve, and the importance of a disciplined personal practice is often skewed in favour of the therapeutic uses of the practice on others.

The one element that may be a surprise is “Secrets”. These are intrinsic in the practice, a given, a reflection of everday life. They refer to that which is held as being 'true’, but which are beliefs about the truth. These key words “the secret method of inviting happiness” are inscribed on Mikao Usui’s memorial stone referencing the 'Reiki precepts’. Not that secrets are being held back, but the nature of the secrets is that they are “knowable” only through the engaging in the practice.

The practice is the key to layers of “secrets” in this practice and follow simple 'rules’:

• The best kept secrets are invisible even when in plain sight.
• Secrets are not “known” by the telling. The intellectual knowledge of the secret is not the realisation of the truth that the secret holds.
  
• The secrets are known (“realised” as in made real) only when the secrets, the tools, the teachings of the system, reveal themselves through the practice.
  

If this is not in your experience yet, continue a mindful practise. Do not assume that you truly know anything with certainty or have the “right” teachings. Open to what the system has to reveal to you rather than imposing your meanings on the practice and the system. This is the key, and the meaning of Hawayo Takata’s often quoted  “Practice! Practice! Practice!” and “Let Reiki teach you!”

Love IS

There are emotions and feelings called ‘love’. Real enough, but based in neuro-chemical brain states rooted in survival and reproductive programming.

The Love we truly crave, the Love that endures, that fulfils, is the Love that is the experience of beingness in the now moment, that is allowance, that is acceptance, that is forgiveness.

You are the One you have been waiting for.

Before I began the Reiki practice, I (from time to time) used an intuited natural “healing” ability that feels very much like the experience of what I now know as ‘Reiki’. Externally it 'looks like’ Reiki. My best healing story comes from that time. I have not abandoned this original ability, and allow its expression when the moment calls for it. But it is not, and was not “Reiki”.

The original calligraphic character for 'Reiki’, a word picture from the Japanese language, has many meanings, one of which inspired Mikao Usui (the founder of the Usui System of Reiki Healing) to use the expression 'Reiki’ to label the method that he founded, and the form of his practice. 

By inference, if the form of the practice in its many aspects is not recognisable as the one Mikao Usui founded, then it is not 'Reiki, the Usui System’. That is a round about way of saying that the Usui System doesn’t own the word 'Reiki’, and practices that are called 'Reiki’ are not necessarily 'The Usui System’. Nor are they 'Usui Shiki Ryoho’, or “Usui’s way of doing it”. Sounds messy and it is.

There is a point to this.

The system is superficially simple to the outside observer or the casual practitioner. Yet it is a finely crafted and essentially human construct from the perspective of a deeper experience of it as a disciplined practice. What it looks like on the surface and the deeper experience are worlds apart. To know it, one has to engage in the deeper experience, to allow it to reveal who and what we are as a human being.

This enters, as spiritual practice so often does, into the realm of allowing the practice to reveal its meaning to us, as against imposing our meanings on the practice .

A “friend” posed a question a while ago as to why I taught first and second degree separately. “Is it because you make more money that way?”

There were so many assumptions underlying the question I didn’t know quite where to begin, assumptions about motivation, about Reiki, about making money, and more.

So I put aside my initial need to correct the assumptions, and answered with the simple truth. “It’s because it is what serves a student best.”

Without the grounding in the hands on practice, which is what I teach in first degree, the student doesn’t have a foundation into which second degree practice can be integrated. The risk is that second degree easily becomes just another “layer of stuff”.

Second degree is not more “powerful” than first degree, but it is a different way to practice. Each level has its own lessons and teachings that arise out of the practice, which is all about experience, and not something that can be taught.

What I do in the class is provide the inspiration and encouragement to simply do the practice.

A blog post I read recently began “In its original form, within Japanese Buddhist circles in the late 19th Century, Reiki was a path to enlightenment”. (End of quote). The remainder of the post focused on the healing practice.

Not only “was a path to enlightenment”, but still is, in the western form and practice. More than that, one does not need to become more “Japanese” or to adopt Buddhism or its philosopy.

There is absolutely no harm, and a certain satisfaction, in immersing oneself in the Japanese language and culture, or developing an understanding of Buddhist thought and meditative practices. But “the way” is not these things.

The risk is as it has always been, of too much mind, Japanese mind, Buddhist mind, right mind, and more.

