Wakey Reiki! Rise and Shine!

PREVIOUS|MASTER LIST|NEXT

Welcome to the first Reiki Blog Hop!

The theme was set by Joy Vernon who asked us to share some of our first experiences with Reiki

Looking back at my first experience of Reiki, I guess it’s a pretty unremarkable incident, but then such is my habit as to see all individual events are being mostly mundane at the time and it’s not until much  later when there becomes a broader context and  longer timelines that something more interesting begins to emerge to me…

Certainly I recall hearing the word Reiki for the first time and I met the word with an internal sigh and probably the sort of feeling Mr Creoste felt when he was offered that after dinner mint… (those of you raised on Monty Python will know what I mean… those of you who somehow managed to miss the experience… Don’t go there! It’s not pretty! 😀 ) I’d just finished 2 years of full-time studies in Holistic Therapies and it was a new course at the college and the tutors filled it to the brim with so many types of therapy that it was hard to take in and digest them all fully or try and distinguish how the flavours changed from one to the other. I had a grand case of holistic indigestion and when finally, I’d filled countless tick box sheets of client case study evidence into groaning overstuffed box files, then someone suggesting to me that I should further train in Reiki, it was not something that tempted my appetite no matter how many times I was told I’d find it amazing… All I heard was the Pythonesque waiter saying…

And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin mint.

Oh sir! It’s only a tiny little thin one.

Oh sir… it’s only wafer thin.

But you know how it is with these things… if they’re supposed to come and find you, they come and find you.

So, fast forward I think about 8 years in calendar terms and about what felt like 50 years of life events which hit like a tornado that I still can’t really put into linear sequence but included several births, a couple of deaths, and the set up and put on hold of a business and just the general chaos that I file under – If you want to make God laugh, then tell him your five year plan!

I’d always kept my hand in at some level with therapies and after my youngest finally started full-time school, I turned my thoughts to getting my business back together and of maybe it would be good to train in another therapy now as a way of getting back up to speed. I mulled the thoughts around and left them unvoiced and then one evening after a yoga session, the instructor called me back and told me that a friend of hers was training as a Reiki Master and was looking for students to teach and asked if I’d be interested.

Well, I guess that you’ve probably worked out that I went to meet her.

For one reason or another, I didn’t end up training with her, but instead training with her Master. I did, however, receive my first Reiki treatment…

To be honest, I had low expectations. Even though I’ve trained in several therapies, my formal traditional education was in the Sciences and so I will look for explanations as to how things work and I will shoot down pseudoscience babble  but I also know that there are some things that Science as yet can not explain and that have a magic that I can enjoy…  Reiki falls into that category for me… something that I cannot adequately explain in a way the satisfies the scientist in me but something that I can feel in a way that appeals to the artist in me. I don’t say ‘healer’ as I feel that is something that straddles both camps and is the blend that emerges at the interstices of all my different sides…

So, the thing with Reiki that caught my attention was that during that first session, even though on one level I was intensely alert due to my nosiness as to what’s going on? What’s she doing? I wonder if my thumb will go numb if I wedge it into my pocket? And other such stuff of no great importance… On another level… there was a profound sense of calm. But, what really intrigued me was that each time she placed her hands directly on  my body, rather than in the aura, then my mind would stop with the chatter and inside my head seemed to fill with an inky darkness that had a small glimmer of white light at the centre and then the light would slowly expand until it filled my whole mind and then her hands would move to a new place. Each time, at that precise point that my head was full of white, then the hands left and moved and the chatter crept back in until the next pit-stop.

This was enough to convince me that it was time for me to take this further and soon after I received my first attunement. This seemed unremarkable at the time other than seeing swirls of colour… Though over the following days and weeks, I felt an intense urge to paint. I’d not painted since I’d left school though for some reason I had kept materials and taken them with me every time I’d moved house… I knew that there were oils paints sitting in my attic and eventually the urge grew so strong that it overrode my common sense of fear of breaking my neck to scramble up without a ladder to get them, that I did retrieve them and set to work to let this noise out of my mind …

It was messy and chaotic and brushes were soon abandoned as they treacherously refused to replicate what I saw and eventually in my garden, covered fingertips to elbows in paints and with more on me than on the canvas, I let out a sigh of relief… There it was! A great wet mass, the result of my self-(non-surgical)trepanning… I’d let it out of my head to escape into the world …

And then I tossed it to one side and carried on my merry way and it would be another 5 years before I took up art again and turned it into a daily practice.

At that point, I viewed Reiki as being another tool in my kit and certainly it enhanced my other therapies and also I could see many benefits in my day to day life… It took me a long time to figure out that art was going to be the way that I would feel most naturally connected to Reiki.

You can continue reading the Reiki Blog Hop by clicking on the following links which will transport you to either my neighbours – Jyogan Hakata-Kohler and Sierra Koch or to the master list which has links to all of the writers.

PREVIOUS|MASTER LIST|NEXT