The “way” of Reiki can be found in the everyday hands-on practice, and the here and the now.

Note “everyday” and “here and now”.

Recently I happened upon an online posting of an image of the Reiki practice depicted as an iceberg. The part above the water line was labelled as the hands on practice and the bulk of the iceberg below water as a meditation based practice.

I didn’t have an issue with the iceberg concept as a metaphor for the contrast between what you see, as against the unseen aspects of the practice that are the experience.

My disconnect was with the inference that the the hands on treatment practice (the bit out of the water) was the lesser part of the practice, and that the larger unseen portion (labelled as a multi aspected meditative practice) was the most important part.

For me, the bit you can see, the very human “hands on” physical practice on oneself and with others holds an aspect that is of its very nature meditative or mindful, is a complete “wholing” relational experience, that leads into the deeper experience.

There is not need for “more” than that. This has been my experience.

I had known my lovely young friend “M” a number of months before she asked a question about my practice of Reiki, and in the process informed me that she had taken first and second degree.

I asked a few cautious questions and she offered that she didn’t actually practice, just did a bit here and there. And on second degree practice, “I never really got into it”. Then came words I have heard oh so often, “But I have a manual, so I can get back into it if I want to.” My best guess, based on long experience, is that “the manual review” wont happen.

I dont use manuals, never have. The form I teach is simple, just the simple basic practice. My intent in a class is to encourage and inspire the student to practice, and to have that practice teach them the nuances and depth of the practice they have been taught. That actually works.

Hawayo Takata, who brought the practice to the western world stressed that “Reiki was simple”, to “practice practice practice”, and to “let Reiki teach you”. I could not hope to do more.

“Can you fix me in 20 minutes?” was the question asked by a passerby who had stopped outside my shop.

She was serious.

I gave her my standard “I dont fix people. What happens depends on you. We can only see what happens”.

I share the story only to offer the comparison with the question asked by someone else, which was "Would you be willing to work with me. I would like to have a Reiki treatment from you.”

Theres a world of difference between the two.

“I’m am coming to see you for a therapy session.” said my friend.

“Why now?” I asked. Until this moment he had not shown the slightest interest in taking up a long standing offer of a complementary session.

His answer: “I observe people. I have seen how they look, the way they walk, before they go into your shop, and I see how they look afterward. I want to experience what that difference is.”

Feedback like that is priceless.

Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry — all forms of fear — are caused by too much future, and not enough presence.

Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.

Great story today from my local Market stall. I offer 20 minute Reiki treatments for the (small) sum of $15.00 so as to encourage  people who may never have had “the Reiki experience” to stop and give it a try.

A young man did just that today …and returned later in the day while I was engaged in a treatment session. He left money and a note on my bookings clipboard that read “Thanks, you’re worth more than you charged me. Cheers W.”

I was touched by his gesture and words. He was right of course, but the experience is necessary to know that.

My friend Peter was never one to let an “I know …” statement go unchallenged. His first question was always “How do you know”? The response was often “I just know”. Then came the big question “How do you know that you know”?

Good question!

Is the “knowing” from personal experience, a subjective opinion? Is it someone elses thought (or even your own thought) that has been accepted as being so? Is it an inherited belief system?

One way to “know” is to question everything, to be willing to hold apparently contradictory viewpoints as an opportunity for deeper understandings, to be in a place of not knowing.

Then there’s a place to “know” what you know.

A friend who had coordinated a volunteer group offering Reiki treatments in a drug and alcohol rehab unit shared her story of taking a survey of the clients receiving treatment. She asked for their feedback on what worked best for them and what didn’t.

The feedback was overwhelmingly clear on two items: hands in contact with the body and a set sequence of hand placements during treatments.

No surprise really, just simple human considerations. They wanted the safety of a known set of hand placements, and the reassurance and comfort of real human contact.

I would ask that very same thing for myself.

“You are the universe and you are creating it at every moment.

Because, you see, it starts now. It didn’t begin in the past. There was no past, see! If the universe began in the past, when that happened it was now. Well it’s still now, and the universe is still beginning now, and it’s trailing off like the wake of a ship from now.

When the wake of the ship fades out, so does the past. You can look back there to explain things but the explanation disappears. You never find it there. Things are not explained by the past. They’re explained by what happens now …that creates the past. It begins here.

That’s the birth of responsibility.”

- Alan Watts

My friend who was busy coordinating a weekend event, published a schedule with someone elses name incorrectly in the space for a segment on Reiki which I was to present.

He was profusely apologetic and was unexpectedly surprised when I told him it was OK, it wasn’t a big deal.

He was quiet a moment as he wrote in the correct name on his copy of the schedule, and then he remarked “So how come it’s no big deal for you and this other guy went ballistic because his name had been typed with two letters transposed".

I smiled and said “The name on the piece of paper is not who I am”.

“So who are you then?” my friend said thinking he still didn’t have my name correctly.

“That’s a really great question!” was my answer.

Then he got it, and laughed.

Initiation as a Reiki master will not make you more than you already are, nor will it give you powers you do not already possess. Initiation as a master is not the end of the journey; it is the beginning of a new and lifelong one,  of self-mastery, of bringing into being a healed and whole Self, a self that has always been present but layered over by the separations created by ego-mind. ~  (extract from  markruge.com.au)

From some eminently forgettable action movie in years gone by, I remember a scene where a warlord general of an all powerful army had captured an assassin, the daughter of a king that had been defeated and killed by the warlord. The daughter had vowed vengeance, to kill this warlord with her own hand.

What stuck with me was the warlord’s words to her which went something like: “The day that I came to your city and destroyed the world that you knew, was the single most significant, most momentous day in your life. But for me, it was a Wednesday”.

When I talk to people who have taken Reiki and don’t “do it” anymore, I usually ask about their first degree experience. Often for them it was “a Wednesday” type day. I don’t know precisely what makes the difference (I have thoughts!), but for me first degree was one of the more significant experiences of my life, a life changer.

The world  that I thought I knew changed in the space of minutes, and the change was in myself. The people who knew me best all responded to that something that was different. I was asked “What happened? What did you do? You are not the same one that went away”. I didn’t have an adequate answer for those questions at the time.

With hindsight it wasn’t anything I was taught. There was no new information imparted by the teacher, just a story and a daily practice that was to become part of my life. The “what happened” was the initiations, an opening to conscious awareness of some core part of my being, an omni max in my mind type thing.

My mind could have made much of it, but the experience was of the nature of a change of heart, and it was that to which people were responding. That change of heart was real and not imagination. It didn’t slip away, was there to stay.

There are those who will say their experience was different, and it is.

My response is that is that it was the conscious experience that was different. Initiation is only ever a starting point, an opening to a deeper experience of Self.

The deepening in that experience, the healing of the self separated from Self, is held in the daily self treatment practice and the natural initiations that are every day life experience. Love is the healer. Healing in turn reveals love. That’s win-win, all round, but the choice is ours.

In any class there is what is taught and what is learnt, what is presented and what is received. These dynamics are different for each person in the class, filtered through a web of beliefs and understandings.

What I remember being taught in my first degree class, was a simple form of a hands on practice that could be used on others but would primarily be used on myself. What I received was an experience of initiation that was a catalyst for change and an opening to the mystery of who and what I am.

The very nature of experience is that one can never again be the person who didn’t have that experience. Our only choice is what we do with the experience; whether - due to the degree it impacts our senses - it becomes a significant part of our life story, or not.

What I had expected to be using on others turned out to be for myself. I was naively unaware at the time how much I was the one person in my life who was so much in need of healing.

That’s what began almost immediately, not a process of physical healing (which would come later) but of healing the separated aspects of my life. Not only self healing but SELF healing, a process of returning to a wholeness of being, that seemingly had always existed, but that was somehow hidden behind the myriad details of my life.

The hands on self healing practice became my mainstay, a gentle self discipline of stillness and being present. It brought a sense of peace and ease into my life that had been absent for a long time, and continues to do so all these many years later.

Initiation proved to be not a connection to something outside my self, but a door cracked open to the great mystery of life: the essence of who we are, the yearnings of heart that lie within each one of us.

The statement has been made that my writings about initiation are very different from the version that is commonly expressed about being tuned into Reiki energy, and channelling it through your body during a healing treatment, to balance the energy of the person receiving the treatment.

My response is that it is indeed different, and also that it’s neither right nor wrong: I accepted that explanation for a time at the very beginnings of my Reiki practice …and then I was no longer able to do that. My experience of being in the Reiki practice, being willing to question everything I believed, healing my places of separation, unravelled the world in which the old beliefs existed.

Mrs Takata is quoted as saying that Reiki was like a radio wave, invisible until you tune into it. She was using the word “like” in the sense of “sort of, like”, an unscientific word picture for people who lived in an era when the idea of invisible radio waves in the air around them was still somewhat novel and magical. For some, it is remains that way even today.

People interpreted her words, a normal human response when the mind has need of an explanation for something unknown. In the groupings that formed around the practice in its early days of rapid growth, “sort of, like” dropped out of the word picture and the concept that Reiki *is* a wave/energy out there, to which you have to be tuned into to have access, gained traction. When added to the sense of a flow of energy felt in the hands, it became an idea with a physical experience as “proof”. Initiation became a “tuning” process.

While I understand the origin of the concept, my personal experience of the practice led to a different model, not surprisingly one that would have been familiar to Mikao Usui, one that is still in use, developed over 2500 years of Buddhist exploration of the nature of mind.

When Mikao Ususi went in search of how the great healers performed their healing works, he began an exploration into the nature of healing, which inevitably becomes an exploration of the nature of mind.

But that’s a story for another day.

“The Master gives the student nothing he or she does not already have, nor does the Master take away anything that is not already absent”.

~ Phyllis Lei Furumoto.

The Reiki initiations are of a specialised or functional kind. They differ from the natural kind by nature of intent and purpose, and by nature of the conscious choice to enter into them. But in other aspects they are quite similar, not an end point, only the beginning of a process, the unfolding awareness of the outer and inner dimensions of our lives.

Initiation is not the ceremony (although a ceremony is involved). Initiation is no more and no less than an opening to an experience of the unknown self, the possibility of an awakening to the reality of who and what we really are.

The personal experience of initiation is a variable, dependent on the nature of one’s preparation, commitment and surrender. However phenomenal or ordinary that experience may be in the moment, the process that is initiated requires nurturing for its continuance, hence the precepts as a guide and the hands-on practice to support it long term.

The purpose in this process is to lead into the experience of what it is to become whole, to heal the illusions and separations that keep us from living our human existence to its fullness, to awaken to the beauty and the wonder of our beingness, to be truly present in the natural initiations that grace our lives.

There are different kinds of initiation.  One kind is natural initiation, the everyday kind that is intrinsic to the experience of being human, a natural unfoldment or opening of awareness with no conscious effort or outward intent required to experience it.

This kind of initiation is held within seemingly ordinary life events, the birth of a child, or the experience of death, serious illness, deep pain, or suffering. Experiences of these kinds hold the possibility of an opening to a larger, perhaps richer perspective on life.

These are moments in which the world may seem to be transformed. But it is not that the world has changed. It is the person that is changed, aware of subtleties in the experience of life in a way that is not possible without the experience. 

More importantly the experience and the awareness is a new beginning. One may begin to think, feel, perceive and act differently. In embracing the experience it can be said that one truly begins to live and to love.

Morpheus: You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. ~ from “The Matrix”.

The Matrix has long been one of my all time favourite movies. My daughter took me to see it for the  first time, a great action movie she said. When it was finished screening, I said to her “Action movie eh? That too, but do you have any idea what you just watched, what was entrained in your mind?” When she replied “No, what do you mean?”, I outlined the metaphysical threads in the story.

It was a light bulb moment for her, and she began taking her friends to watch the movie and “explained” it to them also. My daughter still references Matrix quotes, so it made an impact. But the red pill experience is not something she has chosen …yet!

It’s easy to do the blue pill trip, it’s comfortable, there’s companionship there, the “known”, persons of like thought etc, and there are ways to ease the pain of that existence, or to block it out completely.

Then there’s the “red pill” trip down the rabbit hole. It’s not comfortable, it’s the unknown. You can only do it on your own. You get to meet the red queen and the white queen (different movie now!), the duality constructs that reflect the nature of the ego mind. You get to slay the jabberwocky, the shadowy fearful aspects of your own mind. And eventually you emerge again into the same world that was left behind.

The world is the same, pain can still be found, but you are changed and will never vision it or experience it in the same way again.

Initiation, in its many forms, all through humankind’s existence has been the doorway to changes in awareness, and for some …the entrance to the rabbit hole.

My Reiki master friend Steve ran a ”healing night” every Wednesday night for many years. The night began as a practice night for people who had taken Reiki with him, but attendance was open to anyone wishing to try a Reiki session, and others whether they had taken a Reiki class with Steve or not. Often there were three or more persons at each of the six therapy tables.

The only request that Steve made, was that if anyone was the recipient of a hands on treatment, then they consider taking their place at the table alongside the other practitioners, and give equal hands on treatment time. He asked them to simply follow what the Reiki practitioners were doing, to not try to do anything (nothing to do), to simply place their hands in contact with the body of the person on the table.

I got to share in this experience for over a year while sharing house with Steve. One curious fact was notable every time. There was no way to tell from the physical treatment experience whether the person placing their hands on our bodies had taken Reiki or not. It was not uncommon for the hottest hands (a quite subjective experience) to be those of persons who had not taken Reiki at all, and there was no discernible difference in that short treatment experience from that of the Reiki practitioners.

The common threads I note over many years are all there: doing without doing (being present, being in stillness, unattached to outcome), drawing together in recognition of the common need for healing, the giving and receiving of that most basic of needs, human touch. This can also be viewed as an expression of love (love = acceptance, allowance, forgiveness), and remembering to add “self” in front of each of those words.

A Reiki class is not a required element for this. The hands on healing experience is valid in its many forms outside of the Reiki context. The Reiki class holds an experience that uses and builds on the hands on healing practice as a disciplined foundation practice.

The experience is called initiation. Without it, there is no Reiki practice.

When I took my first degree class 20 years ago I didn’t actually know what I was about to be taught. I had not researched it, had observed only the result of several quick “reiki therapy sessions”, muscle spasms and headaches relieved, simple things, but, I was drawn to “Reiki” like a magnet, just had to do it.

All thoughts of learning a therapy lasted  five minutes into the class. No one had mentioned initiations and I already knew how to do something very like this.

A year before, my father had contracted legionnaires disease, had been placed on life support, had been given the last rites, was not expected to last the night. That was how I first saw him on arriving at the hospital, unconscious and on life support. There was no doubt in my mind that I was watching him die.

I managed to have a ten minute time alone with him in the ICU. I took his hand, told him what I was going to do, and after eight or nine minutes was satisfied that I had done what I could. I told him it was now up to him, that he had to choose what was to happen.

There was no phone call during the night, and we arrived at the hospital next morning to find him off life support, breathing on his own, and asking when he might be able to eat. He walked out of hospital three days later.

The doctors said they could not explain it. It was something of a mystery, a miracle even. I said no word to anyone, but my mother let it be known she knew that I had done “something”.

I didn’t take Reiki to learn how to do that. Everyone is able to do it. Love works miracles …everyone “knows” that. The only confusion is over what love really is.

Buddhist legends recount stories of Mara the demon king, the great tempter, the creator of illusions. One such story is of Mara travelling with his attendants through the countryside when they encountered a man doing walking meditation and whose face was lit up in wonder. The man had just discovered something on the ground in front of him.

Mara’s attendant asked what that was and Mara replied, “A piece of truth.”

“Doesn’t this bother you when someone finds a piece of truth, O Evil One?” his attendant asked. “Oh no, not at all” Mara replied. “Right after this, they usually make a belief out of it.”

The story is a reminder to hold what we believe to be the truth lightly, to be ever open to perceiving a larger more inclusive version of what is true, to not become a prisoner to illusion and false beliefs. 

This is as true in the practice of Reiki as it is in any other human experience.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of humans as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

~ HELEN KELLER.

While that quote is most often used in a motivational context, and in that context it is useful, it’s a limited viewpoint. Life is never nothing, has always been (and is) a daring adventure no matter what the external appearance may be.

You are unique. There is no one else who has ever lived exactly the same life that you have lived or will live. How your life unfolds is an adventure into the unknown. At no point was getting to where you are now guaranteed.

Congratulate yourself for having made it thus far. There is always uncertainty, even risk. No one knows what choices you will make, or can say with certainty how your story will unfold.

The truly mind-blowingly daring part of the adventure however, is in the possibilities that it holds if you are willing to take risks. Perhaps you will risk choosing love over fear, risk choosing to live as fully as is possible, to perhaps discover that now is the only time there is, that you are the one you have been searching for.

I owned a brand new car once, which was an entirely delightful experience. I took very good care of it, washed it every week, kept it in good mechanical condition. But the reality is that it was a means of transport, a set of wheels to go places, and it did that so very well.

For some however, a vehicle is much more than transport. That shiny sleek powerful machine becomes a symbol, an extension of their image of themselves.  Even so, no one says “I am this vehicle”. That would be absurd. The vehicle is not who they are.

The mind isn’t so discriminating however with its “vehicle”. We say “my hand”, “my leg”,” my body” as if it belongs to someone, a someone who is the vehicle that is the body. But its not so.

Living with non vital body parts or a limb removed in no way diminishes our sense of being a self, although our thinking  about our body may require an adjustment.

Then there is the mystery of sleep. For close to one third of your 24 hour day, one third of your life,“you” are not actually there.

So if “I” am not my body, and “I” am not always there, then who am I? Really?

In a lifetime there are many little deaths, some big some small. A phase of our lives comes to an end; a career change; the end of a relationship; a serious illness; and the like. Each time, we die a little death and perhaps grieve the end of the story of the self that we believed we were up until that life changing event.

A story is told of Mikao Usui. Having found inspiration in his studies of the sutras (his ah-ha moment!) he sought advice on what to do next from the abbot of the monastery where he had studied.

The Abbot is said to have given him the very zen advice, “Die one time.”

Dying to the story of the ego mind, awakening to the nature of who we really are is the nature of the zen practice, and the very essence of the nature of healing.

Therein lies the revolving door of life and death and of healing. Die one time, awaken to who we truly are, who we have always been …or die the many little deaths on the road to that realisation.

At the end of the talk someone from the audience asked the Dalai Lama, “Why didn’t you fight back against the Chinese?”

The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up at us and said with a gentle smile, “Well, war is obsolete, you know.”

Then, after a few moments, his face grave, he said, “Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back…but the heart, the heart would never understand. Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you.”

That’s the insanity of war, the insanity of the separated mind’s way of perception.

Scanning the news of the world on any given day is enough to lead you to thinking that the world is gone mad, that its being run by insane people, doing insane things …and you would be 100% correct.

The answer to the chaos and madness is not a single one of the “usual solutions” that are bandied about. The real answer to all this is the healing of the insanity of the separated ego mind, its need for control, its need to be right, and its “slippery logic”.

“Slippery logic” makes it OK to kill people for the “right” reasons, to torture, to deny people their basic human rights, to treat others as less than human, to lie, to cheat, to swindle, to wreak ecological harm on the planet in the name of “a greater good”. I, me, my, mine, is the underlying root cause of all of this. Everytime!

None of this is new of course, but the effects are no longer able to be hidden, and the means to have a global impact brings us to the brink of disaster like never before.

The usual answers, fixing stuff “out there” has been a futile exercise throughout human history. Making a war on everything only creates more war. Fixing “stuff out there” is in fact a story dreamed up by ego mind that created the problem. The real answer lies within each one of us, the opening to the values of heart that lead back to being in the here and the now. 

True wisdom resides only in the now, unfettered by stories about a past, and not bound by fears about the future. All else is part of the ego minds fantasy.

The shift has to take place in you and I before it will be observed “out there”. 

What happens when we weave “question everything” with “feeding the good wolf”?

What the mind receives gets processed. That means everything, everything you see and visualise, whatever you listen to, what you enjoy, whatever gives you pleasure in life, both the positive and the negative.

Images are very powerful inputs. Your mind doesn’t discriminate when it comes to images, and especially moving images which generate strong feelings. Remember how many times you watched images of the twin towers falling for example. 

Films and T.V. shows (of every kind), video games, the nightly news, flood our minds with repeated images (some real, some created) that get processed and stored as if they were our own real life experience.

The screens big and small are illusions in themselves, just coloured dots that create an image. Believing what is presented on them has consequences. These images and the feelings generated can get woven seamlessly into own personal story. We can make them “real” even when they are not.

Its not like that you say, I know the difference between real and not real. The insidious side of this repeated exposure is desensitisation, a closing of the heart to what is not OK, what has never been OK. Desensitising leads to acceptance of the unacceptable, until it becomes our reality.

If your mind is being continually assaulted by negative images and the fearful thoughts that inevitably result, finding peace within becomes far more difficult when the appearance of the world “out there” seems to confirm the fears in the mind.

Be selective with what you feed your mind, question its reality. Is it fear making? Where is the love in it? Give time to, and be in real life, the here now. That’s the only place that love, happiness, joy and lasting peace will be found.

A Native American Cherokee elder tells a story to his grandchildren (all the children are “grandchildren”) about life .  

He says to them, “A fight is going on inside me,  a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf is evil—he is fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, and false pride. 

The other is good —he is joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith. 

This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too." 

The children thought about it for a minute, and then one asked, "Which wolf will win, Grandfather?" 

The Elder simply replies, "The one you feed.”

It’s a great story, with a powerful message, and with a question for each one of us. But its easy to dismiss its message.

The “good” wolf is a symbol of ourselves living consciously. The “evil” wolf is a symbol of our way of being when living unconsciously …a symbol of all those negative human traits that goes with ego mindedness.

Whatever we focus on, keep in mind, is reflected in the world we experience. Be mindful of what is being fed into your mind, be as aware as possible of the effect it has inside you.

Ask the question, “Which ‘wolf’ is this feeding?”. Then act on the answer.

Eckhart Tolle Quote:

“Deal with the past on the level of the present. The more attention you give to the past, the more you energize it, and the more likely you are to make a ‘self’ out of it. Don’t misunderstand: Attention is essential, but not to the past as past. Give attention to the present; give attention to your behaviour, to your reactions, moods, thoughts, emotions, fears, and desires as they occur in the present. There’s the past in you. If you can be present enough to watch all those things, not critically or analytically but non-judgementally, then you are dealing with the past and dissolving it through the power of your presence. You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You find yourself by coming into the present.”

This is a very real and practical approach. It combines “feeling the feeling” - not denying that something happened - with staying out of judgment about right and wrong, and with staying in the present.

It’s all too common that past trauma is re-created over and over again, by getting enmeshed in the emotion and pain, and then being carried away in it. That process takes us back into unconsciousness. It’s not wrong, but it reinforces victimhood and reopens old wounds.

Healing comes when we no longer identify with that past trauma, it isn’t who we are. It’s OK to feel that we had no choice in that story of the past, but by being conscious, which means being in the now, we get to choose how the story ends.

Theres an old saying that to get the choicest fruit you have to go out on the limb.

People are so very interesting. Some people want the easy “truth”,  a story from an authority figure that makes their choice the right or true one. It is then so easy to fall back on “But my teacher taught me that … (fill in the blank) ”.

Some don’t really care what the facts are, they already have a story that they have accepted as the “truth” and will disregard all other data.

Neither way works if you are seeking Truth.

It is human nature to cling to fondly held beliefs, to a sense of safety, to the comfort of the accepted beliefs of the community or the culture in which we are engaged. However this is can be easily become another prison for our minds, one that limits our perspectives and understandings. It’s just the way things are.

The courage to question everything, even those things seemingly least open to question, to see with new eyes,  is the nature of seeking Truth.

Sometimes you have to go out on the limb.

The thread of several previous posts has been an interpretation of the Reiki precepts as a path to “being in the now”. That doesn’t make the traditional way of interpreting them in a minded way any less valid. It’s not a “this or that” situation, it’s both.

To a mind engaged in a linear timeline, where the fearful or painful experiences of the past are dark clouds projected into the future, the concept of “now” is  a nonsense. The past creates the future in that world view.

The traditional interpretation is the one that has a practical application in that setting. Only with the healing of the pain and fears the mind holds regarding events past is there a possibility for a different world view that includes the freedom of different choices held in the now moment. That’s just the way it is.

And of course there are other ways to use the precepts, as a mantra or a mindfulness verse for instance. The precepts are all of these things, and all at the same time.

An insight into the Reiki precepts as ways to “being in the now” doesn’t seem exactly earth shaking. What use is that information, unless it can be a lived experience. That’s exactly the point. The “now” is not just for special or spiritual people. Anyone who follows those simple ways in the precepts, with or without the Reiki practice, is creating the mental environment where the now can be experienced.

Theres a difference between being in the now and thinking we are in the now. It’s the difference that Tolle refers to when he talks about “entering the forest with your mind”. “You will think you are present, but you are not really”.

Alan Watts tells the story of people during the second world war that heard the whistle of the bomb coming. They knew there was no escape, it was all over. There was nothing they could do and they simply let go of doing anything. The bomb hit, failed to explode and these people found they were alive in a different world, the now. They actually believed that there was something wrong with them, that they had a “mental condition”.

Every single human being has actually known the experience of living in the now, lived it effortlessly until they “unlearned” it around the age of six years. That’s the age at which time we develop and stabilise the facility we call “ego mind”. Those five precepts are a path to undoing what developing the ego mind took away.

It’s a paradox of life that we lose this capability in becoming an individual, to experience and possess the world as a self, and then at some point, we realise a longing for what was lost and begin a spiritual journey “home”.

So how does “being here now” play out in relation to the precepts? It means they truly make sense of “Reiki” in terms of a spiritual practice. It shows the precepts to be a master key to the Reiki practice and its ultimate healing outcome, the healing of the separated ego mind.

Each precept is a key to the lived experience of the now. In the now, there is no future to worry over, no past to anger about. Honour and gratitude are given naturally. What is more honest than being present, being here now? “Now” is the end of the source of all of humankind’s mental suffering.

Each precept is then an invitation to step out of ego based stories of past and future, to step into the natural state of existence that we are all born into, the heaven of our religions, our natural state of spiritual connection with all that is, into the very fabric of mystic order.

This is what “the secret method of inviting happiness …effective against all kinds of illness” relates to.

“Being in the now” is not fantasy, every child knows this way of being. What clearer context is there than this for the biblical quote “Unless you become as little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven”? The now is that “kingdom”. We’ve simply forgotten how to “be” there.

The Reiki practice was given form by a Japanese man of great spiritual insight enabling humankind with a way to remember. What the ego mind has made of that practice is something else, but that’s precisely the nature of what it does. Illusions are its tools of trade.

Undoing the ego mind is what the practice appears tailor made to do. The physical body follows where the mind leads. Simple as that.

I get lost in detail just as easily as anyone else, get hooked on perceived differences. For many years I have heard opinions over which version of the Reiki precepts was “more correct”, which was the “right” order, and so on. I consciously made an effort to not buy into it, simply accepting the version that was the tradition in my form of practice.

What has always piqued my curiosity however, is the phrase that accompanies the precepts, “the secret method of inviting happiness”. Pulling the words and phrases apart, finding meanings and insights through that process, and applying those insights is a perfectly good and useful methodology. Even so, none of that process felt like it was even close to a “secret method”.

It wasn’t until creating a “precepts workshop” that the “secret” emerged, like a 3D stereoscopic image that appears to be random dots one minute and a 3D image the next. I was studying different translations of Usui”s memorial stone, on which the precepts and the secret method reference are inscribed. The source was the same for each translation, but the wording was distinctly different.

Translation is an art. It is the translators job to change the form of the original, but to retain its meaning. What I realised was that I had been hooked on perceived differences in the English language words, and the meanings I was giving to them. In the instant that I let go of needing the words to be the same, and reached for the original meaning behind them, understanding dawned.

The secret method was not a secret, has never been a secret, but it may as well be so for our inability to perceive it. The teachings of mystics and sages over the ages is known to all. “Be here now!”  Each phrase of the precepts is a lesson in being in the now, a path to that experience.

I came across this small story (which I have paraphrased) in a Gregg Braden book, “The Spontaneous Healing of Belief”. He asked a buddhist abbot in a monastery this question. “When we see your prayers, what are you really doing? When we see you tone and chant for 14 and 16 hours a day … when we see the bells, the bowls, the gongs, the chimes, the mudras, and the mantras on the outside, what is happening to you on the inside?”

The abbot’s reply was  “You have never seen our prayers, because a prayer cannot be seen. What you have seen is what we do to create the feeling in our bodies. Feeling is the prayer.” (my italics)

I was reminded of what people see and interpret when I place my hands on someone during a hands on reiki treatment. Every time a feeling of peace and a stillness of mind takes place “inside” me, within my body. The abbots words resonated within me, and they morphed form in my mind.

“You have never seen the healing, because healing cannot be seen. What you see is what I do to create the feeling in my body. The feeling is healing.”

What are you waiting for? The next promotion? The next holiday? The next satsang? The next Facebook update? The next spiritual high? The next victory? The next relationship? The next level of enlightenment? The next chance to prove how much you know? The next life? The next moment?

What if this ‘next’ never comes? And even if it does, what if it doesn’t end your seeking?

What if life – and its fulfilment – is always now? Then, what’s next?